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These Winter nights against my window-pane Nature with busy pencil draws designs Of ferns and blossoms and fine spray of pines, Oak-leaf and acorn and fantastic vines, Which she will make when summer comes again-- Quaint arabesques in argent, flat and cold, Like curious Chinese etchings.

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors: The north is thine; there hast thou build thy dark, Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs, Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.

When now, unsparing as the scourge of war, Blasts follow blasts and groves dismantled roar; Around their home the storm-pinched cattle lows, No nourishment in frozen pasture grows; Yet frozen pastures every morn resound With fair abundance thund'ring to the ground.

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms. . . . For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

Look! the massy trunks Are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray, Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven, Is studded with its trembling water-drops, That glimmer with an amethystine light.

Yet all how beautiful! Pillars of pearl Propping the cliffs above, stalactites bright From the ice roof depending; and beneath, Grottoes and temples with their crystal spires And gleaming columns radiant in the sun.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Over the river and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go; The horse knows the way To carry the sleigh, Through the white and drifted snow.

The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.

Every Fern is tucked and set, 'Neath coverlet, Downy and soft and warm.

O Winter! ruler of the inverted year, . . . . I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturb'd Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons-- That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes--

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come, see the north-wind's masonry, Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he For number or proportion.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Every mile is two in winter.

On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence.

His breath like silver arrows pierced the air, The naked earth crouched shuddering at his feet, His finger on all flowing waters sweet Forbidding lay--motion nor sound was there:-- Nature was frozen dead,--and still and slow, A winding sheet fell o'er her body fair, Flaky and soft, from his wide wings of snow.

Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay-- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.