post-chaises, and girls in red cloaks, and, afar off, looking almost
like a toy, the coach. It meets us fast and soon. How much happier the
walkers look than the riders--especially the frost-bitten gentleman,
and the shivering lady with the invisible face, sole passengers of that
commodious machine! Hooded, veiled, and bonneted, as she is, one sees
from her attitude how miserable she would look uncovered.

Another pond, and another noise of children. More sliding? Oh no! This
is a sport of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the lieutenant,
skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or three other
four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy of joy and
wonder! Oh what happy spectators! And what a happy performer! They
admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity never excited by all
the quadrilles and the spread-eagles of the Seine and the Serpentine. He
really skates well though, and I am glad I came this way; for, with all
the father's feelings sitting gaily at his heart, it must still gratify
the pride of skill to have one spectator at that solitary pond who has
seen skating before.

Now we have reached the trees,--the beautiful trees! never so beautiful
as to-day. Imagine the effect of a straight and regular double avenue of
oaks, nearly a mile long, arching overhead, and closing into perspective
like the roof and columns of a cathedral, every tree and branch
incrusted with the bright and delicate congelation of hoar-frost, white
and pure as snow, delicate and defined as carved ivory. How beautiful it
is, how uniform, how various, how filling, how satiating to the eye and
to the mind--above all, how melancholy! There is a thrilling awfulness,
an intense feeling of simple power in that naked and colourless beauty,
which falls on the earth like the thoughts of death--death pure, and
glorious, and smiling,--but still death. Sculpture has always the same
effect on my imagination, and painting never. Colour is life.--We are
now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of a steep
eminence commanding a wide view over four counties--a landscape of snow.
A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track,
sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom,
crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell
of thyme. How lovely these banks are now--the tall weeds and the gorse
fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round t