e were asleep all night
long--sound asleep as children--while the flakes were falling, "and soft
as snow on snow" were all the descendings of our untroubled dreams. The
moon and all her stars were willing that their lustre should be veiled
by that peaceful shower; and now the sun, pleased with the purity of the
morning earth, all white as innocence, looks down from heaven with a
meek unmelting light, and still leaves undissolved the stainless
splendour. There is Frost in the air--but he "does his spiriting
gently," studding the ground-snow thickly with diamonds, and shaping the
tree-snow according to the peculiar and characteristic beauty of the
leaves and sprays, on which it has alighted almost as gently as the dews
of spring. You know every kind of tree still by its own spirit showing
itself through that fairy veil--momentarily disguised from
recognition--but admired the more in the sweet surprise with which again
your heart salutes its familiar branches, all fancifully ornamented with
their snow-foliage, that murmurs not like the green leaves of summer,
that like the yellow leaves of autumn strews not the earth with decay,
but often melts away into changes so invisible and inaudible, that you
wonder to find that it is all vanished, and to see the old tree again
standing in its own faint-green glossy bark, with its many million buds,
which perhaps fancy suddenly expands into a power of umbrage
impenetrable to the sun in Scorpio.

A sudden burst of sunshine! bringing back the pensive spirit from the
past to the present, and kindling it, till it dances like light
reflected from a burning mirror. A cheerful Sun-scene, though almost
destitute of life. An undulating Landscape, hillocky and hilly, but not
mountainous, and buried under the weight of a day and night's incessant
and continuous snow-fall. The weather has not been windy--and now that
the flakes have ceased falling, there is not a cloud to be seen, except
some delicate braidings here and there along the calm of the Great Blue
Sea of Heaven. Most luminous is the sun, yet you can look straight on
his face, almost with unwinking eyes, so mild and mellow is his large
light as it overflows the day. All enclosures have disappeared, and you
indistinctly ken the greater landmarks, such as a grove, a wood, a hall,
a castle, a spire, a village, a town--the faint haze of a far-off and
smokeless city. Most intense is the silence; for all the streams are
dumb, and the great r