nd the old door-slab is half hid
Under an alabaster lid.

All day it snows: the sheeted post
Gleams in the dimness like a ghost;
All day the blasted oak has stood
A muffled wizard of the wood;
Garland and airy cap adorn
The sumach and the way-side thorn,
And clustering spangles lodge and shine
In the dark tresses of the pine.

The ragged bramble, dwarfed and old,
Shrinks like a beggar in the cold;
In surplice white the cedar stands,
And blesses him with priestly hands.

Still cheerily the chickadee
Singeth to me on fence and tree:
But in my inmost ear is heard
The music of a holier bird;
And heavenly thoughts, as soft and white
As snow-flakes, on my soul alight,
Clothing with love my lonely heart,
Healing with peace each bruised part,
Till all my being seems to be
Transfigured by their purity.

* * * * *

EASE IN WORK.

To thoughts and expressions of peculiar force and beauty we give the
epithets "happy" and "felicitous," as if we esteemed them a product
rather of the writer's fortune than of his toil. Thus, Dryden says of
Shakspeare, "All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he
drew from them, not laboriously, but luckily." And, indeed, when one
contemplates a noble creation in art or literature, one seems to receive
from the work itself a certain testimony that it was never wrought out
with wrestling struggle, but was genially and joyfully produced, as the
sun sends forth his beams and the earth her herbage. This appearance
of play and ease is sometimes so notable as to cause a curious
misapprehension. For example, De Quincey permits himself, if my memory
serve me, to say that Plato probably wrote his works not in any
seriousness of spirit, but only as a pastime! A pastime for the
immortals that were.

The reason of this ease may be that perfect performance is ever more the
effluence of a man's nature than the conscious labor of his hands. That
the hands are faithfully busy therein, that every faculty contributes
its purest industry, no one could for a moment doubt; since there could
not be a total action of one's nature without this loyalty of his
special powers. Nevertheless, there are times when the presiding
intelligence descends into expression by a law and necessity of its own,
as clouds descend into rain; and perhaps it is only then that consummate
work is done. He who by his particular powers and g