the white twig, a sparkling shower falls
Starlike. It is not whiteness, but a clear
Outshining of all purity, which takes
The winking eyes with such a silvery gleam.
No sunshine, and the sky is all one cloud.
The vale seems lonely, ghostlike; while aloud
The housewife's voice is heard with doubled sound.
I have not words to speak the perfect show;
The ravishment of beauty; the delight
Of silent purity; the sanctity
Of inspiration which o'erflows the world,
Making it breathless with divinity.

So thus with fair delapsion softly falls
The sacred shower; and when the shortened day
Dejected dies in the low streaky west,
The rising moon displays a cold blue night,
And keen as steel the east wind sprinkles ice.
Thicker than bees, about the waxing moon
Gather the punctual stars. Huge whitened hills
Rise glimmering to the blue verge of the night,
Ghostlike, and striped with narrow glens of firs
Black-waving, solemn. O'er the Luggie-stream
Gathers a veiny film of ice, and creeps
With elfin feet around each stone and reed,
Working fine masonry; while o'er the dam,
Dashing, a noise of waters fills the clear
And nitrous air. All the dark, wintry hours
Sharply the winds from the white level moors
Keen whistle. Timorous in his homely bed
The school-boy listens, fearful lest gaunt wolves
Or beasts, whose uncouth forms in ancient books
He has beheld, at creaking shutters pull
Howling. And when at last the languid dawn
In wind redness re-illumines the east
With ineffectual fire, an intense blue
Severely vivid o'er the snowy hills
Gleams chill, while hazy, half-transparent clouds
Slow-range the freezing ether of the west.
Along the woods the keenly vehement blasts
Wail, and disrobe the mantled boughs, and fling
A snow-dust everywhere. Thus wears the day:
While grandfather over the well-watched fire
Hangs cowering, with a cold drop at his nose.

Now underneath the ice the Luggie growls,
And to the polished smoothness curlers come
Rudely ambitious. Then for happy hours
The clinking stones are slid from wary hands,
And Barleycorn, best wine for surly airs,
Bites i' th' mouth, and ancient jokes are cracked.
And oh, the journey homeward, when the sun,
Low-rounding to the west, in ruddy glow
Sinks large, and all the amber-skirted clouds,
His flaming retinue, with dark'ning glow
Diverge! The broom is brandished as the sign