I, singularly moved
          To love the lovely that are not beloved,
          Of all the seasons, most love winter, and to trace
          The sense of the Trophonian pallor of her face. 
          It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
          And this dim cloud which doth the earth enfold
          Hath less the characters of dark and cold
          Than light and warmth asleep,
          And intermittent breathing still doth keep
          With the infant harvest heaving soft below
          Its eider coverlet of snow.

The beauty of winter is like the beauty of certain austere classics of literature and art, and as with them, also, it demands a certain almost moral strenuousness of application before it reveals itself.  The loftiest masterpieces have something aloof and cheerless about them at our first approach, something of the cold breath of those starry spaces into which they soar, and to which they uplift our spirits.  When we first open Dante or Milton, we miss the flowers and the birds and the human glow of the more sensuous and earth-dwelling poets.  But after awhile, after our first rather bleak introduction to them, we grow aware that these apparently undecorated and unmusical masterpieces are radiant and resounding with a beauty and a music which “eye hath not seen nor ear heard.”  For flowers we are given stars, for the song of birds the music of the spheres, and for that human glow a spiritual ecstasy.

Similarly with winter.  It has indeed a strange beauty peculiar to itself, but it is a beauty we must be at some pains to enjoy.  The beauty of the other seasons comes to us, offers itself to us, without effort.  To study the beauty of summer, it is enough to lie under green boughs with half-closed eyes, and listen to the running stream and the murmur of a million wings.  But winter’s is no such idle lesson.  In summer we can hardly stay indoors, but in winter we can hardly be persuaded to go out.  We must gird ourselves to overcome that first disinclination, else we shall know nothing of winter but its churlish wind and its ice-in-the-pail.  But, the effort made, and once out of doors on a sunlit winter’s morning, how soon are we finding out the mistake we were making, coddling ourselves in the steam-heat!  Indoors, indeed, the prospect had its Christmas-card picturesqueness; snow-clad roofs, snow-laden boughs, silhouetted tracery of leafless trees; but we said that it was a soulless spectacular display, the beauty of death, and the abhorred coldness thereof.  We have hardly walked a hundred yards, however, before impressions very different are crowding upon us, among which the impression of cold is forgotten, or only retained as pleasantly heightening the rest.