And what a morning!  The sun, a young conqueror, sends in his glorious rays, like heralds, to rouse us for the inspection of his trophies.  The baffled foe, retiring, has left far and near the high-heaped spoils behind.  The glittering plains own the new victor.  Over all these level and wide-swept meadows, over all these drifted, spotless slopes, he is proclaimed undisputed monarch.  On the wooded hill-sides the startled shadows are in motion; they flee like young fawns, bounding upward and downward over rock and dell, as through the long gleaming arches the king comes marching to his throne.  But shade yet lingers undisturbed in the valleys, mingled with timid smoke from household chimneys; blue as the smoke, a gauzy haze is twined around the brow of every distant hill; and the same soft azure confuses the outlines of the nearer trees, to whose branches snowy wreaths are clinging, far up among the boughs, like strange new flowers.  Everywhere the unstained surface glistens in the sunbeams.  In the curves and wreaths and turrets of the drifts a blue tinge nestles.  The fresh pure sky answers to it; every cloud has vanished, save one or two which linger near the horizon, pardoned offenders, seeming far too innocent for mischief, although their dark and sullen brothers, banished ignominiously below the horizon’s verge, may be plotting nameless treachery there.  The brook still flows visibly through the valley, and the myriad rocks that check its course are all rounded with fleecy surfaces, till they seem like flocks of tranquil sheep that drink the shallow flood.

The day is one of moderate cold, but clear and bracing; the air sparkles like the snow; everything seems dry and resonant, like the wood of a violin.  All sounds are musical,—­the voices of children, the cooing of doves, the crowing of cocks, the chopping of wood, the creaking of country sleds, the sweet jangle of sleighbells.  The snow has fallen under a cold temperature, and the flakes are perfectly crystallized; every shrub we pass bears wreaths which glitter as gorgeously as the nebula in the constellation Perseus; but in another hour of sunshine every one of those fragile outlines will disappear, and the white surface glitter no longer with stars, but with star-dust.  On such a day, the universe seems to held but three pure tints,—­blue, white, and green.  The loveliness of the universe seems simplified to its last extreme of refined delicacy.  That sensation we poor mortals often have, of being just on the edge of infinite beauty, yet with always a lingering film between, never presses down more closely than on days like this.  Everything seems perfectly prepared to satiate the soul with inexpressible felicity if we could only, by one infinitesimal step farther, reach the mood to dwell in it.