What a simple and stately hospitality is that of Nature in winter!  The season which the residents of cities think an obstruction is in the country an extension of intercourse:  it opens every forest from here to Labrador, free of entrance; the most tangled thicket, the most treacherous marsh becomes passable; and the lumberer or moose-hunter, mounted on his snow-shoes, has the world before him.  He says “good snow-shoeing,” as we say “good sleighing”; and it gives a sensation like a first visit to the sea-side and the shipping, when one first sees exhibited, in the streets of Bangor or Montreal, these delicate Indian conveyances.  It seems as if a new element were suddenly opened for travel, and all due facilities provided.  One expects to go a little farther, and see in the shop-windows, “Wings for sale,—­gentlemen’s and ladies’ sizes.”  The snow-shoe and the birch-canoe,—­what other dying race ever left behind it two memorials so perfect and so graceful?

The shadows thrown by the trees upon the snow are blue and soft, sharply defined, and so contrasted with the gleaming white as to appear narrower than the boughs which cast them.  There is something subtle and fantastic about these shadows.  Here is a leafless larch-sapling, eight feet high.  The image of the lower boughs is traced upon the snow, distinct and firm as cordage, while the higher ones grow dimmer by fine gradations, until the slender topmost twig is blurred and almost effaced.  But the denser upper spire of the young spruce by its side throws almost as distinct a shadow as its base, and the whole figure looks of a more solid texture, as if you could feel it with your hand.  More beautiful than either is the fine image of this baby hemlock:  each delicate leaf droops above as delicate a copy, and here and there the shadow and the substance kiss and frolic with each other in the downy snow.

The larger larches have a different plaything:  on the bare branches, thickly studded with buds, cling airily the small, light cones of last year’s growth, each crowned, with a little ball of soft snow, four times taller than itself,—­save where some have drooped sideways, so that each carries, poor weary Atlas, a sphere upon its back.  Thus the coy creatures play cup and ball, and one has lost its plaything yonder, as the branch slightly stirs, and the whole vanishes in a whirl of snow.  Meanwhile a fragment of low arbor-vitae hedge, poor outpost of a neighboring plantation, is so covered and packed with solid drift, inside and out, that it seems as if no power of sunshine could ever steal in among its twigs and disentangle it.

In winter each separate object interests us; in summer, the mass.  Natural beauty in winter is a poor man’s luxury, infinitely enhanced in quality by the diminution in quantity.  Winter, with fewer and simpler methods, yet seems to give all her works a finish even more delicate than that of summer, working, as Emerson says of English agriculture, with a pencil, instead of a plough.  Or rather, the ploughshare is but concealed; since a pithy old English preacher has said that, “the frost is God’s plough, which He drives through every inch of ground in the world, opening each clod, and pulverizing the whole.”