Coming out upon a high hill-side, more exposed to the direct fury of the sleet, we find Nature wearing a wilder look.  Every white-birch clump around us is bent divergingly to the ground, each white form prostrated in mute despair upon the whiter bank.  The bare, writhing branches of yonder sombre oak-grove are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they look so remote and foreign that there is not a wild creature of the Norse mythology who might not stalk from beneath their haunted branches.  Buried races, Teutons and Cimbri, might tramp solemnly forth from those weird arcades.  The soft pines on this nearer knoll seem separated from them by ages and generations.  On the farther hills spread woods of smaller growth, like forests of spun glass, jewelry by the acre provided for this coronation of winter.

We descend a steep bank, little pellets of snow rolling hastily beside us, and leaving enamelled furrows behind.  Entering the sheltered and sunny glade, we are assailed by a sudden warmth whose languor is almost oppressive.  Wherever the sun strikes upon the pines and hemlocks, there is a household gleam which gives a more vivid sensation than the diffused brilliancy of summer.  The sunbeams maintain a thousand secondary fires in the reflection of light from every tree and stalk, for the preservation of animal life and the ultimate melting of these accumulated drifts.  Around each trunk or stone the snow has melted and fallen back.  It is a singular fact, established beyond doubt by science, that the snow is absolutely less influenced by the direct rays of the sun than by these reflections.  “If a blackened card is placed upon the snow or ice in the sunshine, the frozen mass underneath it will be gradually thawed, while that by which it is surrounded, though exposed to the full power of solar heat, is but little disturbed.  If, however, we reflect the sun’s rays from a metal surface, an exactly contrary result takes place:  the uncovered parts are the first to melt, and the blackened card stands high above the surrounding portion.”  Look round upon this buried meadow, and you will see emerging through the white surface a thousand stalks of grass, sedge, osmunda, golden-rod, mullein, Saint-John’s-wort, plaintain, and eupatorium,—­an allied army of the sun, keeping up a perpetual volley of innumerable rays upon the yielding snow.

It is their last dying service.  We misplace our tenderness in winter, and look with pity upon the leafless trees.  But there is no tragedy in the trees:  each is not dead, but sleepeth; and each bears a future summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her baby at her breast.  The same security of life pervades every woody shrub:  the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with fragrance its folded blossom.  Winter is no such solid bar between season and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and interruption: