Poor mortals haste and hide away:  creep soon
  Into your icy beds:  the embers die: 
And on your frosted panes the pallid moon
        Is glimmering brokenly. 
Mutter faint prayers that spring will come e’erwhile,
  Scarring with thaws and dripping days and nights
  The shining majesty of him that smites
        And slays you with a smile
Upon his silvery lips, of glinting mockery.

WINTER HUES RECALLED

Life is not all for effort:  there are hours,
When fancy breaks from the exacting will,
And rebel though takes schoolboy’s holiday,
Rejoicing in its idle strength.  ’Tis then,
And only at such moments, that we know
The treasure of hours gone—­scenes once beheld,
Sweet voices and words bright and beautiful,
Impetuous deeds that woke the God within us,
The loveliness of forms and thoughts and colors,
A moment marked and then as soon forgotten. 
These things are ever near us, laid away,
Hidden and waiting the appropriate times,
In the quiet garner-house of memory. 
There in the silent unaccounted depth,
Beneath the heated strainage and the rush
That teem the noisy surface of the hours,
All things that ever touched us are stored up,
Growing more mellow like sealed wine with age;
We thought them dead, and they are but asleep. 
In moments when the heart is most at rest
And least expectant, from the luminous doors,
And sacred dwelling place of things unfeared,
They issue forth, and we who never knew
Till then how potent and how real they were,
Take them, and wonder, and so bless the hour.

Such gifts are sweetest when unsought.  To me,
As I was loitering lately in my dreams,
Passing from one remembrance to another,
Like him who reads upon an outstretched map,
Content and idly happy, these rose up,
Out of that magic well-stored picture house,
No dream, rather a thing most keenly real,
The memory of a moment, when with feet,
Arrested and spell bound, and captured eyes,
Made wide with joy and wonder, I beheld
The spaces of a white and wintery land
Swept with the fire of sunset, all its width,
Vale, forest, town, and misty eminence,
A miracle of color and of beauty.

I had walked out, as I remember now,
With covered ears, for the bright air was keen,
To southward up the gleaming snow-packed fields,
With the snowshoer’s long rejoicing stride,
Marching at ease.  It was a radiant day
In February, the month of the great struggle
’Twixt sun and frost, when with advancing spears,
The glittering golden vanguard of the spring
Holds the broad winter’s yet unbroken rear
In long-closed wavering contest.  Thin pale threads
Like streaks of ash across the far off blue
Were drawn, nor seemed to move.  A brooding silence
Kept all the land, a stillness as of sleep;