Now, leaving the Storm to do his appointed office, let us sit down, pen in hand, by our fireside.  Gloomy as it may seem, there is an influence productive of cheerfulness and favorable to imaginative thought in the atmosphere of a snowy day.  The native of a Southern clime may woo the Muse beneath the heavy shade of summer foliage reclining on banks of turf, while the sound of singing-birds and warbling rivulets chimes in with the music of his soul.  In our brief summer I do not think, but only exist in the vague enjoyment of a dream.  My hour of inspiration—­if that hour ever comes—­is when the green log hisses upon the hearth, and the bright flame, brighter for the gloom of the chamber, rustles high up the chimney, and the coals drop tinkling down among the growing heaps of ashes.  When the casement rattles in the gust and the snowflakes or the sleety raindrops pelt hard against the window-panes, then I spread out my sheet of paper with the certainty that thoughts and fancies will gleam forth upon it like stars at twilight or like violets in May, perhaps to fade as soon.  However transitory their glow, they at least shine amid the darksome shadow which the clouds of the outward sky fling through the room.  Blessed, therefore, and reverently welcomed by me, her true-born son, be New England’s winter, which makes us one and all the nurslings of the storm and sings a familiar lullaby even in the wildest shriek of the December blast.  Now look we forth again and see how much of his task the storm-spirit has done.

Slow and sure!  He has the day—­perchance the week—­before him, and may take his own time to accomplish Nature’s burial in snow.  A smooth mantle is scarcely yet thrown over the withered grass-plat, and the dry stalks of annuals still thrust themselves through the white surface in all parts of the garden.  The leafless rose-bushes stand shivering in a shallow snowdrift, looking, poor things! as disconsolate as if they possessed a human consciousness of the dreary scene.  This is a sad time for the shrubs that do not perish with the summer.  They neither live nor die; what they retain of life seems but the chilling sense of death.  Very sad are the flower-shrubs in midwinter.  The roofs of the houses are now all white, save where the eddying wind has kept them bare at the bleak corners.  To discern the real intensity of the storm, we must fix upon some distant object—­as yonder spire—­and observe how the riotous gust fights with the descending snow throughout the intervening space.  Sometimes the entire prospect is obscured; then, again, we have a distinct but transient glimpse of the tall steeple, like a giant’s ghost; and now the dense wreaths sweep between, as if demons were flinging snowdrifts at each other in mid-air.  Look next into the street, where we have an amusing parallel to the combat of those fancied demons in the upper regions.  It is a snow-battle of schoolboys.  What a pretty satire on war and military glory might