feet
  Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
  Around the radiant fire-place, enclosed
  In a tumultuous privacy of storm. 
    Come see the north wind’s masonry. 
  Out of an unseen quarry evermore
  Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
  Curves his white bastions with projected roof
  Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. 
  Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
  So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
  For number or proportion.  Mockingly
  On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
  A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn: 
  Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
  Maugre the farmer’s sighs, and at the gate
  A tapering turret overtops the work. 
  And when his hours are numbered, and the world
  Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
  Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
  To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
  Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
  The frolic architecture of the snow.”

In Mr. Bryant’s “Winter Piece” we have a brilliant description of frost-work: 

            “Look! the massy trunks
  Are cased in the pure crystal; each light spray
  Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven,
  Is studded with its trembling water-drops,
  That glimmer with an amethystine light. 
  But round the parent stem the long low boughs
  Bend, in a glittering ring, and arbors hide
  The glassy floor.  Oh! you might deem the spot
  The spacious cavern of some virgin mine,
  Deep in the womb of earth—­where the gems grow,
  And diamonds put forth radiant rods and bud
  With amethyst and topaz—­and the place
  Lit up, most royally, with the pure beam
  That dwells in them.  Or haply the vast hall
  Of fairy palace, that outlasts the night,
  And fades not in the glory of the sun;—­
  Where crystal columns send forth slender shafts
  And crossing arches; and fantastic aisles
  Wind from the sight in brightness, and are lost,
  Among the crowded pillars.  Raise thine eye;
  Thou seest no cavern roof, no palace vault;
  There the blue sky and the white drifting cloud
  Look in.  Again the wildered fancy dreams
  Of spouting fountains, frozen as they rose,
  And fixed, with all their branching jets, in air,
  And all their sluices sealed.  All, all is light;
  Light without shade.  But all shall pass away
  With the next sun.  From numberless vast trunks,
  Loosened, the crashing ice shall make a sound
  Like the far roar of rivers, and the eve
  Shall close o’er the brown woods as it was wont.”

Winter, itself, has never been more happily impersonated than by dear old Spenser.  We meant to close with his portrait of Winter, but, on second thoughts, we give, as more seasonable, his description of January.  The fourth line can hardly fail to remind the reader of the second line of Shakspeare’s song, and to suggest the query—­whether Shakspeare borrowed from Spenser, Spenser from Shakspeare, or both from Nature?