frost continues, the canal will be sheathed in a night, and next day stones will be thrown upon it, and a daring urchin venturing upon it will go souse head over heels, and run home with his teeth in a chatter; and the day after, the lake beneath the old castle will be sheeted, and the next, the villagers will be sliding on its gleaming face from ruddy dawn at nine to ruddy eve at three; and hours later, skaters yet unsatisfied will be moving ghost-like in the gloom—­now one, now another, shooting on sounding irons into a clear space of frosty light, chasing the moon, or the flying image of a star!  Happy youths leaning against the frosty wind!

I am a Christian, I hope, although far from a muscular one—­consequently I cannot join the skaters on the lake.  The floor of ice, with the people upon it, will be but a picture to me.  And, in truth, it is in its pictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season.  As an artist, winter can match summer any day.  The heavy, feathery flakes have been falling all the night through, we shall suppose, and when you get up in the morning the world is draped in white.  What a sight it is!  It is the world you knew, but yet a different one.  The familiar look has gone, and another has taken its place; and a not unpleasant puzzlement arises in your mind, born of the patent and the remembered aspect.  It reminds you of a friend who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whom there is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange.  How purely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen!  How exquisite and virginal the repose!  It touches you like some perfection of music.  And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.  Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a jeweller he is!  How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulations with his frosts!  The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire is thicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls.  Go into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl and diamond—­pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into tears and fall but to congeal into splendours again.  Nor does he work in black and white alone.  He has on his palette more gorgeous colours than those in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about three o’clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sun in the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen, and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see the black skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory.  Nor need I speak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue, crowded with star and planet, “burnished by the frost,” is glittering like the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day.