There is always, I think, much more of sadness in the anticipation of Winter days than we find that they at all deserved when they are once fairly at home with us. The anticipation, the transition, is sad from Autumn profusion to Winter bareness. The month that severs the two is a month somewhat tinged with melancholy, and clad in a weeping robe of fogs and mists. There is a certain chill and gloom in wandering about the shrouded face of the so-lately rich Autumn fields,—
“When a blanket wraps the day, When the rotten woodland drips, And the leaf is stamped in clay,”—

there is something sad in passing through the sodden lanes, thickly244 carpeted with flat damp leaves, and strewn with the bright sienna chesnuts; here the gleaming nut, and there the three-fold shattered husk, brown-green, with cream-white lining.

You may find a sort of pleasing melancholy, of tender romance, in watching the first tints of Autumn stealing over the Summer, from the very first, when
“The long-smouldering fire within the trees
Begins to blaze through vents,”

until,—tree by tree, wood by wood, landscape by landscape,—they stand in their glory—
“The death-flushed trees, that, in the falling year, As the Assyrian monarch, clothe themselves In their most gorgeous pageantry to die.”

Then the first frosts, and the calm clear mornings, and the grey fresh blue of the evenings, with their sprinkling of intensely piercingly glittering stars. And then the deep spell upon the trees is broken, and we stand and watch while, now in a shower and now singly,
“The calm leaves float Each to his rest beneath their parent shade,”

and the year seems just passing away like a beautiful dissolving view.

There is also something to keep you up, something of excitement and stir, and glow, in the brave October days, when a great wind comes roaring and booming over the land, and you see the tall ash trees toss up their wild arms in245 dismay, and a deep roar gathers in the elms, and a far hissing in the pines, and from that beech avenue,
“The flying gold of the ruined woodlands Drives through the air.”

You can walk out, and press your hat on to your head, and button your coat, and labour up the rising downs, yielding no foot to the blustering screaming wind; and a glow and exhilaration tingles in your veins as you march on, with pace no whit slackened for all its vehement opposition.

But November has come; and the calm quiet hectic of September and the hale vigour of October have now passed away. The rain has sodden and struck down leaf after leaf, heaping the roadside, until you might count the leaves left upon the trees that edge the lanes. A sense of bareness and desolation oppresses you, and an aspect of dreariness and moist death has overspread the landscape. You walk into the garden: the dahlias are blackened with the frosts of October; the pinched geraniums, verbenas, heliotropes, lie wrecked on the beds; the few straggling chrysanthemums and scattered Michaelmas daisies—these are not enough to cheer you; for even these are drooping in the universal damp, and strung with trembling glittering diamonds of sorrowful tears. The dark sodden walnut-leaves thickly carpet the side paths, and the most cheerful thing in them is here and there the black wet walnut lying, with just a warm hint of the clean bright yellow shell within, betrayed through a torn fibrous gap. Day after day the fog sleeps over the land, and you see your breath in the morning in the cold damp air.246 You are brought face to face—earth stripped of its poetry and romance—face to face with Winter days.

And their approach seems gloomy. The light, and warmth, and the glory of the year have gone; but, as yet, the memory of them has not all quite departed. There are still the gleeful leaves lying, poor dead things, in the lanes; there are yet the unburied flowers, black on the garden-beds; the air is tepid; the trees are not entirely bare; the state is one of transition.
“The year’s in the wane, There is nothing adorning, The night has no eve, And the day has no morning;— Cold Winter gives warning.”

247 Yes, the approach of Winter days seems gloomy. We have more in our thought the chill drear outside of Winter, than his warm comfortable core, glowing as the heart of a burst pomegranate.

But November has now ended, and December has come. The early days of this month seem stragglers from that which has just gone out, and the same chill warm gloom prevails. There is a muggy closeness in the air; everything feels damp to the touch, and an oppressive scent of decay dwells in the gardens and the fields. You seem to see low fevers brooding over the lanes and alleys of the city, and you apprehend that “green Yule,” which “makes a fat kirkyard.” Your spirits, if your health be such as that they are a little dependent on the weather, seem drooping and languid and foggy too. And in this mood it is that you determine after lunch to call for a friend, and take a walk for a mile or two, with thick boots and trousers turned up, because of the drenched roads and the sticky fields. And you warm into a better mood with the walk and the talk, and make the mile or two five or six miles; indeed the sun is setting, and a deepening dusk in the sky shows a pale star here and there, while you are yet a mile from home. A sort of clearness and freshness seems to have come into the air since you started homewards; and you notice as you walk on, the frosty glitter in the stars, and you perceive that the road is actually growing rough and hard under your feet, and the road-side puddles are gathering a lace-work at their edge.

248
“By the breath of God frost is given: And the breadth of the waters is straitened.”

And so either “the hoary frost of heaven” falls upon the earth, making a white feather of every straw, and a crisp fairy forest of the lawn, and a fernery of the windows, and hanging gardens of the spider’s webs, and a wondrous dreamland of the asparagus bed, a mist of white feather-foliage, with a lovely scattering of red fruit glowing among it here and there; or a black frost descends on the lands and waters, holding them with a gripe that grows closer, closer, and stiffens with more iron rigidity every day, until
“The waters are hid as with a stone, And the face of the deep is frozen.”

And the blood tingles in the veins, and life and health come back with sudden rush, and you leave who will to stay by the fire, while you start forth with swinging skates to do the next best thing to flying; having dined hastily at midday, so as to have a long evening.

And one night you go to bed, leaving a yellow dun sky sleeping over the hard fields. At a little before seven you rise, and drawing aside the blind with something of a shiver and a yawn, rub your eyes with amaze. In the half dark you seem to look out from your dim-lit room upon one large Twelfthcake, with a dark figure here and there for an ornament. And when you put out your candle, and draw up the blind, on how strange a sight do you look! How changed the appearance of everything since last night! What a heavy fall of snow there has been; and how sudden,251 and how silent! Against the slate sky a few dark flakes steal down, or a small drift dances, changing into a pearl-white as they sink lower, and are seen against the black bare trees, or the full evergreens. You are fascinated; you must stand at the window and watch. That araucaria—how can its long dark arms hold such a piled sheer height of snow? How deep and dazzling it lies upon the window sill! what a broad sheet upon the roof of that barn! how of the thinnest twigs of the nut trees and the acacias each sustains his piled inch and-a-half in the complete stillness! how the laurels bend down under great heavy loads of snow; and the erect holly shows a prickly dark gleam, and a burning berry here and there! All the sad traces of the dead Summer are buried, and the bustling birds chirp and huddle upon the anew foliaged branches, raining down a miniature snow-storm as they fidget about the trees. All the sodden leaves, and the black flower-stalks, and the bare fields are hidden now, and Autumn and Summer are buried; and the Winter days are come in earnest. Ah, yes, the sadness was more in the transition, and now that that is over and the change made, did you not discover that—

252
“Some beauty still was found; for, when the fogs had passed away, The wide lands came glittering forward in a fresh and strange array; Naked trees had got snow foliage, soft, and feathery, and bright, And the earth looked dressed for heaven, in its spiritual white.
“Black and cold as iron armour lay the frozen lakes and streams; Round about the fenny plashes shone the long and pointed gleams Of the tall reeds, ice-encrusted; the old hollies, jewel-spread, Warmed the white, marmoreal chillness with an ardency of red:
“Upon desolate morasses, stood the heron like a ghost, Beneath the gliding shadows of the wild fowls’ noisy host; And the bittern clamoured harshly from his nest among the sedge, Where the indistinct, dull moss had blurred the rugged water’s edge.”

But, O writer, your pen has wandered; and this mere description of God’s snow and frost is mere secular writing. Dear Reader, let me contradict you, and plead—“It is not so.” A careful loving observer of God’s works, attains also the privilege of becoming a reader of a second volume of God’s word. And if you would have for what I say authority from the sacred volume, take it down and turn to the 104th Psalm. You will find in that, God’s works abundantly brought in and interwoven with God’s word, still further, as I may say, embellishing and beautifying it; and illuminating the text with initial letters and little gems of illustration. Here is a bird’s nest, you will find, swung securely in the long flat arm of a cedar; here a breadth of bright green grass, with cattle feeding upon it; here a tinkling spring, trickling down the hill side, whilst, as it sleeps in the valley, the beasts of the field gather about it, and the wild asses quench their thirst. The birds chirp and sing among the branches, the murmuring rain descends from the chambers of God upon the grateful hills and the satisfied earth; the tender grapes appear, and the “olive-hoary capes,” and the wide waving fields of the deep golden grain. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the conies stud the rocks here and there. There are moonlight scenes, and sunsets, and an Eastern night, with its great luminous stars, and the deep roar of the253 lion creeping under the shadow of those tall silent palms. There is a field with labourers at work, coming out from their homes as the sun rises, and the beasts of prey slink back to theirs.

And there are sea pieces too: we turn from the land to the hoary wrinkled ocean, with its ships, and its monsters, and its innumerable population, all gathering their meat from God. And in other psalms, and in many another part of the Bible, we find God’s word studded with illustrations from God’s works. In the 147th Psalm, for instance, there is something to our present purpose:
“He sendeth forth His commandment upon earth: His word runneth very swiftly. He giveth snow like wool: He scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes. He casteth forth His ice like morsels: who can stand before His cold?”

Further, who will not recall our Saviour’s teaching, so interwoven with pictures from the wonders of beauty and design which, the clue having been once given, reveal God to us through Nature. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” “Behold the fowls of the air.” Then the corn-field, the vineyard, the fig-tree, the fall of the sparrows, the red evening and morning sky,—through all these Christ teaches us. And St. Paul, forthshadowing the resurrection body, what does he but use the image of the seed sown in the plough-lands, and rising again with the new and glorious body which God gives it, as it pleaseth Him?

Religion, in truth, is too much thought of as “a star that dwells apart,” and is not one with our common life; not as254 the daisy by our hedgerows, or the rose in our gardens, as well as the light in our sky. It should not be a mere Sunday garb, to be wrapped up and put away in a drawer till Sunday comes again; if we understand and use it aright, it is our holiday dress, and our every-day dress too; and no need to fear lest we should shabby it, or wear it out. The world may look on it as an artificial restraint, a thing to be put on, and not our common apparel; as a light which has to be lit after a great deal of fuss in striking the match; or a moon only useful in the night of sorrow. But we should learn to make it a light ever at hand, and ever in use; there needs not that we should have to make a disturbance in order to procure it at any moment:—
“But close to us it gleams, Its soothing lustre streams Around our Home’s green walls, and on our Churchway path.”

Only thoughts on Nature should really lead on to thoughts of God; else we do but look at the type, but are not reading the book. And I must here own to something of deeper meaning underlying these stray jottings on Winter days. For it struck me that, taking the reader’s arm, and walking out for a short stroll into the frosty air through the vista of November, I might show, perchance, from one or two points of vi............