Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862

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Coming out upon a high hill-side, more exposed to the direct fury of the
sleet, we find Nature wearing a wilder look. Every white-birch clump
around us is bent divergingly to the ground, each white form prostrated
in mute despair upon the whiter bank. The bare, writhing branches of
yonder sombre oak-grove are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they
look so remote and foreign that there is not a wild creature of the
Norse mythology who might not stalk from beneath their haunted branches.
Buried races, Teutons and Cimbri, might tramp solemnly forth from those
weird arcades. The soft pines on this nearer knoll seem separated from
them by ages and generations. On the farther hills spread woods of
smaller growth, like forests of spun glass, jewelry by the acre provided
for this coronation of winter.

We descend a steep bank, little pellets of snow rolling hastily beside
us, and leaving enamelled furrows behind. Entering the sheltered and
sunny glade, we are assailed by a sudden warmth whose languor is almost
oppressive. Wherever the sun strikes upon the pines and hemlocks,
there is a household gleam which gives a more vivid sensation than
the diffused brilliancy of summer. The sunbeams maintain a thousand
secondary fires in the reflection of light from every tree and stalk,
for the preservation of animal life and the ultimate melting of these
accumulated drifts. Around each trunk or stone the snow has melted and
fallen back. It is a singular fact, established beyond doubt by science,
that the snow is absolutely less influenced by the direct rays of the
sun than by these reflections. "If a blackened card is placed upon the
snow or ice in the sunshine, the frozen mass underneath it will be
gradually thawed, while that by which it is surrounded, though exposed
to the full power of solar heat, is but little disturbed. If, however,
we reflect the sun's rays from a metal surface, an exactly contrary
result takes place: the uncovered parts are the first to melt, and the
blackened card stands high above the surrounding portion." Look round
upon this buried meadow, and you will see emerging through the white
surface a thousand stalks of grass, sedge, osmunda, golden-rod, mullein,
Saint-John's-wort, plaintain, and eupatorium,--an allied army of the
sun, keeping up a perpetual volley of innumerable rays upon the yielding
snow.

It is their last dying service. We misplace our tenderness in winter,
and look with pity upon the leafless trees. But there is no tragedy
in the trees: each is not dead, but sleepeth; and each bears a future
summer of buds safe nestled on its bosom, as a mother reposes with her
baby at her breast. The same security of life pervades every woody
shrub: the alder and the birch have their catkins all ready for the
first day of spring, and the sweet-fern has even now filled with
fragrance its folded blossom. Winter is no such solid bar between season
and season as we fancy, but only a slight check and interruption: one
may at any time produce these March blossoms by bringing the buds into
the warm house; and the petals of the May-flower sometimes show their
pink and white edges in autumn. But every grass-blade and flower-stalk
is a mausoleum of vanished summer, itself crumbling to dust, never to
rise again. Each child of June, scarce distinguishable in November
against the background of moss and rocks and bushes, is brought into
final prominence in December by the white snow which imbeds it. The
delicate flakes collapse and fall back around it, but they retain their
inexorable hold. Thus delicate is the action of Nature,--a finger of
air, and a grasp of iron.

We pass the old red foundry, banked in with snow and its low eaves
draped with icicles, and come to the brook which turns its resounding
wheel. The musical motion of the water seems almost unnatural amidst
the general stillness: brooks, like men, must keep themselves warm by
exercise. The overhanging rushes and alder-sprays, weary of winter's
sameness, have made for themselves playthings,--each dangling a crystal
knob of ice, which sways gently in the water and gleams ruddy in the
sunlight. As we approach the foaming cascade, the toys become larger and
more glittering, movable stalactites, which the water tosses merrily
upon their flexible stems. The torrent pours down beneath an enamelled
mask of ice, wreathed and convoluted like a brain, and sparkling
with gorgeous glow. Tremulous motions and glimmerings go through the
translucent veil, as if it throbbed with the throbbing wave beneath.
It holds in its mazes stray bits of color,--scarlet berries, evergreen
sprigs, blue raspberry-stems, and sprays of yellow willow; glittering
necklaces and wreaths and tiaras of brilliant ice-work cling and trail
around its edges, and no regal palace shines with such carcanets of
jewels as this winter ball-room of the dancing drops.

Above, the brook becomes a smooth black canal between two steep white
banks; and the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the
solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed
over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous
current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath
the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same thing,
on a larger scale, helps to form the mighty ice-pack of the Northern
seas. Nothing except ice is capable of combining, on the largest scale,
bulk with mobility, and this imparts a dignity to its motions even on
the smallest scale. I do not believe that anything in Behring's Straits
could impress me with a grander sense of desolation or of power than
when in boyhood I watched the ice break up in the winding channel of
Charles River.

Amidst so much that seems like death, let us turn and study the life.
There is much more to be seen in winter than most of us have ever
noticed. Far in the North the "moose-yards" are crowded and trampled, at
this season, and the wolf and the deer run noiselessly a deadly race,
as I have heard the hunters describe, upon the white surface of the
gleaming lake. But the pond beneath our feet keeps its stores of life
chiefly below its level platform, as the bright fishes in the basket of
yon heavy-booted fisherman can tell. Yet the scattered tracks of mink
and musk-rat beside the banks, of meadow-mice around the hay-stacks, of
squirrels under the trees, of rabbits and partridges in the wood, show
the warm life that is beating unseen, beneath fur or feathers, close
beside us. The chicadees are chattering merrily in the upland grove, the
blue-jays scream in the hemlock glade, the snow-bird mates the snow with
its whiteness, and the robin contrasts with it his still ruddy breast.
The weird and impenetrable crows, most talkative of birds and most
uncommunicative, their very food at this season a mystery, are almost as
numerous now as in summer. They always seem like some race of banished
goblins, doing penance for some primeval and inscrutable transgression,
and if any bird have a history, it is they. In the Spanish version of
the tradition of King Arthur it is said that he fled from the weeping
queens and the island valley of Avilion in the form of a crow; and hence
it is said in "Don Quixote" that no Englishman will ever kill one.

The traces of the insects in the winter are prophetic,--from the
delicate cocoon of some infinitesimal feathery thing which hangs upon
the dry, starry calyx of the aster, to the large brown-paper parcel
which hides in peasant garb the costly beauty of some gorgeous moth. But
the hints of birds are retrospective. In each tree of this pasture, the
very pasture where last spring we looked for nests and found them not
among the deceitful foliage, the fragile domiciles now stand revealed.
But where are the birds that filled them? Could the airy creatures
nurtured in those nests have left permanently traced upon the air behind
them their own bright summer flight, the whole atmosphere would be
filled with interlacing lines and curves of gorgeous coloring, the
centre of all being this forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow.

Among the many birds which winter here, and the many insects which are
called forth by a few days of thaw, not a few must die of cold or of
fatigue amid the storms. Yet how few traces one sees of this mortality!
Provision is made for it. Yonder a dead wasp has fallen on the snow, and
the warmth of its body, or its power of reflecting a few small rays
of light, is melting its little grave beneath it. With what a cleanly
purity does Nature strive to withdraw all unsightly objects into her
cemetery! Their own weight and lingering warmth take them through air
or water, snow or ice, to the level of the earth, and there with spring
comes an army of burying-insects, _Necrophagi_, in a livery of red and
black, to dig a grave beneath every one, and not a sparrow falleth to
the ground without knowledge. The tiny remains thus disappear from the
surface, and the dry leaves are soon spread above these Children in the
Wood.

Thus varied and benignant are the aspects of winter on these sunny days.
But it is impossible to claim this weather as the only type of our
winter climate. There occasionally come days which, though perfectly
still and serene, suggest more terror than any tempest,--terrible,
clear, glaring days of pitiless cold,--when the sun seems powerless
or only a brighter moon, when the windows remain ground-glass at high
noontide, and when, on going out of doors, one is dazzled by the
brightness and fancies for a moment that it cannot be so cold as has
been reported, but presently discovers that the severity is only more
deadly for being so still. Exercise on such days seems to produce no
warmth; one's limbs appear ready to break on any sudden motion, like
icy boughs. Stage-drivers and dray-men are transformed to mere human
buffaloes by their fur coats; the patient oxen are frost-covered; the
horse that goes racing by waves a wreath of steam from his tossing head.
On such days life becomes a battle to all householders, the ordinary
apparatus for defence is insufficient, and the price of caloric is
continual vigilance. In innumerable armies the frost besieges the
portal, creeps in beneath it and above it, and on every latch and
key-handle lodges an advanced guard of white rime. Leave the door ajar
never so slightly and a chill creeps in cat-like; we are conscious by
the warmest fireside of the near vicinity of cold, its fingers are
feeling after us, and even if they do not clutch us, we know that they
are there. The sensations of such days almost make us associate their
clearness and whiteness with something malignant and evil. Charles Lamb
asserts of snow, "It glares too much for an innocent color, methinks."
Why does popular mythology associate the infernal regions with a high
temperature instead of a low one? El Aishi, the Arab writer, says of the
bleak wind of the Desert, (so writes Richardson, the African traveller,)
"The north wind blows with an intensity equalling _the cold of hell_;
language fails me to describe its rigorous temperature." Some have
thought that there is a similar allusion in the phrase, "weeping and
gnashing of teeth,"--the teeth chattering from frost. Milton also
enumerates cold as one of the torments of the lost:--

"O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp";

and one may sup full of horrors on the exceedingly cold collation
provided for the next world by the Norse Edda.

But, after all, there are few such terrific periods in our Massachusetts
winters, and the appointed exit from their frigidity is usually through
a snow-storm. After a day of this severe sunshine there comes commonly
a darker day of cloud, still hard and forbidding, though milder in
promise, with a sky of lead, deepening near the horizon into darker
films of iron. Then, while all the nerves of the universe seem rigid and
tense, the first reluctant flake steals slowly down, like a tear. In a
few hours the whole atmosphere begins to relax once more, and in
our astonishing climate very possibly the snow changes to rain in
twenty-four hours, and a thaw sets in. It is not strange, therefore,
that snow, which to Southern races is typical of cold and terror, brings
associations of warmth and shelter to the children of the North.

Snow, indeed, actually nourishes animal life. It holds in its bosom
numerous animalcules: you may have a glass of water, perfectly free from
_infusoria_, which yet, after your dissolving in it a handful of snow,
will show itself full of microscopic creatures, shrimp-like and swift;
and the famous red snow of the Arctic regions is only an exhibition of
the same property. It has sometimes been fancied that persons buried
under the snow have received sustenance through the pores of the skin,
like reptiles imbedded in rock. Elizabeth Woodcock lived eight days
beneath a snow-drift, in 1799, without eating a morsel; and a Swiss
family were buried beneath an avalanche, in a manger, for five months,
in 1755, with no food but a trifling store of chestnuts and a small
daily supply of milk from a goat which was buried with them. In neither
case was there extreme suffering from cold, and it is unquestionable
that the interior of a drift is far warmer than the surface. On the 23d
of December, 1860, at 9 P.M., I was surprised to observe drops falling
from the under side of a heavy bank of snow at the eaves, at a distance
from any chimney, while the mercury on the same side was only fifteen
degrees above zero, not having indeed risen above the point of freezing
during the whole day.

Dr. Kane pays ample tribute to these kindly properties. "Few of us at
home can recognize the protecting value of this warm coverlet of snow.
No eider-down in the cradle of an infant is tucked in more kindly than
the sleeping-dress of winter about this feeble flower-life. The first
warm snows of August and September, falling on a thickly pleached carpet
of grasses, heaths, and willows, enshrine the flowery growths which
nestle round them in a non-conducting air-chamber; and as each
successive snow increases the thickness of the cover, we have, before
the intense cold of winter sets in, a light cellular bed covered by
drift, six, eight, or ten feet deep, in which the plant retains its
vitality. ... I have found in midwinter, in this high latitude of 78 deg.
50', the surface so nearly moist as to be friable to the touch; and upon
the ice-floes, commencing with a surface-temperature of-30 deg., I found
at two feet deep a temperature of-8 deg., at four feet + 2 deg., and at eight
feet + 26 deg.. ... The glacier which we became so familiar with afterwards
at Etah yields an uninterrupted stream throughout the year." And he
afterwards shows that even the varying texture and quality of the snow
deposited during the earlier and later portions of the Arctic winter
have their special adaptations to the welfare of the vegetation they
protect.

The process of crystallization seems a microcosm of the universe.
Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines,
grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chestnut, elm, acanthus: these and
multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window; on
sixteen different panes I have counted sixteen patterns strikingly
distinct, and it appeared like a show-case for the globe. What can seem
remoter relatives than the star, the starfish, the star-flower, and the
starry snow-flake which clings this moment to your sleeve?--yet some
philosophers hold that one day their law of existence will be found
precisely the same. The connection with the primeval star, especially,
seems far and fanciful enough, but there are yet unexplored affinities
between light and crystallization: some crystals have a tendency to grow
toward the light, and others develop electricity and give out flashes of
light during their formation. Slight foundations for scientific fancies,
indeed, but slight is all our knowledge.

More than a hundred different figures of snow-flakes, all regular and
kaleidoscopic, have been drawn by Scoresby, Lowe, and Glaisher, and may
be found pictured in the encyclopaedias and elsewhere, ranging from the
simplest stellar shapes to the most complicated ramifications. Professor
Tyndall, in his delightful book on "The Glaciers of the Alps," gives
drawings of a few of these snow-blossoms, which he watched falling for
hours, the whole air being filled with them, and drifts of several
inches being accumulated while he watched. "Let us imagine the eye
gifted with microscopic power sufficient to enable it to see the
molecules which composed these starry crystals; to observe the solid
nucleus formed and floating in the air; to see it drawing towards it its
allied atoms, and these arranging themselves as if they moved to music,
and ended with rendering that music concrete." Thus do the Alpine winds,
like Orpheus, build their walls by harmony.

In some of these frost-flowers the rare and delicate blossom of our wild
_Mitella diphylla_ is beautifully figured. Snow-flakes have been also
found in the form of regular hexagons and other plane figures, as well
as in cylinders and spheres. As a general rule, the intenser the cold
the more perfect the formation, and the most perfect specimens are
Arctic or Alpine in their locality. In this climate the snow seldom
falls when the mercury is much below zero; but the slightest atmospheric
changes may alter the whole condition of the deposit, and decide whether
it shall sparkle like Italian marble, or be dead-white like the statuary
marble of Vermont,--whether it shall be a fine powder which can sift
through wherever dust can, or descend in large woolly masses, tossed
like mouthfuls to the hungry South.

The most remarkable display of crystallization which I have ever seen
was on the 13th of January, 1859. There had been three days of unusual
cold, but during the night the weather had moderated, and the mercury in
the morning stood at + 14 deg.. About two inches of snow had fallen, and the
trees appeared densely coated with it. It proved, on examination, that
every twig had on the leeward side a dense row of miniature fronds or
fern-leaves executed in snow, with a sharply defined central nerve, or
midrib, and perfect ramification, tapering to a point, and varying in
length from half an inch to three inches. On every post, every rail, and
the corners of every building, the same spectacle was seen; and where
the snow had accumulated in deep drifts, it was still made up of the
ruins of these fairy structures. The white, enamelled landscape was
beautiful, but a close view of the details was far more so. The
crystallizations were somewhat uniform in structure, yet suggested a
variety of natural objects, as feather-mosses, birds' feathers, and the
most delicate lace-corals, but the predominant analogy was with ferns.
Yet they seemed to assume a sort of fantastic kindred with the objects
to which they adhered: thus, on the leaves of spruce-trees and on
delicate lichens they seemed like reduplications of the original growth,
and they made the broad, fiat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as
wide as before. But this fringe was always on one side only, except
when gathered upon dangling fragments of spider's web, or bits of stray
thread: these they entirely encircled, probably because these objects
had twirled in the light wind while the crystals were forming. Singular
disguises were produced: a bit of ragged rope appeared a piece of
twisted lace-work; a knot-hole in a board was adorned with a deep
antechamber of snowy wreaths; and the frozen body of a hairy caterpillar
became its own well-plumed hearse. The most peculiar circumstance was
the fact that single flakes never showed any regular crystallization:
the magic was in the combination; the under sides of rails and boards
exhibited it as unequivocally as the upper sides, indicating that the
phenomenon was created in the lower atmosphere, and was more akin to
frost than snow; and yet the largest snow-banks were composed of nothing
else, and seemed like heaps of blanched iron-filings.

Interesting observations have been made on the relations between ice and
snow. The difference seems to lie only in the more or less compacted
arrangement of the frozen particles. Water and air, each being
transparent when separate, become opaque when intimately mingled; the
reason being that the inequalities of refraction break up and scatter
every ray of light. Thus, clouds cast a shadow; so does steam; so does
foam: and the same elements take a still denser texture when combined
as snow. Every snow-flake is permeated with minute airy chambers, among
which the light is bewildered and lost; while from perfectly hard and
transparent ice every trace of air disappears, and the transmission
of light is unbroken. Yet that same ice becomes white and opaque when
pulverized, its fragments being then intermingled with air again,--just
as colorless glass may be crushed into white powder. On the other
hand, Professor Tyndall has converted slabs of snow to ice by regular
pressure, and has shown that every Alpine glacier begins as a snow-drift
at its summit, and ends in a transparent ice-cavern below. "The blue
blocks which span the sources of the Arveiron were once powdery snow
upon the slopes of the Col du Geant."

The varied and wonderful shapes assumed by snow and ice have been best
portrayed, perhaps, by Dr. Kane in his two works; but their resources of
color have been so explored by no one as by this same favored Professor
Tyndall, among his Alps. It appears that the tints which in temperate
regions are seen feebly and occasionally, in hollows or angles of fresh
drifts, become brilliant and constant above the line of perpetual snow,
and the higher the altitude the more lustrous the display. When a staff
was struck into the new-fallen drift, the hollow seemed instantly to
fill with a soft blue liquid, while the snow adhering to the staff took
a complementary color of pinkish yellow, and on moving it up and down
it was hard to resist the impression that a pink flame was rising and
sinking in the hole. The little natural furrows in the drifts appeared
faintly blue, the ridges were gray, while the parts most exposed to
view seemed least illuminated, and as if a light brown dust had been
sprinkled over them. The fresher the snow, the more marked the colors,
and it made no difference whether the sky were cloudless or foggy. Thus
was every white peak decked upon its brow with this tiara of ineffable
beauty.

The impression is very general that the average quantity of snow has
greatly diminished in America; but it must be remembered that very
severe storms occur only at considerable intervals, and the Puritans did
not always, as boys fancy, step out of the upper windows upon the snow.
In 1717, the ground was covered from ten to twenty feet, indeed; but
during January, 1861, the snow was six feet on a level in many parts of
Maine and New Hampshire, and was probably drifted three times that depth
in particular spots. The greatest storm recorded in England, I believe,
is that of 1814, in which for forty-eight hours the snow fell so
furiously that drifts of sixteen, twenty, and even twenty-four feet were
recorded in various places. An inch an hour is thought to be the average
rate of deposit, though four inches are said to have fallen during the
severe storm of January 3d, 1859. When thus intensified, the "beautiful
meteor of the snow" begins to give a sensation of something formidable;
and when the mercury suddenly falls meanwhile, and the wind rises, there
are sometimes suggestions of such terror in a snowstorm as no summer
thunders can rival. The brief and singular tempest of February 7th,
1861, was a thing to be forever remembered by those who saw it, as I
did, over a wide plain. The sky suddenly appeared to open and let down
whole solid snow-banks at once, which were caught and torn to pieces by
the ravenous winds, and the traveller was instantaneously enveloped in
a whirling mass far denser than any fog; it was a tornado with snow
stirred into it. Standing in the middle of the road, with houses close
on every side, one could see absolutely nothing in any direction, one
could hear no sound but the storm. Every landmark vanished, and it was
no more possible to guess the points of the compass than in mid-ocean.
It was easy to conceive of being bewildered and overwhelmed within a rod
of one's own door. The tempest lasted only an hour; but if it had lasted
a week, we should have had such a storm as occurred on the steppes of
Kirgheez in Siberia, in 1827, destroying two hundred and eighty thousand
five hundred horses, thirty thousand four hundred cattle, a million
sheep, and ten thousand camels,--or as "the thirteen drifty days,"
in 1620, which killed nine-tenths of all the sheep in the South of
Scotland. On Eskdale Moor, out of twenty thousand only forty-five were
left alive, and the shepherds everywhere built up huge semicircular
walls of the dead creatures, to afford shelter to the living, till the
gale should end. But the most remarkable narrative of a snowstorm which
I have ever seen was that written by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd,
in record of one which took place January 24th, 1790.

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