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

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James Hogg at this time belonged to a sort of literary society of young
shepherds, and had set out, the day previous, to walk twenty miles over
the hills to the place of meeting; but so formidable was the look of the
sky that he felt anxious for his sheep, and finally turned back again.
There was at that time only a slight fall of snow, in thin flakes which
seemed uncertain whether to go up or down; the hills were covered with
deep folds of frost-fog, and in the valleys the same fog seemed dark,
dense, and as it were crushed together. An old shepherd, predicting a
storm, bade him watch for a sudden opening through this fog, and expect
a wind from that quarter; yet when he saw such an opening suddenly form
at midnight, (having then reached his own home,) he thought it all a
delusion, as the weather had grown milder and a thaw seemed setting in.
He therefore went to bed, and felt no more anxiety for his sheep; yet
he lay awake in spite of himself, and at two o'clock he heard the
storm begin. It smote the house suddenly, like a great peal of
thunder,--something utterly unlike any storm he had ever before heard.
On his rising and thrusting his bare arm through a hole in the roof, it
seemed precisely as if he had thrust it into a snow-bank, so densely was
the air filled with falling and driving particles. He lay still for an
hour, while the house rocked with the tempest, hoping it might prove
only a hurricane; but as there was no abatement, he wakened his
companion-shepherd, telling him "it was come on such a night or morning
as never blew from the heavens." The other at once arose, and, opening
the door of the shed where they slept, found a drift as high as the
farm-house already heaped between them and its walls, a distance of only
fourteen yards. He floundered through, Hogg soon following, and, finding
all the family up, they agreed that they must reach the sheep as soon as
possible, especially eight hundred ewes that were in one lot together,
at the farthest end of the farm. So, after family-prayers and breakfast,
four of them stuffed their pockets with bread and cheese, sewed their
plaids about them, tied down their hats, and, taking each his staff, set
out on their tremendous undertaking, two hours before day.

Day dawned before they got three hundred yards from the house.
They could not see each other, and kept together with the greatest
difficulty. They had to make paths with their staves, rolled themselves
over drifts otherwise impassable, and every three or four minutes had to
hold their heads down between their knees to recover breath. They went
in single file, taking the lead by turns. The master soon gave out and
was speechless and semi-conscious for more than an hour, though he
afterwards recovered and held out with the rest. Two of them lost their
head-gear, and Hogg himself fell over a high precipice, but they reached
the flock at half-past ten. They found the ewes huddled together in a
dense body, under ten feet of snow,--packed so closely, that, to the
amazement of the shepherds, when they had extricated the first, the
whole flock walked out one after another, in a body, through the hole.

How they got them home it is almost impossible, to tell. It was now
noon, and they sometimes could see through the storm for twenty yards,
but they had only one momentary glimpse of the hills through all that
terrible day. Yet Hogg persisted in going by himself afterwards to
rescue some flocks of his own, barely escaping with life from the
expedition; his eyes were sealed up with the storm, and he crossed a
formidable torrent, without knowing it, on a wreath of snow. Two of the
others lost themselves in a deep valley, and would have perished but
for being accidentally heard by a neighboring shepherd, who guided them
home, where the female portion of the family had abandoned all hope of
ever seeing them again.

The next day was clear, with a cold wind, and they set forth again at
daybreak to seek the remainder of the flock. The face of the country
was perfectly transformed: not a hill was the same, not a brook or lake
could be recognized. Deep glens were filled in with snow, covering the
very tops of the trees; and over a hundred acres of ground, under an
average depth of six or eight feet, they were to look for four or five
hundred sheep. The attempt would have been hopeless but for a dog that
accompanied them: seeing their perplexity, he began snuffing about, and
presently scratching in the snow at a certain point, and then looking
round at his master: digging at this spot, they found a sheep beneath.
And so the dog led them all day, bounding eagerly from one place to
another, much faster than they could dig the creatures out, so that he
sometimes had twenty or thirty holes marked beforehand. In this way,
within a week, they got out every sheep on the farm except four, these
last being buried under a mountain of snow fifty feet deep, on the top
of which the dog had marked their places again and again. In every case
the sheep proved to be alive and warm, though half-suffocated; on being
taken out, they usually bounded away swiftly, and then fell helplessly
in a few moments, overcome by the change of atmosphere; some then died
almost instantly, and others were carried home and with difficulty
preserved, only about sixty being lost in all. Marvellous to tell, the
country-people unanimously agreed afterwards to refer the whole terrific
storm to some secret incantations of poor Hogg's literary society
aforesaid; it was generally maintained that a club of young dare-devils
had raised the Fiend himself among them in the likeness of a black dog,
the night preceding the storm, and the young students actually did not
dare to show themselves at fairs or at markets for a year afterwards.

Snow-scenes less exciting, but more wild and dreary, may be found in
Alexander Henry's Travels with the Indians, in the last century. In the
winter of 1776, for instance, they wandered for many hundred miles over
the farthest northwestern prairies, where scarcely a white man had
before trodden. The snow lay from four to six feet deep. They went on
snow-shoes, drawing their stores on sleds. The mercury was sometimes
-32 deg.; no fire could keep them warm at night, and often they had no fire,
being scarcely able to find wood enough to melt the snow for drink. They
lay beneath buffalo-skins and the stripped bark of trees: a foot of snow
sometimes fell on them before morning. The sun rose at half past nine
and set at half past two. "The country was one uninterrupted plain, in
many parts of which no wood nor even the smallest shrub was to be seen:
a frozen, sea, of which the little coppices were the islands. That
behind which we had encamped the night before soon sank in the horizon,
and the eye had nothing left save only the sky and snow." Fancy them
encamped by night, seeking shelter in a scanty grove from a wild tempest
of snow; then suddenly charged upon by a herd of buffaloes, thronging in
from all sides of the wood to take shelter likewise,--the dogs barking,
the Indians firing, and still the bewildered beasts rushing madly
in, blinded by the storm, fearing the guns within less than the fury
without, crashing through the trees, trampling over the tents, and
falling about in the deep and dreary snow! No other writer has ever
given us the full desolation of Indian winter-life. Whole families,
Henry said, frequently perished together in such storms. No wonder that
the Aboriginal legends are full of "mighty Peboan, the Winter," and of
Kabibonokka a his lodge of snow-drifts.

The interest inspired by these simple narratives suggests the
reflection, that literature, which has thus far portrayed so few aspects
of external Nature, has described almost nothing of winter beauty.
In English books, especially, this season is simply forlorn and
disagreeable, dark and dismal.

"And foul and fierce
All winter drives along the darkened air."

"When dark December shrouds the transient
day,
And stormy winds are howling in their
ire,
Why com'st not thou?. ... Oh, haste to pay
The cordial visit sullen hours require!"

"Winter will oft at eve resume the breeze,
Chill the pale morn, and bid his driving
blasts
Deform the day delightless."

"Now that the fields are dank and ways are
mire,
With whom you might converse, and by the
fire
Help waste the sullen day."

But our prevalent association with winter, in the Northern United
States, is with something white and dazzling and brilliant; and it is
time to paint our own pictures, and cease to borrow these gloomy alien
tints. One must turn eagerly every season to the few glimpses of
American winter aspects: to Emerson's "Snow-Storm," every word a
sculpture,--to the admirable storm in "Margaret,"--to Thoreau's "Winter
Walk," in the "Dial,"--and to Lowell's "First Snow-Flake." These are
fresh and real pictures, which carry us back to the Greek Anthology,
where the herds come wandering down from the wooded mountains, covered
with snow, and to Homer's aged Ulysses, his wise words falling like the
snows of winter.

Let me add to this scanty gallery of snow-pictures the quaint lore
contained in one of the multitudinous sermons of Increase Mather,
printed in 1704, entitled "A Brief Discourse concerning the Prayse
due to God for His Mercy in giving Snow like Wool." One can fancy
the delight of the oppressed Puritan boys, in the days of the
nineteenthlies, driven to the place of worship by the tithing-men,
and cooped up on the pulpit-and gallery-stairs under charge of
the constables, at hearing for once a discourse which they could
understand,--snow-balling spiritualized. This was not one of Emerson's
terrible examples,--"the storm real, and the preacher only phenomenal";
but this setting of snow-drifts, which in our winters lends such grace
to every stern rock and rugged tree, throws a charm even around the grim
theology of the Mathers. Three main propositions, seven subdivisions,
four applications, and four uses, but the wreaths and the gracefulness
are cast about them all,--while the wonderful commonplace-books of those
days, which held everything, had accumulated scraps of winter learning
which cannot be spared from these less abstruse pages.

Beginning first at the foundation, the preacher must prove, "Prop. I.
_That the Snow is fitly resembled to Wool_. Snow like Wool, sayes the
Psalmist. And not only the Sacred Writers, but others make use of this
Comparison. The Grecians of old were wont to call the Snow, ERIODES
HUDOR _Wooly Water_, or wet Wool. The Latin word _Floccus_ signifies
both a Lock of Wool and a Flake of Snow, in that they resemble one
another. The aptness of the similitude appears in three things." "1. In
respect of the Whiteness thereof." "2. In respect of Softness." "3. In
respect of that Warming Vertue that does attend the Snow." [Here the
reasoning must not be omitted.] "Wool is warm. We say, _As warm as
Wool_. Woolen-cloth has a greater warmth than other Cloathing has. The
wool on Sheep keeps them warm in the Winter season. So when the back of
the Ground is covered with Snow, it keeps it warm. Some mention it as
one of the wonders of the Snow, that tho' it is itself cold, yet it
makes the Earth warm. But Naturalists observe that there is a saline
spirit in it, which is hot, by means whereof Plants under the Snow are
kept from freezing. Ice under the Snow is sooner melted and broken than
other Ice. In some Northern Climates, the wild barbarous People use to
cover themselves over with it to keep them warm. When the sharp Air has
begun to freeze a man's Limbs, Snow will bring heat into them again. If
persons Eat much Snow, or drink immoderately of Snow-water, it will burn
their Bowels and make them black. So that it has a warming vertue in it,
and is therefore fitly compared to Wool."

Snow has many merits. "In _Lapland_, where there is little or no light
of the sun in the depth of Winter, there are great Snows continually on
the ground, and by the Light of that they are able to Travel from one
place to another... At this day in some hot Countreys, they have their
Snow-cellars, where it is kept in Summer, and if moderately used, is
known to be both refreshing and healthful. There are also Medicinal
Vertues in the snow. A late Learned Physician has found that a Salt
extracted out of snow is a sovereign Remedy against both putrid and
pestilential Feavors. Therefore Men should Praise God, who giveth Snow
like Wool." But there is an account against the snow, also. "Not only
the disease called _Bulimia_, but others more fatal have come out of the
Snow. _Geographers_ give us to understand that in some Countries Vapours
from the Snow have killed multitudes in less than a Quarter of an Hour.
Sometimes both Men and Beasts have been destroyed thereby. Writers speak
of no less than Forty Thousand men killed by a great Snow in one Day."

It gives a touching sense of human sympathy, to find that we may look at
Orion and the Pleiades through the grave eyes of a Puritan divine. "The
_Seven Stars_ are the Summer Constellation: they bring on the spring
and summer; and _Orion_ is a Winter Constellation, which is attended
with snow and cold, as at this Day.... Moreover, Late _Philosophers_ by
the help of the _Microscope_ have observed the wonderful Wisdom of God
in the Figure of the Snow; each flake is usually of a _Stellate_ Form,
and of six Angles of exact equal length from the Center. It is _like a
little Star_. A great man speaks of it with admiration, that in a Body
so familiar as the Snow is, no Philosopher should for many Ages take
notice of a thing so obvious as the Figure of it. The learned _Kepler_,
who lived in this last Age, is acknowledged to be the first that
acquainted the world with the Sexangular Figure of the Snow."

Then come the devout applications. "There is not a Flake of Snow that
falls on the Ground without the hand of God, Mat. 10. 29. 30. Not a
Sparrow falls to the Ground, without the Will of your Heavenly Father,
all the Hairs of your head are numbred. So the Great God has numbred all
the Flakes of Snow that covers the Earth. Altho' no man can number them,
that God that tells the number of the Stars has numbred them all.... We
often see it, when the Ground is bare, if God speaks the word, the Earth
is covered with snow in a few Minutes' time. Here is the power of the
Great God. If all the Princes and Great Ones of the Earth should send
their Commands to the Clouds, not a Flake of snow would come from
thence."

Then follow the "uses," at last,--the little boys in the congregation
having grown uneasy long since, at hearing so much theorizing about
snow-drifts, with so little opportunity of personal practice. "Use I. If
we should Praise God for His giving Snow, surely then we ought to Praise
Him for Spiritual Blessings much more." "Use II. We should Humble our
selves under the Hand of God, when Snow in the season of it is
witheld from us." "Use III. Hence all Atheists will be left Eternally
Inexcusable." "Use IV. We should hence Learn to make a Spiritual
Improvement of the Snow." And then with a closing volley of every text
winch figures under the head of "Snow" in the Concordance, the discourse
comes to an end; and every liberated urchin goes home with his head full
of devout fancies of building a snow-fort, after sunset, from which to
propel consecrated missiles against imaginary or traditional Pequots.

And the patient reader, too long snow-bound, must be liberated also.
After the winters of deepest drifts the spring often comes most
suddenly; there is little frost in the ground, and the liberated waters,
free without the expected freshet, are filtered into the earth, or climb
on ladders of sunbeams to the sky. The beautiful crystals all melt away,
and the places where they lay are silently made ready to be submerged
in new drifts of summer verdure. These also will be transmuted in their
turn, and so the eternal cycle of the seasons glides along.

Near my house there is a garden, beneath whose stately sycamores a
fountain plays. Three sculptured girls lift forever upward a chalice
which distils unceasingly a fine and plashing rain; in summer the spray
holds the maidens in a glittering veil, but winter takes the radiant
drops and slowly builds them up into a shroud of ice which creeps
gradually about the three slight figures: the feet vanish, the waist is
encircled, the head is covered, the piteous uplifted arms disappear, as
if each were a Vestal Virgin entombed alive for her transgression. They
vanishing entirely, the fountain yet plays on unseen; all winter the
pile of ice grows larger, glittering organ-pipes of congelation add
themselves outside, and by February a great glacier is formed, at whose
buried centre stand immovably the patient girls. Spring comes at
last, the fated prince, to free with glittering spear these enchanted
beauties; the waning glacier, slowly receding, lies conquered before
their liberated feet; and still the fountain plays. Who can despair
before the iciest human life, when its unconscious symbols are so
beautiful?

A STORY OF TO-DAY.

PART V.

There was a dull smell of camphor; a further sense of coolness and
prickling wet on Holmes's hot, cracking face and hands; then silence and
sleep again. Sometime--when, he never knew--a gray light stinging his
eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into warm, unsounded darkness
and unconsciousness. It might be years, it might be ages. Even in
after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks or days:
people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain, always: it was
a vague vacuum in his memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured
life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm. When, by
long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly
done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to him, as if he
had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its calming mist with him,
out of the shades.

The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on the
pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him, unreal at first: parts
only of the dull, lifeless pleasure. There was a sharper memory pierced
it sometimes, making him moan and try to sleep,--a remembrance of great,
cleaving pain, of falling giddily, of owing life to some one, and being
angry that he owed it, in the pain. Was it he that had borne it? He did
not know,--nor care: it made him tired to think. Even when he heard the
name Stephen Holmes, it had but a far-off meaning: he never woke enough
to know if it were his or not. He learned, long after, to watch the red
light curling among the shavings in the grate when they made a fire in
the evenings, to listen to the voices of the women by the bed, to know
that the pleasantest belonged to the one with the low, shapeless figure,
and to call her Lois when he wanted a drink, long before he knew
himself.

They were very long, pleasant days in early December. The sunshine
was pale, but it suited his hurt eyes better: it crept slowly in the
mornings over the snuff-colored carpet on the floor, up the brown
foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind shook the window-curtains,
made little crimson pools of mottled light over the ceiling,--curdling
pools, that he liked to watch: going off, from the clean gray walls and
rustling curtain and transparent crimson, into sleeps that lasted all
day.

He was not conscious how he knew he was in a hospital: but he did know
it, vaguely; thought sometimes of the long halls outside of the door
with ranges of rooms opening into them, like this, and of very barns of
rooms on the other side of the building with rows of white cots where
the poor patients lay: a stretch of travel from which his brain came
back to his snug fireplace, quite tired, and to Lois sitting knitting by
it. He called the little Welsh-woman, "Sister," too, who used to come in
a stuff dress, and white bands about her face, to give his medicine and
gossip with Lois in the evening: she had a comical voice, like a cricket
chirping. There was another with a real Scotch brogue, who came and
listened sometimes, bringing a basket of undarned stockings: the doctor
told him one day how fearless and skilful she was, every summer going to
New Orleans when the yellow fever came. She died there the next June:
but Holmes never, somehow, could realize a martyr in the cheery,
freckled-faced woman whom he always remembered darning stockings in the
quiet fire-light. It was very quiet; the voices about him were pleasant
and low. If he had drifted from any shock of pain into a sleep like
death, some of the stillness hung about him yet; but the outer life was
homely and fresh and natural.

The doctor used to talk to him a little; and sometimes one or two of
the patients from the eye-ward would grow tired of sitting about in the
garden-alleys, and would loiter in, if Lois would give them leave; but
their talk wearied him, jarred him as strangely as if one had begun on
politics and price-currents to the silent souls in Hades. It was enough
thought for him to listen to the whispered stories of the sisters in the
long evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to them; to look
drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon sunshine was still so
summer-like that a few hollyhocks persisted in showing their honest red
faces along the walls, and the very leaves that filled the paths would
not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy brown. One of the sisters had
a poultry-yard in it, which he could see: the wall around it was of
stone covered with a brown feathery lichen, which every rooster in that
yard was determined to stand on, or perish in the attempt; and Holmes
would watch, through the quiet, bright mornings, the frantic ambition
and the uproarious exultation of the successful aspirant with an amused
smile.

"One'd thenk," said Lois, sagely, "a chicken never stood on a wall
before, to hear 'em, or a hen laid an egg."

Nor did Holmes smile once because the chicken burlesqued man: his
thought was too single for that yet. It was long before he thought of
the people who came in quietly to see him as anything but shadows, or
wished for them to come again. Lois, perhaps, was the most real thing in
life then to him: growing conscious, day by day, as he watched her, of
his old life over the gulf. Very slowly conscious: with a weak groping
to comprehend the sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then
forgetting his old life, and the change, and the pity he felt for
himself, in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his nurse with
her interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while the sky
without would thicken and gray and a few still flakes of snow would come
drifting down to whiten the brown fields,--with no chilly thought of
winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more quiet. Whatever honest,
commonplace affection was in the man came out in a simple way to this
Lois, who ruled his sick whims and crotchets in such a quiet, sturdy
way. Not because she had risked her life to save his; even when he
understood that, he recalled it with an uneasy, heavy gratitude; but the
drinks she made him, and the plot they laid to smuggle in some oysters
in defiance of all rules, and the cheerful pock-marked face he never
forgot.

Doctor Knowles came sometimes, but seldom: never talked, when he did
come: late in the evening generally: and then would punch his skin, and
look at his tongue, and shake the bottles on the mantel-shelf with a
grunt that terrified Lois into the belief that the other doctor was a
quack, and her patient was totally undone. He would sit, grim enough,
with his feet higher than his head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and
leave them both thankful when he saw proper to go.

The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little
mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to pieces,
and souls set right. He had no faith in your slow, impalpable cures:
all reforms were to be accomplished by a wrench, from the abolition of
slavery to the pulling of a tooth.

He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either: the men were started
in life from opposite poles: and with all the real tenderness under
his surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard to touch him with the
sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown crippled and penniless upon the
world, helpless, it might be, for life. He would have been apt to tell
you, savagely, that "he wrought for it."

Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters. Knowles could
have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the _role_ played
by the Papal power in the progress of humanity,--how jar it served as a
stepping-stone, and the exact period when it became a wearisome clog.
The world was done with it now, utterly. Its breath was only poisoned,
with coming death. So the homely live charity of these women, their
work, which, no other hands were ready to take, jarred against his
abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run
into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a
matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in
spite of the positive philosophers, you know.

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