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.

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“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—

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“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 view, the cheeriness and the calm, and the deep heart of peace, that underlies all even of the sadnesses that god sends. there is a bitter kernel to all the sorrows that we bring on ourselves—the kernel of remorse and unavailing regret. but there is a sweet255 kernel, believe me, to all the bitter-cased walnuts which fall, naturally, straight down from god’s trees. there is use, yea, also, beauty, in his dying fields and his shrouded earth; in his november, and in his winter days.

let me gather a thought here and there that seem to come up, like christmas roses, from the bare beds of winter days.

the life of man has its november time; a time of sheer, literal, moist decay; no romantic flush of autumn woods, freaking them with a thousand fancies and poetic hues, and crowning death with an intense, fascinating, dreamy glory. the wild abundant spring blossoms are over long ago; the achievements of summer, sobered though they were, have256 passed away, and the tinge of pleasant dreamy melancholy that touched their first decay has died out; and the heart sinks as we look around us.

“that time of life thou dost in him behold, when yellow leaves, or few or none, do hang upon the boughs that shake against the cold, bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

the ageing man looks back upon his past life, and on all the works that his hands have wrought, and on the labour that he has laboured to do; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. what we meant to be, and what we are! the bright, soaring, heaven-adorned bubbles that gleamed about us, and the little mess of soapsuds that are sinking into the ground here and there! the crowd, the rush of emerald vivid buds that our boyhood knew; and now the bare, poor black twigs and branches, that drip above the yellow stained heaps below! hopes, ambition, dreams, love, friendships, aspirations, yearnings, plans, resolves, scattered and lying about the lanes of our life, or here and there heaped in a mass at some well-remembered turn or corner, dead, and sodden, and desolate exceedingly.

“oh! ’tis sad to lie and reckon all the days of faded youth, all the vows that we believed in, all the words we spoke in truth.”

well, and what then? can there be a december to follow upon and beautify those sad chilly hours? i think so. sometimes it is just when the leaves are all fallen,257 and the flowers all dead, and the fruits only represented by a straggler lying here and there, and when the bare boughs are strung with trembling tears that gleam with a dull light in the heavy enfolding mist; sometimes it is even then that a wondrous work is wrought. a pinching frost comes with, as it seems, the finishing stroke, and the last sere leaf circles down, and even the fading chrysanthemums blacken, and the little robin lies dead on the iron border. a dim sky overglooms all, and you go your sad way from the scene as night deepens over it. but god wakens you some morning, and bids you look out of the dim-lit room in which your heart was shut; and lo! a strange transformation! his consolations, and his teaching of the deep meaning of things, have descended thick and abundant from heaven, and even earth’s dull ruins and desolations are glorified and transfigured by the beauty of that heavenly snow. you are content now that the earthly foliage should have made way for and given place to that unearthly glory which reclothes earth’s bare boughs; you can think calmly, quietly, without any anguish, of those desolate leaves, and stained flowers, and cold robin, that all sleep undisturbedly under the snow. god’s snow, i think—the snow which he sends down upon hearts desolate and deserted,

“that once were gay, and felt the spring.”

god’s quiet snow, i think, that succeeds all the spring and summer excitements, and ecstasies, and heats of life, is just that peace of god which passeth all understanding sent down to keep our heart and mind, that its life be not258 destroyed nor its aspirations all cut off, but that it may be folded over warm and safe until the resurrection, that spring time, better than earth’s springs, which do but reform perishable buds and leaves; a spring which shall know no november, no winter days; a spring which shall no doubt revive and recover every feeling, and thought, and love, and aspiration which was really god-given and beautiful, and shall make those blighted hopes bright with the blossom of unearthly beauty, and shall bend the bare boughs of those unquiet inexpressible yearnings low towards him with the abundant fruit of satisfaction.

“brighter, fairer far than living, with no trace of change or stain, robed in everlasting beauty, shall we see them once again.”

i think the contemplation a little way off, of any sorrow or bereavement, bears out what i have said concerning the anticipation of winter being really the worst and most cheerless time—a time when only the chill, and the death, and the dreariness is in our thoughts, and we do not suspect the strange beauties that will accompany it, nor the warm glow that is hidden in its heart. we only see the trouble coming, and we know not, until the time of need is even with us, of the consolation, and the support, and the spiritual loveliness that are coming too; coming with the silent step of the snow, or the unseen breath of the frost, to adorn thoughts, and feelings, and character with a fringe and foliage of heavenly beauty; coming with a glow of consolation, like christmas in the heart of259 winter—the warm fire of god’s love, which can keep out earth’s sharpest and most piercing cold. so that when the winter has really come, and we look out on the soft snow of god’s peace, and creep closer to the fire of god’s love, we find that even the sharpest winter days are not so terrible as november painted them; and, revolving and realising their beauty and their use, we can enter into his feelings who said, “it is good for me that i have been afflicted”; and say amen with quiet grateful hearts to those once inexplicable words, “blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

* * * * *

the thought of winter days seems to lead us at once, by analogy, to the winter of death drawing near any one of us, old men and maidens, young men and children. and indeed this time, seen from the misty avenues of november, is apt to seem chill and cold to the mind and heart. still, i am sure that death, since the saviour died, is not a time of real unlovely or uncomforted gloom to the obedient and faithful child of god. oh no! when that winter has indeed come, such a one then perceives and realises its christmas heart of warm comfort, and its unearthly frost work of strange sweet thoughts and teachings. to such a one, if gloomy, it is only gloomy by anticipation, and while the traces of earth’s summers yet linger, and the tears and regrets of earth are yet glittering on the empty trees, bare lands, and faded flowers; only gloomy until god has quite weaned us, first by his chastenings and then by his consolations.

how sad it is that, in our common ideas, and representations,260 and modes of speech, death, even the good man’s death—should be overshadowed with such dismal gloom! i remember a curious proof of this, if proof were needed.

in a small illustrated edition of longfellow’s poems, the artist has chosen for illustration those sweet verses, “the reaper and the flowers.” you know them, of course, my reader, by heart. you remember these graceful lines:—

“he gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes, he kissed their drooping leaves; it was for the lord of paradise he bound them in his sheaves.

“‘my lord hath need of these flow’rets gay,’ the reaper said, and smiled; ‘dear tokens of the earth are they, where he was once a child.’”

and how do you think the artist has represented that gentle angel-reaper? actually as a hideous skeleton with a lank scythe! so ingrained is that ghastly and loathsome idea of death in the common thought of men. then think of all the impenetrable gloom with which we surround death in this christian england in this nineteenth century; of the utter absence of hope or beauty (save for the glorious p?an of the service) in our obsequies. listen, as soon as the happy, hopeful christian has “fallen asleep,” to the manner in which we tell the news to the family of our village or town. drop, drop, like melted lead falling, for a whole hour sometimes comes that dull monotony of gloom, toll, toll, toll, till the heart dies down into depression for the day.

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save that we know that that recurring note comes from the belfry of the peaceful little church that presides hopefully and holily over its gathering of sleepers—save for this, would there, i ask, be any thought but of dreariness in that dull ceaseless repetition of one desolate tone? death is, indeed

always a grave and solemn thing, and it were well that a grave and solemn voice should announce its presence to the clustered or the scattered homes. but why change solemnity into despair? why fill the air with nought but heavy gloom for a whole hour or half-hour? i would not say, in the words of poe:—

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“avaunt! to-night my heart is light, no dirge will i upraise, but waft the angel on her flight with a p?an of old days! let no bell toll! lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, should catch the note as it doth float up from the weeping earth.”

for there must be sadness here, if there be joy where the spirit has gone. only let not the dark cloud be debarred from any the least silver lining. something gentle, tender, and sweet, in accordance, so far as earth’s lamenting can accord, with the glory and rapture of the released one, would surely be better for the living than that slow prolonged numbering the beads of their own sorrow. i would have the bells rung, as for a wedding; only with a minute’s interval between each note. so the joy and the sorrow would each claim its share.

the early christians used to speak of and commemorate the day of death, as “τ? γεν?θλια,” the birthday feast of the dead. what a different way of putting things from our compassionate mention—not of the surviving, but of the dead. poor so-and-so! how sad!—this, for the spirit, that we feel a good hope, is in paradise! how the having it put before you in the just view—rather as an entering into true life, than a dying from it, casts a glow on what most seem to regard as nought but gloom. a most exquisite instance of such a beautiful putting of such a sharp winter day to even a bereaved father and mother, i find in one of archbishop leighton’s heavenly letters. in what a different light must their loss, surely, have appeared to them, after its perusal.

“indeed,” he writes, “it was a sharp stroke of a pen,263 that told me your pretty johnny was dead: and i felt it truly more than, to my remembrance, i did the death of any child in my lifetime. sweet thing! and is he so quickly laid to sleep? happy he! though we shall have no more the pleasure of his lisping and laughing, he shall have no more the pain of crying, nor of being sick, nor of dying: and hath wholly escaped the trouble of schooling, and all other sufferings of boys, and the riper and deeper griefs of riper years, this poor life being all along but a linked chain of many sorrows and many deaths. tell my dear sister she is now much more akin to the other world; and this will quickly be passed to us all. john is but gone an hour or two sooner to bed, as children use to do, and we are undressing to follow.”

in another letter the same writer says of himself—

“i am grown exceedingly uneasy in writing and speaking, yea, almost in thinking, when i reflect how cloudy our clearest thoughts are; but, i think again what other can we do, till the day break and the shadows flee away, as one that lieth awake in the night must be thinking; and one thought that will likely oftenest return, when by all other thoughts he finds little relief, is, when will it be day?”

you see he would have wondered to be spoken of thus—“poor leighton has gone.” answer, “how very sad,”—when at last he had attained to that day.

let me show, by another noble instance, that, as winter days, when they come, bring often unforeseen beauty and gladness with them, so not even the anticipation is always necessarily sad to the eye of exalted faith. remember you those words of the mighty apostle of christ—when the264 winter time was yet somewhat removed—with their more than calm anticipation of it, their deep warmth of joy?

“to me to live is christ, and to die is gain. what i shall choose i wot not. for i am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with christ; which is far better.”

and then the stirring tones of exultation and triumph, as now but few leaves were left, and winter days were even at the door.

“i am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course, i have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day.”

here is an aurora borealis flashing up to the heavens in light and splendour, over the wide snow landscape of winter days.