Midwinter

“ Let us take midwinter. Take this very Christmas season when the days are short and cheerless, the nights are long and dark and cold. We might be tempted to think that the sun had well-nigh forgotten us. It is true he only seems to pay us very occasional visits, and between fogs and clouds we in England see but little of him; but, visible or invisible, the sun incessantly tends us, and provides for our welfare in ways that perhaps we do not always remember. ”

“ In midwinter, when the deep snows come—if they come at all—how effectually the snow-birds enliven what might otherwise be a dreary outlook! On the projecting twigs above the huge drifts they gather, and, plunging down deeply into the snow, find seeds on many a sturdy weed that winter winds have not cast down. ”

“ The ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are incased in hard pure ice ”

“ In midwinter of the Far North, dawn comes late. Stars, which shine with a hard, clear, crystal radiance only seen in northern skies, pale in the gray morning gloom; and the sun comes over the horizon dim through mists of frost-smoke. In an hour the frost-mist, lying thick to the touch like clouds of steam, will have cleared ”

“ If the heathen of ancient Europe celebrated, as we have good reason to believe, the season of Midsummer with a great festival of fire, of which the traces have survived in many places down to our own time, it is natural to suppose that they should have observed with similar rites the corresponding season of Midwinter ”

“ On the same principle, let us have, in art, our green leaves and warm colors amid the frosts of midwinter. Only the atmospheric extremes, summer and winter, can be seriously considered in "seasoning" periodical literature, the months our almanacs call spring being neither one thing nor another. ”

“ Midwinter started to his feet, his dark face flushing deep; his eyes fixed brightly and steadily, at last, on the rector's face. "A light!" he exclaimed, tearing the pages of his father's letter, one by one, from the fastening that held them. "Let us destroy the last link that holds us to the horrible past! Let us see this confession a heap of ashes before we part!" ”

“ Cutting a Canal through the Ice to Release the Belgica from her Year’s Imprisonment.
December 25.—Christmas in midsummer is certainly an anomaly to residents of the northern hemisphere, but our midsummer is more sterile than the midwinter of any known spot on the globe. At home there may be snow and wind, but there is at hand the companionship of warm friends, the cheer of a bright fire, the charm of flowers and pretty things ”

“ The joy of having bright sunny weather in midwinter is very great, and it is also a pleasure to meet friends at the club or hotels, and for those inclined that way balls and parties can be attended on most evenings during the season. ”

“ At times in midwinter the thermometer registers much below zero. These days of low temperature invariably follow a fall of snow, and before the bright sunshine that is sure to come has tempered the dry, cutting atmosphere. ”

“ "I am nothing—a will-o'-the-wisp at your service—a clod of vivified dust whom its progenitors christened Amos Midwinter. I have no possession but my name, and no calling but that of philosopher. Naked I came from the earth, and naked I will return to it." ”

“ If you watch the sun you will see it pass higher and higher every noon until Midsummer Day is reached, and then the sun at noon is found quite high up in the sky. As autumn draws near, the sun at noon creeps downwards again until, when the next shortest day has come round, we find that it passes just where it did at the previous midwinter. With unceasing regularity year after year the sun goes through these changes. When he is high at noon we have days both long and warm; when he is low at noon we have days both short and cold. ”

“ His eyes wandered higher, and encountered the dismantled masts of the wreck rising weird and black against the night sky. He shuddered at the sight of them, and hid his face on Allan's knee. "No dream!" he murmured to himself, mournfully. "Oh me, no dream!"
"You have been overtired all day," said Allan, "and this infernal adventure of ours has upset you. Take some more whisky, it's sure to do you good. Can you sit by yourself, if I put you against the bulwark, so?"
"Why by myself? Why do you leave me?" asked Midwinter. ”

“ Rabbit after rabbit he found, gray and white, hanging stiff and stark, dead from their own weight, strangled in the twine snares. Snares were set anew, the game strung over his shoulder, and Koot was walking through the gray gloaming for the cabin when that strange sense of feel told him that he was being followed. What was it? Could it be the dog? He whistled—he called it by name. [Pg 212]
In all the world, there is nothing so ghostly silent, so deathly quiet as the swamp woods, muffled in the snow of midwinter, just at nightfall. ”

“ These tracks did not pass the door, therefore the horseman must be within. There were no signs of a coach's wheels, so Lady Norreys had not yet arrived. He lifted his eyes and looked down the stream. There, a mile or so distant, moved a dark cluster, a coach apparently and attendant riders.
The snow was on them again and Alastair bowed his head to the blast. "They will lie at that inn," said Midwinter. "Brightwell is half a dozen miles on, and the road is dangerous. You will, of course, join them. ”

“ All the world knows what a spring this has been. The famous black spring commemorated by Gilbert White can hardly have been more thoroughly ungenial, more fatal to man or beast, to leaf and flower, than this most miserable season, this winter of long days, when the sun shines as if in mockery, giving little more heat than his cold sister the moon, and the bitter north-east produces at one and the same moment the incongruous annoyances of biting cold and suffocating dust. Never was such a season. ”

“ The earth began to awake, lights kindled in farms and cottages, lanterns flickered around steadings. Movement through this world just struggling out of sleep was a joy and an exhilaration. It reminded Alastair of a winter journey from Paris to Beauvais—part of a Prince's wager—when with relays of horses he had ridden down the night, through woods and hamlets dumb with snow, intoxicated with his youth, and seeing mystery in every light that glimmered out of the dark. ”

“ So much is certain that it can not be small, to judge by the violence and swelling of the rivers in spring. The summits of the hills, and the declivities exposed to the reigning winds, are constantly deprived of snow, which, however, fills up the bottom of the valleys to a considerable height. Great was Middendorff’s astonishment, while travelling over the tundra at the end of winter, to find it covered with no more than two inches, or at the very utmost half a foot, of snow; the dried stems of the Arctic plants everywhere peeping forth above its surface. ”

“ After several weeks of clear, bright, bracing, frosty weather, with a serene atmosphere and cloudless sky, you awake one morning surprised at the change in the temperature; and, upon looking out of the window, behold the woods obscured by a murky haze—not so dense as an English November fog, but more black and lowering—and the heavens shrouded in a uniform covering of leaden-coloured clouds, deepening into a livid indigo at the edge of the horizon. The snow, no longer hard and glittering, has become soft and spongy, and the foot slips into a wet and insidiously-yielding mass at every step. ”

“ Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into “a tumultuous privacy of storm.” ”

“ It happened that we received the letter on one of those soft November days, which sometimes intervene between the rough winds of October and the crisp frosts of Christmas, and which, although too dirty under foot to be quite pleasant for walking, are yet, during the few hours that the sun is above the horizon, mild enough for an open carriage in our shady lanes, strewed as they are at that period with the yellow leaves of the elm, whilst the hedgerows are still rich with the tawny foliage of the oak, and the rich colouring of the hawthorn and the bramble. ”

“ Not that we grieve, when, after some seven months of storm and bitter frost, Spring, in the guise of a flower-crowned virgin, is seen driving away the hoary despot, pelting him with violets by the handful, and strewing green grass on the path behind him. Often, ere he will give up his empire, old Winter rushes fiercely back, and hurls a snow-drift at the shrinking form of Spring ”

“ Never did eager British children look for the first violets and primroses of spring with more impatience than my baby boys and girls watched, day after day, for the first snow-flakes that were to form the road to convey them to their absent father.
"Winter never means to come this year. It will never snow again?" ”

“ Here, on the ever-balmy shores of the Mediterranean—that motionless sea which looks as though it were under glass—where, while the months are dark in the rest of Europe, Spring has taken shelter from the wind and the snows in a palace of peace and light and love, it is interesting to detect its preparations for travelling in the fields of undying green. I can see clearly that it is afraid, that it hesitates once more to face the great frost-traps which February and March lay for it annually beyond the mountains. ”

“ An evil wind arose, chilling us to the bone. It seemed to be December; we felt the chill of winter and that restlessness which accompanies every sudden menace on the part of nature. All round the horizon small leaden-colored clouds began to collect, scudding rapidly along, as though searching impatiently for a direction and a shape. Then the waters began to ripple, and became streaked with rapid luminous reflections, with long stripes of green, violet, white, ochre, black. ”

“ However we may prefer the green and living beauty of spring, when everything is so full of vitality, so buoyant and free, yet the autumn scenery is the most magnificent of any in the year."
"Every season has its charms," said Spalding, "Even the winter, with its cold, its dead and cheerless desolation, has its robe of chaste and peerless white, which, as well as that of the spring-time, the summer, and the autumn, has been the theme of song. I agree with you, that in gorgeousness of beauty, there is no season so rich as the autumn. ”

“ Midnight showed keen interest in this new world. It was a white world, a silent world of snow and green spruce. The biting cold made him plunge through the deep drifts and snort eagerly. One other dweller of the high country, who could not sleep through the cold months, came to the meadow. An old timber-line buck had chosen to stay in the high mesa country defying the cold and the snow. ”

“ The ascent is easy, there being little snow upon the path in the summer; there is a bridle-trail throughout, a small inn higher than half way, and an observatory now erected upon the summit.
We are only intellectually cognizant of this Pic du Midi, however, as we jog on up toward the pass; for the driving fog curtains all the peaks, at times lifting so far as to show the nearer slopes and perhaps the hills ahead, but for the most part enfolding even the road and ourselves in its maudlin affection. ”

“ The gathering of the enormous drifts that begins in November and continues until March is another winter fact that touches the imagination. The sight of these vast curled waves of snow is undeniably impressive⁠—accumulating with every fresh fall for delivery in the spring. ”

“ A faint tinge of Christianity has been given to them by naming Midsummer Day after St. John the Baptist, but we cannot doubt that the celebration dates from a time long before the beginning of our era. The summer solstice, or Midsummer Day, is the great turning-point in the sun's career, when, after climbing higher and higher day by day in the sky, the luminary stops and thenceforth retraces his steps down the heavenly road. Such a moment could not but be regarded with anxiety by primitive man so soon as he began to observe and ponder the courses of the great lights across the celestial vault ”

“ On the 2nd October the thermometer fell still lower, and the first snow storm came on; there was but little wind, and there were therefore none of those violent whirlpools of snow called drifts, but a vast white carpet of uniform thickness soon clothed the cape, the enceinte of fort, and the coast. The waters of the lake and sea, not yet petrified by the icy hand of winter, were of a dull, gloomy, greyish hue, and on the northern horizon the first icebergs stood out against the misty sky. ”

“ But I have often wonder'd that those who are like my self, and love to live in Gardens, have never thought of contriving a Winter Garden, which would consist of such Trees only as never cast their Leaves. We have very often little Snatches of Sunshine and fair Weather in the most uncomfortable Parts of the Year; and have frequently several Days in November and January that are as agreeable as any in the finest Months. At such times, therefore, I think there could not be a greater Pleasure, than to walk in such a Winter-Garden as I have proposed. ”