THE SNOW-STORM.

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A MONOLOGUE BY JEREMY SHORT, ESQ.

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It is almost twilight. How swiftly have the moments glided by since we sat ourselves by this window—let us see—some two hours since, and during all that time not a word have we spoken, although our soul has been gushing over with its exceeding fulness. It is snowing. Look out and you will see the downy flakes—there, there, and there—one chasing another, millions on millions falling without intermission, coming down noiselessly and mysteriously, as a dream of childhood, on the earth, and covering field, and forest, and house-top, hill and vale, river, glade, and meadow, with a robe that is whiter than an angel’s mantle. How ceaseless the descent! What countless myriads—more countless than even the stars of heaven—have fallen since we have been watching here! God only could have ordered the falling of that flake which has just now sunk to the earth like an infant on its young mother’s milk-white bosom. Did you not see it? There—follow this one which has just emerged from the skies—but at what spot even we cannot detect—see its slow, easy, tremulous motion as it floats downwards; now how rapidly it intermingles with the others, so that you can scarcely keep it in your eye; and there! there! it shoots to the ground with a joyous leap—and, even as we speak, another and another, aye! ten thousand thousand of them have flitted past, like the gleaming of cherubic wings, such as we used to see in our childhood’s dreams, glancing to and fro before a throne of surpassing glory, far, far away, high up in the skies.

It is snowing. Faster, faster, faster come down the feathery flakes. See how they disport themselves—giddy young creatures as they are—whirling around; now up, and now down; dancing, leaping, flying; you can almost hear their sportive laughter as they skim away across the landscape. Almost, we say, for in truth there is not a sound to be heard in earth, air, or sky. The ground, all robed in white, is hushed in silence—the river sweeps its current along no longer with a hoarse chafing sound, but flows onward with a dull, clogged, almost noiseless motion—not a bird whistles in the wood, nor a beast lows from the barn-yard—while the trees, lifting their bleached branches to the skies, shiver in the keen air, and cower uncomplainingly beneath the falling flakes. But hark! there is a voice beside us—’tis that of the beloved of our soul—repeating Thomson’s Winter—Thomson! majestic at all times, but oh! how much more so when gushing in silver music from the lips of the white-armed one beside us. Hear her!

“The keener tempests rise: and fuming dun

From all the livid east, or piercing north,

Thick clouds ascend; in whose capacious womb

A vapory deluge lies, to snow congeal’d.

Heavy they roll their fleecy world along;

And the sky saddens with the gather’d storm.

Through the hush’d air the whitening shower descends,

At first thin wavering; till at last the flakes

Fall broad, and wide, and fast, dimming the day,

With a continual flow. The cherished fields

Put on their winter-robe of purest white.

’Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts

Along the mazy current. Low the woods

Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun

Faint from the west emits his evening ray

Earth’s universal face, deep hid, and chill,

Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide

The works of man. Drooping, the laborer ox

Stands covered o’er with snow——”

But let us away to the mountains! Far up in a gorge of the Alleghanies we will stand, with the clouds whirling wildly around and beneath, and the wind whistling shrilly far down in some ravine, which we may not see; for all around us is, as it were, a shoreless ocean, buried in a ghastly mist, from which the tall cliffs jut up like islands—and ever, ever comes to our ears from this boiling vortex a sound as of many waves chafing against the shore, like that which the priest of Apollo listened to as he walked all disconsolate, bereft of his fair-haired daughter, back from the tents of the stern Hellenes to the towers of Ilium. The air is full of snow-flakes, driving hither and thither—thick, thick, thicker they descend—you cannot see a fathom before you. Take care how you tread, for a false step may plunge you into an abyss a thousand feet plumb down. Not far from here is the very spot where an unwary traveller, on a night like this, but a bare twelve-month since, slipped from the edge of the precipice, and was never heard of again, until the warm sunny breath of April, melting the snows from beneath the shadows of the hills, disclosed him lying unburied, with his face turned up, as if in mockery, to the bright heavens on which his eye might never look again. In vain had loved ones watched for his coming until their eyes grew weary, and their hearts turned to fountains of tears within them—in vain had a wife or mother kindled the cheery fire, or smoothed for him the bed of down, to welcome him after his absence—for

“——his sheets are more white,

And his canopy grander,

And sounder he sleeps

Where the hill-foxes wander.”

We are in the mountains, in the midst of a snow-storm, and, as we look around, we feel that Jehovah, as when Moses heard the noise of a mighty wind, is passing by. There is a vague emotion of mingled wonder, fear and awe, overshadowing our soul as we stand here alone in the tempest. See how the drift is spinning in the whirlwind; and now it streams out like a pennant on the night. Hark! to the deep organ peal of the hurricane as it thunders among the peaks high up above us—listen to the wild shrieks rising, we know not whither, as if the spirits of the mountain were writhing on beds of torture, as the olden legends say, all unpardoned by their Creator. And now—louder and wilder than the rest—sounding upwards from the gulf below, a voice of agony and might—sublime even in its tribulation, awful in its expression of gigantic suffering—like that of him whom the seer of the Apocalypse beheld bound hand and foot and cast into the bottomless pit, despite an unyielding conflict of twice ten thousand years. Ruin!—ruin!—all is ruin around us. We see not the burying of hamlets, we hear not the descent of avalanches, but the sky is lit up with a wan glare, the whole air is full of mysterious sounds, and we feel, with a strange all-pervading fear, that destruction will glut herself ere morning. God help the traveller who is abroad to-night!

And now, with a sheer descent, full fifty fathoms down, let us plunge like the eagle when he shoots before the burning thunderbolt. We are on the wide ocean, and what a sight! Sea and air are commingled into one. You seem buried alive in a whirling tempest of snow-flakes, and though, as on the mountain, you hear on every side sounds of utter agony, yet, as there, the keenest eye cannot penetrate the wan, dim prospect around; but here, unlike on the hills, there is one voice superior to all the rest—the deep, awful bass of the rolling surges. And then the hurricane! How it whistles, roars and bellows through the rigging, now piping shrill and clear, and now groaning awfully as if in its last extremity. The snow is blocking up the decks, wet, spongy and bitterly cold. There! how she thumped against that wave, quivering under it in every timber, while the spray was dimly seen flying wild and high over the fore-top. “Shall we—oh! shall we live till morning?” asks a weeping girl. “We know not, sweet one, but we are in the Almighty’s hand, and his fatherly care will be over us as well here as on the land.” There; see—“hold on all,” thunders the Stentor voice of the skipper, sounding now however fainter than the feeblest infant’s cry; and as he speaks, the craft shivers with a convulsive throe, and a gigantic billow, seething, hissing, flashing, whirls in over the bow, deluges the deck, and roars away into the blackness of darkness astern. Was that a cry of a man overboard? God in his infinite mercy, pardon the poor wretch’s sins; for, alas! it were madness to attempt his rescue. Already he is far astern. Another and another wave! Oh! for the light of morning. Yes! young Jessie, thou would’st give worlds now for the breezes of the far-off land—the hum of bees, the songs of birds, the scent of flowers in the summer sunshine—the sight of thy home smiling amidst its murmuring trees, with the clear brook hard by laughing over the stones, and the voices of thy young sisters sounding gaily in thy ears. But ere morning we may all be with our brother who has but just gone from our midst. Ora pro nobis!

We were but dreaming when we thought ourselves among the mountains and on the sea, and we were awoke by thy soft voice—oh! loved one of our soul—and looking into thy blue eyes—moist, not with tears, but with thine all-sensitive soul—we feel a calm come down upon us soothing, how gently and sweetly, our agitated thoughts. Many and many a tale could we tell thee of sorrow and peril on the seas, and our heart is even now full of one which would bring the tears into other eyes than thine—but no! you tell us we are all too agitated by our dream, and that another time will do—well, well! Sing us, then, one of thine own sweet songs—Melanie!—for is not thy voice like the warbler of our woods, he of the hundred notes, the silvery, the melting, the unrivalled? That was sweetly done—ever could we sit and listen to thee thus.

“Thy voice is like a fountain

Leaping up in sunshine bright,

And we never weary counting

Its clear droppings, lone and single,

Or when in one full gush they mingle,

Shooting in melodious light!”

That is Lowell’s—a noble soul is his, and all on fire with poetry. We tender to him, though we have never met in the flesh, our good right hand, joining his herewith in cordial fellowship, the hearts of both being in our eyes the while:—we tender him our hand—he far away in his student’s room at Boston and we here in old Philadelphia—and we tell sneering worldlings and critics who are born only to be damned, that, for one so young, Lowell has written grandly; that he is full, even to overflowing, of purity, enthusiasm, imagination, and love for all God’s creatures; and being this, why should not we—aye! and all honest men beside—grasp him cheerily by the hand, and if need be, stand to our arms in his defence?

But the clock has struck six, and we will walk to the door to see if the tempest still rages. What a glorious night! The moon is out, sailing high up in heaven, with a calm mystic majesty that fills the soul with untold peace. Far away on the horizon floats a misty veil—while here and there, in the sky, a cloud still lingers, its dark body seeming like velvet on an azure ground, and its edges turned up with silver. There are a thousand stars on the frosty snow; for every tiny crystal that shoots out into the moonshine glistens all diamond-like; and, as you walk, ten thousand new crystals open to the light, until the whole landscape seems alive with millions of gems. Hark! how the hard crust crackles under the tread. If you put your ear to the ground you will hear a multitude of almost inarticulate sounds as if the sharp moon-beams were splintering the snow—but it is only the shooting of myriads of crystals. There have been icicles forming all day from yonder twig, and now as we shake the tree, you may hear them tinkling, one by one, to the ground, with a clear silvery tone, like the ringing of a bell miles off among the hills. Early in the afternoon, the snow melted on the river, but towards nightfall the stream became clogged, and now the frost is “breathing a blue film” from shore to shore—and to-morrow the whole surface will be smooth as glass, and the steel of the skater will be ringing sharp along the ice. How keen was that gust!—you may hear its dying cadence moaning away in the distance, like the wail of a lost child in a forest. Hush! was that a whistle down in the wood?

And now again all is still. Let us pause a moment and look around. The well-known landmarks of the scene have disappeared, giving place to an unbroken prospect of the purest white. We seem to have entered into a new world, and to have lost by the transition all our old and more selfish feelings, so that now, every emotion of our heart is softened down to a gentle calm, in unison with the beauty and repose around us. There is a dreaminess in the landscape, thus half seen by the light of the moon, giving full play to the imagination. The spirit spurns this mortal tenement of clay, and soars upwards to a brighter world, holding fancied communion with the myriads of beatified spirits, which it would fain believe, hover in the air and whisper unseen into our souls. Glorious thought, that God hath appointed such guardian watchers over a lost and sinful race! We would not surrender this belief—wild and visionary as it may seem to some—for all that sectarians have asserted or atheists denied. We love, in the still watches of the night, to think that the “loved and lost” are communing with our hearts—that though dead they yet live, and watch, as of old, over our erring path—that they soothe us in sorrow, hover around our beds of sickness, are the first to bear the parted soul upwards to the gates of Paradise—and that the angelic sounds we hear upon the midnight air, coming we know not whither, but seeming to pervade the whole firmament as with a celestial harmony, are but their songs of praise. Or may not these heavenly strains be the cadences which faintly float, far down from the battlements of heaven?

“Oft in bands

While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk,

With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds

In full harmonic numbers joined, their songs

Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven.”

The dream grows dim, the illusion is fading, our rhapsody dies upon our lips. We hear again thy voice—Hebe of our heart!—and we may not longer tarry in the night air. And so farewell!