ABSTRACT
Far away in the valley the wind raved; and ever and anon it lashed the panes, whirling up powdery sleet, or bellowed in the chimney. All the middle space of sky had been swept bare by the hurricane. A net of vapour hid the moon, through which she cast a glaring blurred light upon the frozen scene. Beneath lay the city, as clear as in daytime. The church-towers black against the garish snow—their tops and the roof of every house piled with snow, while the dark fronts of buildings traced the course of street and quay and winding river. Far beyond, the hills stood tall and white and spectral, divided by the black lines of their hedgerows. As I gazed, they seemed in that turmoil of tempest to shiver and grow taller and then shrink again, and again to move toward me from their basements. Down there in the town a myriad of twinkling gusty lamps danced and flickered like stars upon a frosty night, except that their light was redder. Our cypresses and tulip-trees and beeches kept grinding and clanging at every wrench of the blast; and sometimes a bough, all bare and dry, was whirled across the windowpanes and carried far into the darkness, to be embedded in some distant snow-wreath. All this commotion suggested no thrill of life, no passion. The stolid, pale-faced, blear-eyed heavens and earth seemed lashed by a vindictive fury of dead impersonal force. How different was this from the same landscape last July! Then, after a sleepless night, I rose to watch the dawn between three and four o’clock. Golden light flooded the eastern hills, and came gloriously falling on my bedroom walls, as though the sun were rising for me alone. For there was an almost awful stillness, through which the messenger of day arrived. The birds who had been chirping since the darkness of the dawn, were hushed. No sound of human step or wheel or rustling tree disturbed the silence—nothing but the Cathedral clock striking a half-hour. Domed thunder-clouds, sheeted with gold around their moulded edges, went sailing ponderously eastward, and amber ripplings glimmered beneath them from the water amid those many masts of ships between the houses. These movements of the travelling clouds and sparkling river alone suggested activity, and life was 176barely indicated by smoke curling from three glass-houses. There I knew that the fires had been kept awake all night by watchers, who listened to the roar of the black chimneys, crying like myself, “Would God that it were morning!”
