These little snow-particles which the storm-spirit flings by handfuls through the air will bury the great Earth under their accumulated mass , nor permit her to behold her sister Sky again for dreary months . We likewise shall lose sight of our mother 's familiar visage , and must content ourselves with looking heavenward the oftener . Now , leaving the Storm to do his appointed office , let us sit down , pen in hand , by our fireside . Gloomy as it may seem , there is an influence productive of cheerfulness and favorable to imaginative thought in the atmosphere of a snowy day . The native of a Southern clime may woo the Muse beneath the heavy shade of summer foliage reclining on banks of turf , while the sound of singing-birds and warbling rivulets chimes in with the music of his soul . In our brief summer I do not think , but only exist in the vague enjoyment of a dream . My hour of inspiration -- if that hour ever comes -- is when the green log hisses upon the hearth , and the bright flame , brighter for the gloom of the chamber , rustles high up the chimney , and the coals drop tinkling down among the growing heaps of ashes . When the casement rattles in the gust and the snowflakes or the sleety raindrops pelt hard against the window-panes , then I spread out my sheet of paper with the certainty that thoughts and fancies will gleam forth upon it like stars at twilight or like violets in May , perhaps to fade as soon . However transitory their glow , they at least shine amid the darksome shadow which the clouds of the outward sky fling through the room . Blessed , therefore , and reverently welcomed by me , her true-born son , be New England 's winter , which makes us one and all the nurslings of the storm and sings a familiar lullaby even in the wildest shriek of the December blast . Now look we forth again and see how much of his task the storm-spirit has done . Slow and sure ! He has the day -- perchance the week -- before him , and may take his own time to accomplish Nature 's burial in snow . A smooth mantle is scarcely yet thrown over the withered grass-plat , and the dry stalks of annuals still thrust themselves through the white surface in all parts of the garden . The leafless rose-bushes stand shivering in a shallow snowdrift , looking , poor things ! as disconsolate as if they possessed a human consciousness of the dreary scene . This is a sad time for the shrubs that do not perish with the summer . They neither live nor die ; what they retain of life seems but the chilling sense of death . Very sad are the flower-shrubs in midwinter . The roofs of the houses are now all white , save where the eddying wind has kept them bare at the bleak corners .
To discern the real intensity of the storm , we must fix upon some distant object -- XXXXX yonder spire -- and observe how the riotous gust fights with the descending snow throughout the intervening space .
In amid as before by for if over through to