Free Over Prairie Trails by Frederick Philip Grove

motionless under that veil of mist, and not their slenderest finger but was clothed in white. And the white it was! A translucent white, receding into itself, with strange backgrounds of white behind it – a modest white, and yet full of pride. An elusive white, and yet firm and substantial. The white of a diamond lying on snow white velvet, the white of a diamond in diffused light. None of the sparkle and colour play that the most precious of stones assumes under a definite, limited light which proceeds from a definite, limited source. Its colour play was suggested, it is true, but so subdued that you hardly thought of naming or even recognizing its component parts. There was no red or yellow or blue or violet, but merely that which might flash into red and yellow and blue and violet, should perchance the sun break forth and monopolize the luminosity of the atmosphere. There was, as it were, a latent opalescence.
    And every twig and every bough, every branch and every limb, every trunk and every crack even in the bark was furred with it. It seemed as if the hoarfrost still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall. And everyone of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in between. There was such an air of fragility about it all that you hated to touch it – and I, for one, took my whip down lest it shook bare too many boughs.
    Whoever has seen the trees like that – and who has not? – will see with his mind’s eye what I am trying to suggest rather than to describe. It was never the single sight nor the isolated thing that made my drives the things of beauty which they were. There was nothing remarkable in them either. They were commonplace enough. I really do not know why I should feel urged to describe our western winters. Whatever I may be able to tell you about them is yours to see and yours to interpret. The gifts of Nature are free to all for the asking. And yet, so it seems to me, there is in the agglomerations of scenes and impressions, as they followed each other in my experience, something of the quality of a great symphony; and I consider this quality as a free and undeserved present which Chance or Nature shook out of her cornucopia so it happened to fall at my feet. I am trying to render this quality here for you.
    On that short mile along the first of the east-west grades, before again I turned into the bush, I was for the thousandth time in my life struck with the fact how winter blots out the sins of utility. What is useful, is often ugly because in our fight for existence we do not always have time or effort to spare to consider the looks of things. But the slightest cover of snow will bury the eyesores. Snow is the greatest equalizer in Nature. No longer are there fields and wild lands, beautiful trails and ugly grades – all are hidden away under that which comes from Nature’s purest hands and fertile thoughts alone. Now there was no longer the raw, offending scar on Nature’s body; just a smooth expanse of snow white ribbon that led afar.
    That led afar! And here is a curious fact. On this early December morning – it was only a little after nine when I started the horses into their trot again – I noticed for the firsttime that this grade which sprang here out of the bush opened up to the east a vista into a seemingly endless distance. Twenty-six times I had gone along this piece of it, but thirteen times it had been at night, and thirteen times I had been facing west, when I went back to the scene of my work. So I had never looked east very far. This