For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and I did my duty faithfully.
There are seven or eight categories of phenomena in the world that are worth talking about, and one of them is weather.
Some weather's coming; you can taste on the sides of your tongue a quince tang in the air.
A roseate redness, clear as amber, suffuses the low western sky about the sun, in which the small clouds are mostly melting, only their golden edges still revealed. The atmosphere there is like some kind of wine, perchance, or molten cinnabar, if that is red, in which also all kinds of pearls and precious stones are melted.
We have always a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types in this blue ground. And the inquiring may always read a new truth.
On Snow and Ice
...there is built out horizontally on the north side of every twig and other surfaces a very remarkable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing...
All objects, even the apples and rails, are to the eye polished silver. It is a perfect land of faery. As if the world were a great frosted cake with its ornaments. The boughs gleam like silver candlesticks.
Looking down the street, you might say that the scene differed from the ordinary one as frosted cake differs from plain bread.
[Snowflakes] are about a tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fernlike, with a distinct straight and slender midrib, raying from the center...
The old ice is covered with a dry powdery snow about one inch deep from which...the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad of fine facets. It is as if the dust of diamonds and other precious stones were spread all around.
...the snow patches are not rose-colored, but a very dark purple like a grape, and thus there are all degrees from pure white to black... The snow patches are a most beautiful crystalline purple, like the petals of some flowers, or as if tinged with cranberry juice. It is quite a faery scene, surprising and wonderfull, as if you are amid those rosy and purple clouds that you see float in the evening sky.
It snowed all day yesterday and never emptied the sky, although the clouds looked so low and heavy they might drop all at once with a thud.
On Clouds
The clouds are handsome this afternoon.
The clouds scattered wisps in the sky, like a squadron thrown into disorder at the approach of the sun.
Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon like a tablecloth whipped off a table.
What a spectacle the subtle vapors that have their habitation in the sky present these wintry days. You have not only ever varying forms of a given type of cloud, but various types at different hours. It is a scene for variety, for beauty and grandeur, out of all proportion to the attention it gets. Who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them today?
On Rain
You feel the fertilizing influence of the rain in your mind.
One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins by spotting the cultivated fields as if shaken from a pepper-box.
A mizzling and rainy day with thick driving fog; a drizzling rain or "drisk" as one called it.
On Storms
But who can calculate the tactics of the storm?
The crashing thunder sound like the overhauling of lumber on heaven's loft.
I thought it must be a place which the thunder loved, where the lightning practised to keep its hand in, and would do no harm to shatter a few pines.
On the Wind
The wind, perchance, shaking the willows and the reeds, —shaking and bending their masts—strains and breaks the fine cordage...
...sit down and hear the wind roar amid the tree-tops. What an incessant straining of the trees. It is a music that wears better than the opera, methinks.
At this quiet hour the evening wind is heard to moan in the hollows of your face, mysterious, spirit-like, conversing with you.
The wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like schoolboys turned their cheeks to it.
Come let us roam the breezy pastures
Where the freest zephyrs blow Batten on the oak tree's rustle,
And the pleasant insect bustle, Dripping with the streamlet's flow.
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