Snow-Flakes
A lyric poem of three six-line stanzas. Each stanza rhymes its first four lines alternately, then closes on a short rhymed couplet. The first stanza ends on the line “Descends the snow.”
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught modern languages at Harvard.[2] It first appeared in print in 1863, in the section “Birds of Passage: Flight the Second” of his volume Tales of a Wayside Inn.[1] He was among the most widely read American poets of the nineteenth century.[2]
Hunters in the Snow
A large oil panel, wider than it is tall. Three hunters and a pack of dogs move away from the viewer along a snow-covered rise at the left, past an inn with a hanging signboard. The ground falls to a valley of two frozen ponds where small figures skate and play, with a village of steep roofs, a watermill, and a row of jagged peaks along the horizon. Bare trees stand across the foreground and a single dark bird crosses the pale sky.
_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?width=1200)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder signed and dated the panel at its lower centre in 1565.[1] It is one of a series showing the seasons and labours of the year, painted for the Antwerp merchant Nicolaes Jongelinck.[1] Six panels were made for the series and five survive.[2] The picture entered the imperial collections in Vienna and now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.[2]
Snow Crystal
A black-and-white photomicrograph of a single snow crystal. Six branching arms radiate from a hexagonal centre, each arm carrying matched side-spurs, and the white crystal stands against a plain dark ground.
Wilson Alwyn Bentley farmed in Jericho, Vermont, and photographed snow crystals for nearly fifty years.[1] On 15 January 1885, at nineteen, he made what is regarded as the first photograph of a single snow crystal, using a bellows camera joined to a microscope.[1] He recorded more than five thousand crystals over his lifetime.[2] In 1931, the year he died, a large selection appeared in the book Snow Crystals, written with the physicist William J. Humphreys.[2]