Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/139

Rh the enduring panicled andromeda, and a few partly decayed prinos berries. I walk amid the bare midribs of cinnamon ferns, with at most a terminal leafet, and here and there I see a little dark water at the bottom of a dimple in the snow over which the snow has not yet been able to prevail.—I was feeling very cheap, nevertheless, reduced to make the most of my dog wood berries. Very little evidence of the divine did I see just then, and life was not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snow-flake on my coat sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that virtue had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart? Sometimes the pines were worn, and had lost their branches, and again it appeared as if several stars had impinged on one another at various angles, making a somewhat spherical mass. There were mingled with these starry flakes small downy pellets also. We are rained and snowed on with gems. I confess that I was a little encouraged, for I was beginning to believe that