| |
| A GREAT white leopard prowling silently | |
| Over the house-tops, up and down the sky, | |
| Trailing its ermine and its ivory— | |
| The lithe and sinuous snow creeps softly by. | |
| |
| The air is crowded and the day alight; | 5 |
| The houses etched in stuccoed boundaries | |
| Loom radiant, while in capricious flight | |
| The snow paints ghostly summer on the trees. | |
| |
| With opals and with lustered silks inlaid | |
| The snow spreads out its long unbroken seas, | 10 |
| And frames each house in candied masquerade | |
| Of quaint and crystaline geometries. | |
| |
| Perhaps the snow is an enchanted rain, | |
| Or, swarming white and gently to and fro, | |
| The souls of little birds come back again | 15 |
| And searching for the sky they used to know. | |
| |
| The snow falls thicker, and a spectral night | |
| Bursts without sunset in a wind-whirled glow, | |
| Blotting the day and leaving more alight | |
| The glistening white nocturne of the snow. | 20 |
| |
| The stiff and tangled avenues become | |
| Like some vague field of dreams that hides behind | |
| A strange and delicate delirium | |
| Of labyrinthine pallors, swift and blind. | |
| |
| The snow seems rising—a fantastic spray | 25 |
| Some sharp and sinister wind has given wing; | |
| And all the world is blowing fast away, | |
| The houses and the trees first vanishing. | |
| |
| The world is but a shimmering pastel, | |
| A whimsically chiseled cameo | 30 |
| Whose life seems only the ephemeral | |
| And pale diaphonous music of the snow. | |
| |
| The snow has ended and the highways lie | |
| In lacquered desolation; and outthrown | |
| The blue and staring shadow of the sky | 35 |
| Appears above the emptied air—alone. | |
| |
| The night is not so silent as the snow | |
| And yet the night is dark and mute and deep— | |
| The faery stains that wander to and fro | |
| Are what the night is dreaming in its sleep. | 40 |
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