everyday things, which we are so used to that we forget to admire—as, when guests are gone, we may look again at the home faces that are dear to us.
With the snow there is no sense of the shroud—rather the Western notion of bridal finery. The poets love it; the Court writes verses on it; the boys delight in it; the common people, pinched with cold in paper-and-wood houses, leave their charcoal hibachi to go out to admire it.
“ ’Tis the first snow,
Just enough to bend
The Gladiolus leaves.[1]
’Tis the first snow,
Yet some one is indoors:
Who can it be?”
The garden now is transformed, glorified; each rounded hill is sheeted, the loved shape beneath softly covered, but discernible, as of a woman sleeping. The stone lantern, shaped for such a time low and flat, crouches like a gnome with a magic umbrella, or like a great white mushroom in a garden of ghosts. The little bamboo summer-house is made of marble now, and the well-cover and gateway too are of fairy marble, unstained by time and storm. The Plum tree blooms, even before its early season. Each twig and branch is weighed
- ↑ Bashō, translated by W. G. Aston.
