PETERSON'S MAGAZINE.
A DECEMBER REVERIE.
BY CHARLES J. PETERSON.
I—LOST IN THE SNOW.
Winter is in the air, on the hills, everywhere. The bit of blue sky, a mere strip, seen between the roofs of the long street, has the cold glitter of Damascus steel. How the tempest rattles the ‘casement, roars around the chimnies, or shrieks down the avenue! Out in the oountry it is blowing ® hurricane. The woods writhe and gtosn as men do upon the rack; and the wind comes down the hill-side sighing piteonsly like an old grey-beard asking alms.
‘At ses what a night! No moon, not even 8 ster, but everywhere utter darkness. We are there in imagination now, swinging, midway, in @ black abysa. Swinging, did we say? Yet more than that, beaten, dung about, almost drowned at times. The monsters of the deep, hideous and gigantlo presences; unseen, yet all sround us, now hurl mountains of waters down, now fling the stout ship as a child would « stone far into obscurity, now prostrate her help- less on her side, hold her down, end trample her under their tempest feet. (h! for morning. Think of shipwreck and death out here, a thoa- sand miles from shore, with a grave ten thousand fathoms down:—if, indeed, that oan be called grave, whore rest never is, but an eternal! toasing to and fro, like the limbs that Dante saw seething in the black cauldron of hell. Lightning would ‘be srelief! It is a fevered dream realized, one ‘of those where, forever and forever, we fall; and still, after conntless ages, after periods that created worlds measure ss eternities, ore falling and yet falling.
‘We are on the Alps! A storm hes sarprised us between two stations, 8 December tempest such as ia peen nowhere else. How ghastly everything around looks, The vallies below us no longer reveal, far down their sides, the farm ‘house or even village; but an cceas, epparently
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bottomless, yet churned into foam on top, rolls above them, lashing its shores wildly—the spray rising in great clouds, in spectral columna, as from the awfal feet of that mightiest and most wierd of Nature's enchanters, Niagara, High aloft, the white peaks lift their dreadfol fronts, like the sheeted ghosts of some Titanic world, dead before Time began, The winds, at those tremendous heights, seem winds from another sphere, where neither attraction, nor other earthly influence hes power——winds that come commis- sioned, like spirits from the abyss of woe, to work evil and death at will.
‘The iey hand of the monster is upon us. The fine snow penetrates our nostrils, distils into our blood, freezes at last our very heart. We try to straggle on. We urge our weary borse forward. and, in our eagerness, would have pushed him over the preciplos, had he not himself drawn back, ems to know that our life is being chilled st its fountain, for he often turns his head, and hooks pityingly at us. But we are faat losing consciousness now. We have a dear ong, pledged to be ours on our retura—alas! our return, The thought is too much for us. Bat we choke down the tears. Then we think of home, of the dear old parents, of the warm breakfast-room, and of the long, long years they will wait in vain for the return of their lost son. Again it is too much for us. The church-yard rises before us now, where our ancestors have been laid for three generations, but where the last of the tine will never, never find sepulture, In wild dreams like these is it a wonder we hear a bell? That we fanoy it the swect Sabbath bell of our boyhood? That we sre, in imagination, a sinleyp child again? That, as we cross the violet-acented meadow to church, we hear angel voices alter- nating, a8 we used to, with the silver olangor of that airy messenger? _ That borne upward on
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