Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the
New England weather--no language could do it justice. But, after all,
there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you
please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to
part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still
have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its
bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice
from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as crystal;
when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond
plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns
all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and
flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again
with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and
green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of
dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest
possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable
magnificence.
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