A walk across the lake with Una

Lenox, February 12th, 1851.

A walk across the lake with Una. A heavy rain, some days ago, has melted a good deal of the snow on the intervening descent between our house and the lake; but many drifts, depths, and levels yet remain; and there is a frozen crust, sufficient to bear a man s weight, and very slippery. Adown the slopes there are tiny rivulets, which exist only for the winter. Bare, brown spaces of grass here and there, but still so infrequent as only to diversify the scene a little. In the woods, rocks emerging, and, where there is a slope immediately towards the lake, the snow is pretty much gone, and we see partridge-berries frozen, and outer shells of walnuts, and chestnut-burrs, heaped or scattered among the roots of the trees. The walnut husks mark the place where the boys, after nutting, sat down to clear the walnuts of their outer shell.

The various species of pine look exceedingly brown just now, less beautiful than those trees which shed their leaves. An oak-tree, with almost all its brown foliage still rustling on it. We clamber down the bank, and step upon the frozen lake. It was snowcovered for a considerable time; but the rain over spread it with a surface of water, or imperfectly melted snow, which is now hard frozen again; and the thermometer having been frequently below zero, I suppose the ice may be four or five feet thick. Frequently there are great cracks across it, caused, I suppose, by the air beneath, and giving an idea of greater firmness than if there were no cracks; round holes, which have been hewn in the marble pavement by fishermen, and are now frozen over again, looking darker than the rest of the surface; spaces where the snow was more imperfectly dissolved than elsewhere; little crackling spots, where a thin surface of ice, over the real mass, crumples beneath one s foot; the track of a line of footsteps, most of them vaguely formed, but some quite perfectly, where a person passed across the lake, while its surface was in a state of slush, but which are now as hard as adamant, and remind one of the traces discovered by geologists in rocks that hardened thousands of ages ago. It seems as if the person passed when the lake was in an intermediate state between ice and water. In one spot some pine boughs, which somebody had cut and heaped there for an unknown purpose. In the centre of the lake, we see the surrounding hills in a new attitude, this being a basin in the midst of them. Where they are covered with wood, the aspect is gray or black; then there are bare slopes of unbroken snow, the outlines and indentations being much more hardly and firmly defined than in summer. We went southward across the lake, directly towards Monument Mountain, which reposes, as I said, like a headless sphinx. Its prominences, projections, and roughnesses are very evident; and it does not present a smooth and placid front, as when the grass is green and the trees in leaf. At one end, too, we are sensible of precipitous descents, black and shaggy with the forest that is likely always to grow there; and, in one streak, a headlong sweep downward of snow. We just set our feet on the farther shore, and then immediately returned, facing the north-west wind, which blew very sharply against us.

After landing, we came homeward, tracing up the little brook so far as it lay in our course. It was considerably swollen, and rushed fleetly on its course between overhanging banks of snow and ice, from which depended adamantine icicles. The little water falls with which we had impeded it in the summer and autumn, could do no more than form a large ripple, so much greater was the volume of water. In some places the crust of frozen snow made a bridge quite over the brook; so that you only knew it was there by its brawling sound beneath.

The sunsets of winter are incomparably splendid, and when the ground is covered with snow, no brilliancy of tint expressible by words can come within an infinite distance of the effect. Our southern view at that time, with the clouds and atmospherical hues, is quite indescribable and unimaginable; and the various distances of the hills which lie between us and the remote dome of Taconic, are brought out with an accuracy unattainable in summer. The transparency of the air at this season has the effect of a telescope in bringing objects apparently near, while it leaves the scene all its breadth. The sunset sky, amidst its splendour, has a softness and delicacy that impart themselves to a white marble world.