Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.
