W. A. BENTLEY, Author of (Snow and Snow Crystals.' See GUELDER ROSE.
a name applied to several white-fruited plants, among them the rubiaceous Chiococca albs of tropical America, a climbing plant with yellow flowers and white berries. It has medicinal properties, and the root, known as calunca-root, was used as a diuretic. The cultivated snow-berry (Symphoricarpus albus) is a small, smooth, much branched shrub of the honeysuckle family, common in North America. It has opposite oval leaves, and inconspicuous rose-colored flowers in racemes, often leafy. While of somewhat sprawling habit, snow berries are valuable because of their power of increasing rapidly by suckers, and for their ornamental white, pulpy berries, borne in such abundance as to bend down the slender branches, and retained far into the winter. The creeping snow-berry is another northern plant (Chiogenes hupidula), an evergreen trail ing shrub, found in sphagnum bogs and moun tainous evergreen woods. It is pubescent, with alternate two-ranked ovate leaves, and axillary, small, white flowers, succeeded by somewhat dry white berries. The whole plant has the aromatic taste of sweet birch.
; a Winter Idyl' (1866) was written by Whittier im mediately after the close of the Civil War. The lifting of a great pressure of anxiety left him free to be idyllic, which he could be all the more movingly because of the recent deaths of his mother and sister, deeply-regretted links with the past, which he perpetuates. Few poems unite with so much tenderness, so much accuracy. (Snow-Bound' can be called nothing less than the classic picture and epitome of rural New England during its golden age. The sturdy,
simple family shut in by the December snow storm includes most of the types native to that region: the "prompt, decisive" father who knows Canada and the sea, and by his ad venturous tales brings half of New England to the winter fireside; the busy mother, full of memories of her own girlhood, of legends of Indian raids, and, still more remote and vener able, of Quaker antiquities as recounted in "painful Sewel's ancient tome"; the uncle, "in nocent of books," who knows the lore of weather and cloud and bird and muskrat in a way which points forward to that village na turalist of genius, Thoreau; the maiden aunt, sweet, devoted, cherishing the "virgin fancies of her heart)); the schoolmaster, a young Dart mouth student who. adaptable and at ease, brings into this plain neighborhood the love of learning and truth; and finally the guest, the lovely and eccentric woman marked by the touch of wildness, nearly madness, that now and then flashes from beneath the surface of New England sobriety. These Whittier de scribes, and their occupations during the week of close embargo, with the fidelity of affection; while even above his truthfulness to outer fact rises his truthfulness to the deeper spirit of New England, its homeliness, its stability, its aspirations, and its inviolable confidence in high and good things. The style of the poem is limpid and flexible, now Flemish in its un adorned detail, and now radiant with mystical fervor.