Winter-Solitude

I saw the city's towers on a luminous pale-gray sky;
   Beyond them a hill of the softest mistiest green,
   With naught but frost and the coming of night between,
   And a long thin cloud above the colour of August rye.
   I sat in the midst of a plain on my snowshoes with bended knee
   Where the thin wind stung my cheeks,
   And the hard snow ran in little ripples and peaks,
   Like the fretted floor of a white and petrified sea.
   And a strange peace gathered about my soul and shone,
  As I sat reflecting there,
  In a world so mystically fair,
  So deathly silent--I so utterly alone.