The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at Winter and pruned it till it cannot be amended.

"It was summer, and now again it is winter.  Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it . . . What a poem!  Winter is an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes.  It is solid beauty.  It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains.  The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended."

Henry David Thoreau

Photo: Greyrock after a snowstorm; Bellvue, CO; December 19, 2012