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It begins when a feeling of stillness creeps into my consciousness. Everything has suddenly gone quiet. Birds do not chirp. Leaves do not rustle. Insects do not sing.

The air that has been hot all day becomes heavy. It hangs over the trees, presses the heads of the followers to the ground, and sits on my shoulders. With a vague feeling of uneasiness I move to the windows. There, in the west, lies the answer —cloud has piled on cloud to form a ridge of mammoth white towers, rearing against blue sky.

Their piercing whiteness is of brief duration. Soon the marshmallow^[64] rims flatten to anvil tops, and the clouds reveal their darker nature. They impose themselves before the late-afternoon sun, and the day darkens early. Then a gust of wind whips the dust along the road, chill warning of what is to come.

In the house a door shuts with a bang, curtains billow into the room. I rush to close the windows, empty the clothesline, and secure the patio furnishings. Thunder begins to grumble^[65] in the distance.

The first drops of rain are huge. They splat into the dust and imprint the windows with individual signatures. They plink on the vent pipe and plunk on the patio roof. Leaves shudder under their weight before rebounding, and the sidewalk wears a coat of shiny spots.

The rhythm accelerates; plink^[66] follows plunk faster and faster until the sound is a roll of drums and the individual drops become an army marching over fields and rooftops. Now the first bolt of lightning stabs the earth. It is heaven’s exclamation point. The storm is here!

In spite of myself, I jump at the following crack of thunder. It rattles the windowpane and sends the dog scratching to get under the bed. The next bolt is even closer. It raises the hair on the back of my neck, and I take an involuntary step away from the window.

The rain now becomes a torrent, flung capriciously by a rising wind. Together they batter the trees and level the grasses. Water streams off roofs and out of rain spouts. It pounds against the window in such a steady wash that I am sightless. There is only water. How can so much fall so fast? How could the clouds have supported this vast weight? How can earth endure beneath it?

Pacing through the house from window to window, I am moved to openmouthed wonder. Look how the lilac bends under the assault^[67], how the day lilies are flattened, how the hillside steps are a new made waterfall! Now hailstones thump upon the roof. They bounce white against the grass and splash into the puddles. I think of the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, the crops in the fields; but, thankfully, the hailstones are not enough in numbers or size to do real damage. Not this time.

For this storm is already beginning to pass. The tension is released from the atmosphere, the curtains of rain let in more light. The storm has spent most of its energy, and what is left will be expended on the countryside to the east.

I am drawn outside while the rain still falls. All around, there is a cool and welcome feeling. I breathe deeply and watch the sun’s rays streak^[68] through breaking clouds. One ray catches the drops that form on the edge of the roof, and I am treated to a row of tiny, quivering color—my private rainbow.

I pick my way through the wet grass, my feet sinking into the saturated^[69] soil. The creek in the guilty runs bank—full of brown water, but the small lakes and puddles are already disappearing into the earth. Every leaf, brick, shingle and blade of grass is fresh-washed and shining.

Like the land, I am renewed, my spirit cleaned. I feel an infinite peace. For a time I have forgotten the worries and irritations I was nurturing before. They have been washed away the glories of the storm.

[点评] 在《壮丽的暴风雨》一文中，作者采用了比喻、拟人等修辞手法，生动地描绘了暴风雨来临前的万籁俱寂、来时的骤然猛烈和暴风雨过后的清凉宜人。经过暴风雨的冲刷，自然万物变得生机勃勃，到处充满着清新自然的美。而人又何尝不是如此！壮丽的暴风雨过后，我们的面貌也焕然一新、心灵得以净化、心情变得格外平静，这难道不是暴风雨对人类心灵的洗礼吗？

When I got up in the morning the world was a chilled hollow of dead white and faint blues. The light that came through the windows was very queer, and it contrived^[71] to make the familiar business of splashing and shaving and brushing and dressing very queer too. Then the sun came out, and by the time I had sat down to breakfast it was shining bravely and flushing the snow with delicate pinks. The dining-room window had been transformed into a lovely Japanese print. The little plum-tree outside, with the faintly flushes snow lining its boughs and artfully disposed along its trunk, stood in full sunlight. An hour or two later everything was a cold glitter of white and blue. The world had completely changed again. The little Japanese prints had all vanished. I looked out of my study window, over the garden, the meadow, to the low hills beyond, and the ground was one long glare, the sky was steely, and all the trees so many black and sinister^[72] shapes. There was indeed something curiously sinister about the whole prospect. It was as if our kindly country-side, close to the very heart of England, had been turned into a cruel steppe. At any moment, it seemed, a body of horsemen might be seen breaking out from the black copse, so many instruments of tyranny, and shots might be heard and some distant patch of snow be reddened. It was that kind of landscape.

Now it has changed again. The glare has gone and no touch of the sinister remains. But the snow is falling heavily, in great soft flakes, so that you can hardly see across the shallow valley, and the roofs are thick and the trees all bending, and the weathercock^[73] of the village church, still to be seen through the grey loaded air, has become some creature out of Hans Andersen. From my study, which is apart from the house and faces it, I can see the children flattening their noses against the nursery window, and there is running through my head a jangle of rhyme I used to repeat when I was a child and flattened my nose against the cold window to watch the falling snow:

Killing geese in Scotland,

Sending feathers here!

The morning, when I first caught sight of the unfamiliar whitened world, I could not help wishing that we had snow oftener, that English winters were more wintry. How delightful it would be, I thought, to have months of clean snow and a landscape sparkling with frost instead of innumerable grey featureless days of rain and raw winds. I began to envy my friends in such places as the Eastern States of America and Canada, who can count upon a solid winter every year and know that the snow will arrive by a certain date and will remain, without degenerating into black slush, until spring is close at hand. To have snow and frost and yet a clear sunny sky and air as crisp as a biscuit—this seemed to me happiness indeed. And then I saw that it would never do for us. We should be sick of it in a week. After the first day the magic would be gone and there would be nothing left but the unchanging glare of the day and the bitter cruel nights. It is not the snow itself, the sight of the blanketed world, that is so enchanting, but the first coming of the snow, the sudden and silent change. Out of the relations, of ever shifting and unanticipated, of wind and water comes a magical event. Who would change this state of things for a steadily recurring round, an earth governed by the calendar? It has been well said that while other countries have a climate, we alone in England have weather. There is nothing duller than climate, which can be converted into a topic only by scientists and hypochondriacs^[74]. But weather is our earth’s Cleopatra, and it is not to be wondered at that we, who must share her gigantic moods, should be for ever talking about her. Once we were settled in America, Siberia, Australia, where there is nothing but a steady pact between climate and the calendar, we should regret her very naughtiness, her willful pranks^[75], her gusts of rage, and sudden tears. Waking in a morning would no longer be an adventure. Our weather may be fickle but it is no more fickle than we are, and only matches our inconstancy with her changes. Sun, wind, snow, rain, how welcome they are at first and how soon we grow weary of them! If this snow lasts a week I shall be heartily sick of it and glad to speed its going. But its coming has been an event. Today has had a quality, an atmosphere, quite different from that of yesterday, and I have moved through it feeling a slightly different person, as if I were staying with new friends or had suddenly arrived in Norway. A man might easily spend five hundred pounds trying to break the crust of indifference in his mind, and yet feel less than I did this morning.

[点评] 《初雪》描写了观雪的情景。作者观察描写的角度从室内到室外，从近处到远景，层次分明，自然流畅。作者还运用了大量的修辞手法寓情于景，寓景于情，读起来清新感人。