Advent Day 4

Snow!
I love snow. I was driving into the office today and the snow was falling the sun was coming up and I was singing praise songs. It was a great way to start the day. As I looked that snow hitting my window I was reminded of a story about snow. I thought I would share it with you on this fourth day of Advent :)

In the early part of the American War a young woman of 22 years died at the Commercial Hospital, Cincinnati, one morning in the dead of winter. She had once possessed an enviable share of beauty and had been greatly sought after for the charms of her face, but had become a prostitute. Highly educated and accomplished in manners, she had spent her young life in shame and died friendless as a broken-hearted outcast of society.
Among her personal effects was found, in manuscript, the poem `Beautiful Snow', which was taken to the editor of National Union and appeared in print the morning after the girl's death. When the poem appeared in the paper, the girl's body had not been buried, and the American poet, Thomas Buchanan Reed, was so impressed by the stirring pathos of the poem that he followed the corpse to its final resting-place.

Some of the stanzas of the poem entitled `Beautiful Snow' are as follows:

Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow!
Filling the sky and the earth below:
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet,
Dancing, flirting, skimming along—
Beautiful snow!—it can do nothing wrong;
Flying to kiss a fair lady's cheek,
Clinging to lips in frolicsome freak;
Beautiful snow, from the heavens above,
Pure as an angel, gentle as love!
Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell,
Fell like the snowflakes, from heaven to hell,
Fell, to be trampled as filth in the street,
Fell, to be scoffed, to be spat on and beat,
Pleading, cursing, dreading to die;
Selling my soul to whoever would buy;
Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread,
Hating the living and fearing the dead.
Merciful God! have I fallen so low,
And yet—I was once like the beautiful snow!
Once I was fair as the beautiful snow,
With an eye like its crystal and heart like its glow;
Once I was loved for my innocent grace—
Flattered and sought for the charms of my face;
Father, mother, sister and all,
God and myself I have lost by my fall;
The veriest wretch that goes shivering by
Will make a wide swoop lest I wander too nigh:
For all that is on or above me, I know
There is nothing so pure as the beautiful snow.



How strange it should be that this beautiful snow
Should fall on a sinner, with nowhere to go!
How strange it should be, when night comes again
If the snow and the ice struck my desperate brain;
Fainting, freezing, dying alone,
Too wicked for prayer, too weak for a moan
To be heard in the streets of the crazy town,
Gone mad in the joy of the snow coming down—
To lie, and to die, in my terrible woe,
With a bed and a shroud of the beautiful snow.
The following verse has been added by another pen:
Helpless and foul as the trampled snow,
Sinner! despair not; Christ stoopeth low
To rescue the soul that is lost in its sin,
And raise it to life and enjoyment again:
Groaning, bleeding, dying for thee,
The Crucified hung, made a curse on the tree;
His accents of mercy fall soft on thine ear—
'Is there mercy for me? Will He heed my prayer?
O God! in the stream that for sinners doth flow,
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow!'
(Isa. 59. 2; James 1. 15; Ps. 51. 7)