On that recent night as I walked down the lane to the shore, an old familiar phrase echoed in my mind, the rhythmic sound of the words as lulling as the foghorn on Egg Rock:

“The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.” How often I repeated those words to my children of Christmases past, and now I whispered them to the trees, to the frozen pond, to the bushes, to the waves rattling the beach rocks…and to myself as if embracing them for the first time … “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.”

Indeed, the full moon reflecting off the deep snow not only provided me a lighted walkway but also shone through the forest with such brightness I could almost imagine a shadow behind the mounded boulders, or one just beyond the snow-frocked jack pines.

Clement Clarke Moore, writing his 1823 classic “A Visit from St. Nick,” must have torn open the shutters – or thrown up the sashes – in a clapboard house around here, not outside New York City, for him to see such a moon on the fresh snow it turned night into day.

Moore wasn’t the only poet brought to mind during that first, heavy snow of the season when I tromped calf-deep through the woods in search of pine boughs or on the shoveled paths to the bird feeders.

“The Snow Fall” by Archibald MacLeish also could have been written around these parts of Maine during the past week:

“Quietness clings to the air. Quietness gathers the bell to a great distance. Listen! This is the snow. This is the slow chime the snow makes. It encloses us. Time in the snow is alone: Time in the snow is at last, is past.”

Tonight another snow is predicted as will be another and another as the winter solstice occurs, Christmas comes and January evolves.

While some folks curse it, I continue to view each snowfall in the assumed role of “The Snow Queen,” or at least, through the eyes of a child in Hans Christian Andersen tales:

“The windowpanes were often frosted right over, but then the children warmed up pennies on the stove, placed the heated coin on the frozen pane, and in this way made a splendid peephole.”

I’ve a splendid peephole out these windows overlooking pink sunrises when the moon is still high in the sky above the blue bay, or when the snow-covered mountain is splashed with red and orange before dusk.

Or on clear, cold nights when the stars themselves make the snow sparkle…once again giving the “lustre of mid-day to objects below.”