FROST FANCIES
DURING the intense cold of the past forty-eight hours, the great panes of large plate-glass windows throughout the city presented scenes of such beauty as the artistic Spirit of the Frost seldom favors us with. The crystallizations were frequently on a gigantic scale—in likeness of such arabesque vegetation, although colorless, as somehow awakened fancies of strange fretwork about the moresque arches of the crystal palaces described in the Arabian Nights. Sometimes they presented such a combination of variedly intricate patterns, as to suggest a possible source for the fantastic scroll-work designs employed by the monkish masters of mediæval illumination in the decoration of their famous missals and manuscripts. There were double volutes of sharp-edged leaf design, such as occasionally formed a design for elegant vase handles with the antique proficients in the ceramic art; damascene patterns, broken by irregular markings like Cufic characters on a scimitar-blade; feathery interweavings of inimitable delicacy, such as might form elfin plumage for the wings of a frost-spirit; spectral mosses, surpassing in their ephemeral beauty the most velvety growths of our vegetable world; ghost ferns, whose loveliness attracts the eye, but fades into airy nothingness under the breath of the admirer; evanescent shrubs of some fairy species, undreamt of in our botanical science; and snowy plumes, fit to grace the helmet of a phantom-knight, shaming the richest art of devisers in rare heraldic emblems. At moments the December sun intensified the brilliancy of these coruscations of frost-fire: lance-rays of solar flame, shivered into myriad sparkles against the glittering mail of interwoven crystals, tinged all the scintillating work with a fairy-faint reflection of such iridescence as flames upon a humming bird’s bosom. The splendor of the frost-work was yesterday everywhere a matter of curious comment, and such a variety of pattern—often of a peculiarly “large-leaved” design—has not been seen for years in the city. On Walnut street, near Seventh, was a very beautiful and peculiar specimen of crystallization in a shop window. It presented the aspect of narrow-bladed wild grasses, thickly growing, and luxuriant; stems shot up bare to a certain height, when leaves sprouted from them on either side, bending suddenly downward at a sharp angle shortly after leaving the stem, in exquisite rivalry of nature. But at a certain height the pattern lost distinctness, and blended into a sharply bristling wilderness of grass-blades, so that the general effect, like that of a rough etching, was best observable at a short distance. The unearthly artist who created the scene, however, was not content with rivaling nature, for his wild grasses terminated beautifully but weirdly in a wild fantasy of leaf scrolls, which resembled nothing in the world of green things growing.
Cincinnati Commercial, December 10, 1876