A mid-winter walk through the cemetery; the freezing fog lifts slightly only to descend again an hour or two later. It is a couple of days before the winter solstice and a few days before Christmas. The people of this ordinarily busy but now bustling town, hurry back with their shopping to the little terraced houses that suround the cemetery. Christmas lights and decorated trees shine a welcome home from the freezing mid-winter evening.
"I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with the sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream."
From 'The Question' by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
