Snow Flakes

Snow Flakes is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his Twice Told Tales collection. The piece is a brief reflective sketch built around the central image of a snowfall and the various observations and reflections that the snow produces in the watching narrator. The sketch captures the kind of quiet domestic and meditative moment that several of Hawthorne’s shorter pieces worked with.

Hawthorne uses the snowfall as the framework for the wider reflection on the various people and activities that the snow affects. The mailman struggling through the drifts. The school children who are excited by the snow as a break from the ordinary. The various other figures whose lives are touched by the weather event. The narrator’s reflective voice gives the simple observation the kind of gentle moral and atmospheric weight that distinguishes Hawthorne’s reflective sketches.

The piece is brief and well suited to a single reading. It works particularly well as a complement to the more morally weighted longer Hawthorne stories, with the lighter atmospheric register of Snow Flakes showing the wider range of his shorter work. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the piece is worth knowing.