COLD January comes in Winter's car,
Thick hung with icicles-its heavy wheels
Cumbered with clogging snow, which cracks and peels
With its least motion or concussive jar
...
Not farther than a fledgling's weak first flight,
In a low dell, standeth an antique grove;
Dusky it is by day, but when 'tis night,
...
January
COLD January comes in Winter's car,
Thick hung with icicles-its heavy wheels
Cumbered with clogging snow, which cracks and peels
With its least motion or concussive jar
'Gainst hard hid ruts, or hewn trees buried far
In the heaped whiteness which awhile conceals
The green and pastoral earth. Old Christmas feels,-
That well-fed and wine-reeling wassailer,-
With all his feasts and fires, feels cold and shivers,
And the red runnel of his indolent blood
Creeps slow and curdled as a northern flood.
And lakes and winter-rills, impetuous rivers
And headlong cataracts, are in silence bound,
Like trammelled tigers lashed to th'unyielding ground
Francis Cornelius Webb (1826–1873) was an English physician and medical writer, he was the eldest son of William Webb. On 25 September 1841 Webb was apprenticed to James Sheppard, a surgeon at Stonehouse, and in 1843 he joined the medical school of University College, London. In 1847 he became a member of the College of Surgeons of London; in 1849 he went to Edinburgh, graduating M.D. there in 1850. In 1851 he returned to London. At the end of the 1860s he became one of the editors of the Medical Times and Gazette, and for the last years of his life he was editor-in-chief. (from Wikipedia)