“What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north-wind raved? Blow high, blow low, not all its snow Could quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow.”
Against the storm outside, the remembered family hearth becomes an image of warmth, companionship and emotional shelter that the winter cannot extinguish.
Source details
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl, around printed page 22 in the represented Project Gutenberg #20226 illustrated witness. ‘What matter how the night behaved?...’ follows Whittier's remembered family gathered around the winter hearth and is immediately followed by his later-life reflection on the family members who have died. It is autobiographically rooted poetic memory shaped by nostalgia and bereavement, not a literal rule that home or warmth removes hardship.