"You see, Horatio, in this harsh midst of winter rot, corruption, all the vices grow as though it were high summer, and the court, the pride of Denmark, but a bloated corpse."

Horatio thinks of the ranks of nobility, all trapped in this palace for days by snow and winds, arguing and intriguing, inventing stories and building mountains out of gossip. He thinks of their professors back in Wittenberg, and one's particularly poetic description of Hamlet's mind as "a garden, from whose fertile soil blooms the noblest of ideas," and he shivers in his cloak, and wishes hard for spring.