THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

February 29, 1852

P. M. - To Pine Hill across Walden.

 The high wind takes off the oak leaves. I see them scrambling up the slopes of the Deep Cut, hurry-scurry over the slippery snow-crust, like a flock of squirrels. The ice on Walden is of a dull white as I look directly down on it, but not half a dozen rods distant on every side it is a light-blue color. 

 For the past month there has been more sea-room in the day, without so great danger of running aground on one of those two promontories that make it arduous to navigate the winter day, the morning or the evening. It is a narrow pass, and you must go through with the tide. Might not some of my pages by called “The Short Days of Winter”?

 

February 26, 1852

We are told to-day that civilization is making rapid progress; the tendency is ever upward; substantial justice is done even by human courts; you may trust the good intentions of mankind. We read to-morrow in the newspapers that the French nation is on the eve of going to war with England to give employment to her army. What is the influence of men of principle, or how numerous are they? How many moral teachers has society? This Russian war is popular. Of course so many as she has will resist her. How many resist her? How many have I heard speak with warning voice? utter wise warnings? The preacher’s standard of morality is no higher than that of his audience. He studies to conciliate his hearers and never to offend them. Does the threatened war between France and England evince any more enlightenment than a war between two savage tribes, as the Iroquois and the Hurons? Is it founded in better reason? 

 

February 24, 1852

P. M. - Railroad causeway.

 I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air. The cock-crowing and even the telegraph harp prophesy it, though the ground is for the most part covered with snow. It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. Observe the poplar’s swollen buds and the brightness of the willow’s bark.

 The telegraph harp reminds me of Anacreon. That is the glory of Greece, that we are reminded of her only when in our best estate, our elysian days, when our senses are young and healthy again. I could find a name for every strain or intonation of the harp from one or other of the Grecian bards. I often hear Mimnermus, often Menander. 

 

January 23, 1852

P. M. - Deep Cut, going to Fair Haven Hill.

 No music from the telegraph harp on the causeway, where the wind is strong, but in the Cut this cold day I hear memorable strains. What must the birds and beasts think where it passes through woods, who heard only the squeaking of the trees before! I should think that these strains would get into their music at last. Will not the mockingbird be heard one day inserting this strain in his medley? It intoxicates me. Orpheus is still alive. All poetry and mythology revive. The spirits of all bards sweep the strings. I hear the clearest silver, lyre-like tones, Tyrtæan tones. I think of Menander and the rest. It is the most glorious music I ever heard. All those bards revive and flourish again in that five minutes in the Deep Cut. The breeze came through an oak still wearing its dry leaves. The very fine clear tones seemed to come from the very core and pith of the telegraph-pole. I know not but it is my own chords that tremble so divinely. There are barytones and high sharp tones, etc. Some come sweeping seemingly from further along the wire. The latent music of the earth had found here a vent. music Æolian. There were two strings, in fact, one each side. I do not know but this will make me read the Greek poets. Thus, as ever, the finest uses of things are the accidental. Mr. Morse did not invent this music. 

 

January 21, 1852

History used to be the history of successive kings or their reigns, - the Williams, Henrys, Johns, Richards, etc., etc., all of them great in somebody’s estimation. But we have altered that considerably. Hereafter it is to be to a greater extent the history of peoples. You do not hear some King Louis or Edward or Leopold referred to now by sensible men with much respect.

January 13, 1852

Would not snow-drifts be a good study, - their philosophy and poetry? Are they not worthy of a chapter? Are they always built up, or not rather carved out of the heaps of snow by the wind passing through the chinks in the walls? I do not see yet but they are builded. They are a sort of ripple-marks which the atmospheric sea makes on the snow-covered bottom.

 

January 9, 1852

The sky shut out by snow-clouds. It spits a little snow and then holds up. Where a path has been shovelled through drifts in the road, and the cakes of snow piled up, I see little azures, little heavens, in the crannies and crevices. The deeper they are, and the larger masses they are surrounded by, the darker-blue they are. Methinks I oftenest see this when it is snowing. At any rate the atmosphere must be in a peculiar state. Apparently the snow absorbs the other rays and reflects the blue. It has strained the air, and only the blue rays have passed through the sieve. Is, then, the blue water of Walden snow-water? I see the heaven hiding in nooks and crevices in the snow. Into every track which the teamster makes, this elysian, empyrean atmosphere rushes. The blue of my eye sympathizes with this blue in the snow. 

 The great pine woods have a peculiar appearance this afternoon. This rather fine snow has lodged in their limbs and given them a grayish look, but as it lies thicker along the core of the limb, it has the appearance, at a distance, of dim white lines lying at various angles like a vast network over the woods, or, rather, like cobwebs seen on the grass in summer mornings. A kind of film over them. 

 I never saw the pitch pines better snowed up. They look like Chinese pagodas. 

“The majestic prerogative which Linnaeus was possessed of,” says Stoever, “to confer titles in the vegetable kingdom,” did not escape the criticism of Haller, who says: “We would reserve all those garlands for those alone who are real and experienced botanists. Nor would we ever assign such a denomination to the mere hopes conceived of men who have not passed the ordeal of merit.”

 

January 7, 1852

We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. Can Washington Street or Broadway show anything as good? Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half and hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls.

November 4, 1852

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present. Let a man have thought what he will of Nature in the house, she will still be novel outdoors. I keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.

November 3, 1852

Shepherd’s-purse abundant still in gardens.

3 P. M. -- To Cliffs and Andromeda Ponds.

In the Heywood Brooks, many young pollywogs two inches long and more; also snails on the bottom. I find these water-bugs, large and small, not on the surface, but apparently sheltered amid the weeds, going into winter quarters. While collecting caddis-worms, of which there are many, whose cases are made of little pieces of weeds piled about them like well-stones, I disturbed a good-sized fish, either a pout or a sucker, near the path. It swam rapidly down this shallow stream, creating a wave which reached from side to side and betrayed it. I followed it down till it concealed itself under some frog-spittle, and when I had dislodged it thence, it went down further, till, coming to where the stream was dammed, it buried itself in the mud above the dam in an instant, and I could not dig it out.

The landscape from Fair Haven Hill looks Novembery, bare gray limbs and twigs in the swamps; and where many young (or shrub) oaks have lost their leaves, you hear the rustling of oak and walnut leaves in the air. There is a ripple on the river from the cool northerly wind. The plants are sere. It is the month of withered oak leaves. The shrub oak plain is all withered. Only one or two butter-and-eggs left. At Andromeda Pond, started nine black (?) ducks just at sunset, as usual they circling far round to look at me. The andromeda is a dull brown like the shrub oak leaves now.

Or I was startled by the cracking of the ground in the coldest nights, which sounded as if it were my house that cracked, and in the morning I would find a crack in the earth a quarter of an inch wide and a quarter of a mile long.

The sunsets begin to be interestingly warm.