THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

January 29, 1854

A very cold morning. Thermometer, or mercury, 18° below zero.

 Varro says that gluma seems to be a glubendo because the grain is shelled from its follicle (deglubitur). Arista, the beard of grain, is so called because it dries first (quod arescit prima). The grain, granum, is a gerendo, for this is the object of planting, that this may be borne. “But the spica (or ear), which the rustics call speca, as they have received it from their forefathers, seems to be named from spes (hope), since they plant because they hope that this will be hereafter (eam enim quod sperant fore).”

 The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers, a trivial or quadrivial place. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs. It is from the Latin villa, which, together with via (a way), or more anciently vea and vella, Varro derives from veho (to carry), because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. The steward or overseer of the villa was a vilicus, and those who got their living by teaming (?) (vecturis) were said vellaturam facere. And whence the Latin vilis and our word(?). The inhabitants are way-worn by the travel that goes by and over them without travelling themselves. 

 

January 27, 1854

We begin to die, not in our senses or extremities, but in our divine faculties. Our members may be sound, our sight and hearing perfect, but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay. You tell me that you are growing old and are troubled to see without glasses, but this is unimportant if the divine faculty of the seer shows no signs of decay.

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 22, 1854

Saw, January 20th, some tree sparrows in the yard. Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o’-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. Yesterday I saw a very permanent specimen, like a long knife-handle of mother-of-pearl, very pale with an interior blue and rosaceous tinges. Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely.

 When I was at C.’s the other evening, he punched his cat with the poker because she purred too loud for him.

 R. Rice says he saw a white owl two or three weeks since. Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea.

 No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first. Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds in the little hollows of the snow-crust. These later falls of the leaf.

 A fine freezing rain on the night of the 19th produced a hard crust on the snow, which was but three inches deep and would not bear. 

 

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 20, 1856

It is now good walking on the river, for, though there has been no thaw since the snow came, a great part of it has been converted into snow ice by sinking the old ice beneath the water, and the crust of the rest is stronger than in the fields, because the snow is so shallow and has been so moist. The river is thus an advantage as a highway, not only in summer and when the ice is bare in the winter, but even when the snow lies very deep in the fields. It is invaluable to the walker, being now not only the most interesting, but, excepting the narrow and unpleasant track in the highways, the only practicable route. The snow never lies so deep over it as elsewhere, and, if deep, it sinks the ice and is soon converted into snow ice to a great extent, beside being blown out of the river valley. Neither is it drifted here. Here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter. But what a different aspect the river’s brim now from what it wears in summer! I do not this moment hear an insect hum, nor see a bird, nor a flower. That museum of animal and vegetable life, a meadow, is now reduced to a uniform level of white snow, with only half a dozen kinds of shrubs and weeds rising here and there above it. 

 

January 19, 1854

Went to Cambridge to court.

 Dr. Harris says that my cocoons found in Lincoln in December are of the Attacus cecropia, the largest of our emperor moths. He made this drawing of the four kinds of emperor moths which he says we have. The cecropia is the largest. The cocoon must be right end uppermost when they are ready to come out. The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it. 

 The spider whose hole I found, and which I carried to him, he is pretty sure is the Lycosa fatifera.

 

January 18, 1859

Every one, no doubt, has looked with delight, holding his face low, at that beautiful frostwork which so frequently in winter mornings is seen bristling about the throat of every breathing-hole in the earth’s surface. In this case the fog, the earth’s breath made visible, was in such abundance that it invested all our vales and hills, and the frostwork, accordingly, instead of being confined to the chinks and crannies of the earth, covered the mightiest trees, so that we, walking beneath them, had the same wonderful prospect and environment that an insect would have in the former case. We, going along our roads, had such a prospect as an insect would have making its way through a chink in the earth which was bristling with hoar frost. 

 That glaze! I know what it was by my own experience; it was the frozen breath of the earth upon its beard. 

 

January 17, 1860

I look again at that place of squirrels (of the 13th). As I approach, I have a glimpse of one or two red squirrels gliding off silently along the branches of the pines, etc. They are gone so quickly and noiselessly, perhaps keeping the trunk of the tree between you and them, that [you] would not commonly suspect their presence if you were not looking for them. But one that was on the snow ascended a pine and sat on a bough with its back to the trunk as if there was nothing to pay. Yet when I moved again he scud up the tree, and glided across on some very slender twigs into a neighboring tree, and so I lost him. Here is, apparently, a settlement of these red squirrels. There are many holes though the snow into the ground, and many more where they have probed and dug up a white pine cone, now pretty black and, for aught I can see, with abortive or empty seeds; yet they patiently strip them on the spot, or at the base of the trees, or at the entrance of their holes, and evidently find some good seed. The snow, however, is strewn with the empty and rejected seeds. They seem to select for their own abode a hillside where there are half a dozen rather large and thick white pines near enough together for their aerial travelling, and then they burrow numerous holes and depend on finding (apparently) the pine cones which they cast down in the summer, before they have opened. In the fall they construct a nest of grass and bark-fibres, moss, etc., in one of the trees for winter use, and so apparently have two resources. 

 

January 16, 1859

P. M. - to Walden and thence via Cassandra Ponds to Fair Haven and down river.

 There is still a good deal of ice on the north sides of woods and in and about the sheltered swamps. As we go southwestward through the cassandra hollows toward the declining sun, they look successively, both by their form and color, like burnished silvery shields in the midst of which we walked, looking toward the sun. The whole surface of the snow the country over, and of the ice, as yesterday, is rough, as if composed of hailstones half melted together. This being the case, I noticed yesterday, when walking on the river, that where there was little or no snow and this rough surface was accordingly dark, you might have thought that the ice was covered with cinders, from the innumerable black points reflecting the dark water. My companion thought that cinders had fallen on that part of the ice. 

 The snow which three-quarters conceals the cassandra in these ponds, and every twig and trunk and blade of withered sedge, is thus covered or cased with ice, and accordingly, as I have said, when you go facing the sun, the hollows look like a glittering shield set round with brilliants. That bent sedge in the midst of the shield, each particular blade of it being married to an icy wire twenty times its size at least, shines like polished silver rings or semicircles. It must have been far more splendid here yesterday, before any of the ice fell off. No wonder my English companion says that our scenery is more spirited than that of England. The snow-crust is rough with the wreck of brilliants under the tree, - an inch or two thick with them under many trees, where they last several days. 

 When, this evening, I took a split hickory stick which was very slightly charred or scorched, but quite hot, out of my stove, I perceived a strong scent precisely like that of a burnt or roasted walnut, - as was natural enough.