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.”
