A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters.
I am glad of the shelter of the thick pine wood on the Marlborough road, on the plain. The wind roars over the pines, and at intervals there is a certain resounding woodiness in the tone. How the wind roars among the shrouds of the wood! The sky looks mild and fair enough from this shelter.
There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan's. Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light. The lately dark woods are open and light; the sun shines in upon the stems of trees which it has not shone on since spring.
Around the edges of ponds the weeds are dead, and there, too, the light penetrates. The atmosphere is less moist and gross, and light is universally dispersed.
We are greatly indebted to these transition seasons or states of the atmosphere, which show us thus phenomena which belong not to the summer or the winter of any climate. The brilliancy of the autumn is wonderful, this flashing brilliancy, as if the atmosphere were phosphoric.
The fall of the year is over, and now let us see if we shall have any Indian summer.
White Pond is prepared for winter. Now that most other trees have lost their leaves, the evergreens are more conspicuous about its shores and on its capes. The view of the southern horizon from the lane this side still attracts me, but not so much as before I had explored those Wayland hills, which look so much fairer, perhaps, than they are.
To-day you may write a chapter on the advantages of travelling, and to-morrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not travelling. The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another, I fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has.
That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. But only our horizon is moved thus further off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still.
"Says I to myself " should be the motto of my journal.
It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1851
A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. See November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight . . .I wear mittens now.”); November 11, 1858 (“Coming home I have cold fingers, and must row to get warm.”)
Around the edges of ponds the weeds are dead, and there, too, the light penetrates. The atmosphere is less moist and gross, and light is universally dispersed.
We are greatly indebted to these transition seasons or states of the atmosphere, which show us thus phenomena which belong not to the summer or the winter of any climate. The brilliancy of the autumn is wonderful, this flashing brilliancy, as if the atmosphere were phosphoric.
The fall of the year is over, and now let us see if we shall have any Indian summer.
White Pond is prepared for winter. Now that most other trees have lost their leaves, the evergreens are more conspicuous about its shores and on its capes. The view of the southern horizon from the lane this side still attracts me, but not so much as before I had explored those Wayland hills, which look so much fairer, perhaps, than they are.
To-day you may write a chapter on the advantages of travelling, and to-morrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not travelling. The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another, I fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has.
That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. But only our horizon is moved thus further off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still.
"Says I to myself " should be the motto of my journal.
It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 11, 1851
A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. See November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight . . .I wear mittens now.”); November 11, 1858 (“Coming home I have cold fingers, and must row to get warm.”)
Things must lie a little remote to be described. See July 23, 1851 ("Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression, — waits till the seed germinates naturally.")
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