I am detained to contemplate Hubbard's hillside.

February 5.

The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day.

The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night. The oaks bare of leaves on Hubbard's hillside are now a light gray in the sun, and their boughs, seen against the pines behind, are a very agreeable maze.

The stems of the white pines also are quite gray at this distance, with their lichens. The boughs, feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove, as if both the silvery-lighted and greenish bough and the shadowy intervals of the shade behind belong to one tree.

Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. The world may perchance reach its end for us in a profounder thought, and Time itself run down.

I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1852

The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day. See February 4, 1852 ("Coming home through the village by this full moonlight, . . . the sky is the most glorious blue I ever beheld, even a light blue on some sides, as if I actually saw into day."); January 21, 1853 (''The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day — is an everlasting surprise to me."); May 11, 1853 ("Blue is the color of the day, and the sky is blue by night as well as by day, because it knows no night.")

The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night. See September 10, 1851 ("As I watch the groves on the meadow opposite our house, I see how differently they look at different hours of the day."); February 9, 1852 ("Objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.”) See also January 13, 1859 ("I can see about a quarter of a mile through the mist, and when, later, it is somewhat thinner, the woods, the pine woods, at a distance are a dark-blue color."); January 18, 1852 ("The pines, some of them, seen through this fine driving snow, have a bluish hue."); January 18, 1859 ("When the fog was a little thinner, so that you could see the pine woods a mile or more off, they were a distinct dark blue."); February 6, 1852 (A mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker and more primitive.); February 7, 1859 ("Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter."); February 7, 1856 (" During the rain the air is thick, the distant woods bluish, and the single trees on the hill, under the dull mist-covered sky, remarkably distinct and black.")

Feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove. See February 4, 1852 ("Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually. . . The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them.") and note to December 8, 1855 ("the silvery sheen . . . from masses of white pine needles.")

Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. See  January 27, 1858 ("Time never passes so quickly and unaccountably, as when I am engaged in composition, i. e. in writing down my thoughts. Clocks seem to have been put forward."); March 8, 1859 ("Such a day as this, I. . . explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing"); see also Walden  ("Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.")

I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains. See December 16, 1859 ("[Gerard] describes according to his natural delight in the plants. It is a man's knowledge added to a child's keen joy who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends.")