To Pine Hill

November 30.

To Pine Hill. 

The buds of the Populus tremuloides show their down as in early spring, and the early willows. Wood- choppers have commenced some time since. This is another pleasant day.

Overlooking Walden Pond toward
Waschusett, from Pine Hill
April 28, 1906

From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden. The country seems to slope up from the west end of Walden to the mountain. 

Already, a little after 4 o'clock, the sparkling windows and vanes of the village, seen under and against the faintly purple-tinged, slate-colored mountains, remind me of  a village in  a mountainous country at twilight, where early lights appear. I think that this peculiar sparkle without redness, a cold glitter, is peculiar to this season.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1852

From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden. See November 30, 1858 ("Coming over the side of Fair Haven Hill at sunset, we saw a large, long, dusky cloud in the northwest horizon, apparently just this side of Wachusett, or at least twenty miles off, which was snowing,")

Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill, August 2, 1852

August 25, 1853 ("Looking up the valley of the Mill Brook. . I was surprised to see the whole outline and greater part of the base of Wachusett, though you stand in a low meadow."); December 27, 1853 ("Wachusett looks like a right whale over our bow, plowing the continent, with his flukes well down");  October 19, 1856 ("I return by the west side of Lee's Cliff hill, and sit on a rounded rock there, covered with fresh-fallen pine-needles, amid the woods, whence I see Wachusett."); See also September 12, 1851("It is worth the while to see the mountains in the horizon once a day."); March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); August 14, 1854(“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon.");October 22, 1857 (“But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ”); November 4, 1857 (Those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way."); May 17, 1858 ("I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence.")

The sparkling windows and vanes of the village. See November 4, 1857 (“I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. . . .I see one glistening reflection on the dusky and leafy northwestern earth, seven or eight miles off, betraying a window there, though no house can be seen. It twinkles incessantly, as from a waving surface.”);