Sun-sparkles where the river is open.

January 28.

January 28, 2019

See three ducks sailing in the river behind Prichard's this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed. 

Though somewhat cool, it has been remarkably pleasant to-day, and the sun-sparkles where the river is open are very cheerful to behold.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 28, 1853

See three ducks sailing in the river though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed. See  December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. . . . A black and white duck on it."); January 29, 1853 (Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday "sheldrakes""); February 1, 1853 ("Saw a duck in the river; different kind from the last");  February 3, 1853 ("Saw three ducks in the river."); See also February 27, 1860 ("This [sheldrake] is the first bird of the spring that I have seen or heard of."); March 5, 1857 ("I scare up six male sheldrakes, with their black heads, in the Assabet,—the first ducks I have seen”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander)

The sun-sparkles where the river is open are very cheerful to behold. See February 27, 1852 ("The main river is not yet open but in very few places, but the North Branch, which is so much more rapid, is open near Tarbell's and Harrington's, where I walked to-day, and, flowing with full tide bordered with ice on either side, sparkles in the clear, cool air, . . . If rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not I too resume my spring life with joy and hope ?"); March 20, 1853 ("It is glorious to behold the life and joy of this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun. The wind ... raises a myriad brilliant sparkles on the bare face of the pond, an expression of glee, of youth, of spring, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it and of the sands on its shore. It is the contrast between life and death. There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy."); April 9, 1859 ("Standing low and more opposite to the sun, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at. Water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water.");  May 24, 1860 ("How perfectly new and fresh the world is seen to be, when we behold a myriad sparkles of brilliant white sunlight on a rippled stream!")

January 28. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 28

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

I see this fine drifting snow in the air ten or twelve feet high at a distance.

January 26. 

Up river on ice 9 A.M. There is a little thin ice on the meadows.  I see the bubbles underneath, looking like coin. A slight, fine, snow has fallen in the night and drifted before the wind. I observe that it is so distributed over the ice as to show equal spaces of bare ice and of snow at pretty regular distances. I have seen the same phenomenon on the surface of snow in fields, as if the surface of the snow disposed itself according to the same law that makes waves of water. There is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates. But why does it lodge at such regular intervals? 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1853

Mornings of Creation

January 26. 

A sharp, cutting air. This is a pretty good winter morning, however. Not one of the rarer.

There are from time to time mornings, 

both in summer and winter,
when especially the world seems to begin anew,

mornings beyond which memory need not go, 

for not behind them is yesterday and our past life;

when, as in the morning of a hoar frost,

there are visible the effects of a certain creative energy, 

the world has visibly been recreated in the night.

Mornings of creation, 

I call them. 

In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, 

while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, 
I look back,- 

I look back for the era of this creation, 

not into the night, 

but to a dawn
for which no man ever rose early enough. 

A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation,
where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted.

It is the poet's hour. 

Mornings when men are new-born, 

men who have the seeds of life in them. 

This is not one of those mornings, but a clear, cold, airy winter day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1853

There are from time to time mornings. . .when especially the world seems to begin anew,. See January 23, 1860 ("Walking on the ice by the side of the river this very pleasant morning, I recommence life.”); January 7, 1858 ("These are true mornings of creation, original and poetic days, not mere repetitions of the past')

See also, Walden, Where I Lived, And What I Lived For  ("The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.")

Jan. 26. 

Up river on ice 9 A. M., above Pantry,

  A sharp, cutting air,

  This is a pretty good winter  morning, however.  Not one of the rarer,

  There are from time to time mornings, both in summer and win ter, when especially the world seems to begin anew, beyond which memory need not go, for not behind them is yesterday and our past life; when, as in the morning of a hoar frost, there are visible the effects of a certain creative energy, the world has visibly been recreated in the night,

 Mornings of creation, I call them,

  In the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back, — I look back for the era of this creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough,

  A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted,

  It is the poet's hour,

  Mornings when men are new - born, men who have the seeds of life in them,

  It should be a part of my religion to [ be ] abroad then,

  This is not one of those mornings, but a clear, cold, airy winter day,

 

  It is surprising how much room there is in nature, if a man will follow his proper path.

  In these broad fields, in these extensive woods, on this stretching river, I never meet a walker,

  Passing behind the farmhouses, I see no man out.

  Perhaps I do not meet so many men as I should have met three centuries ago, when the Indian hunter roamed these woods.

  I enjoy the retirement and solitude of an early settler.

  Men have cleared some of the earth, which no doubt is an advantage to the walker.

  I see a man sometimes chopping in the woods, or planting or hoeing in a field, at a distance; and yet there may be a lyceum in the evening, and there  is a book - shop and library in the village, and five times a day I can be whirled to Boston within an hour.

  There is a little thin ice on the meadows.

  I see the bubbles underneath, looking like coin.

  A slight, fine snow has fallen in the night and drifted before the wind.

  I observe that it is so distributed over the ice as [ to ] show equal spaces of bare ice and of snow at pretty regular distances.

  I have seen the same phenomenon on the surface of snow in fields, as if the surface of the snow disposed itself according to the same law that makes waves of water.

  There is now a fine steam - like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates.

  But why does it lodge at such regular intervals ? I see this fine drifting snow in the air ten or twelve feet high at a distance.

  Perhaps it may have to do with the manner in, or the angle at, which the wind strikes the earth.

  Made a roaring fire on the edge of the meadow at Ware ( ? ) Hill in Sudbury.

  A piece of paper, birch bark, and dry leaves started it, and then we depended on the dead maple twigs and limbs to kindle the large dead wood.

  Green wood will burn better than the damp and rotten wood that lies on the ground.

  We chose a place which afforded a prospect, but it turned out that we looked only at the fire.

  It made all places indifferent.

  The color of the coals, in a glowing heap or seen through the white ashes on the brands, like rubies.

  The shadows, coming and going, of the flame passing over the white ashes of the brands.

  I burnt off my eye lashes when the fire suddenly blazed up with the wind, without knowing that I had come very near it.

  Though  our fuel was dead and rotten wood found in the snow, it made very little smoke, which may have been owing to the state of the atmosphere, clear and cold.

  The sound of the air or steam escaping from a brand, its sighing or dying shriek, fine and sharp as a cambric needle, is the music we hear.

  One half the pleasure is in making the fire.

  But then we should have something to cook by it.

  Collecting fresh fuel from time to time is very pleasant.

  The smoke ever and anon compelled us to move round to the opposite side.

  The sap which flowed from some maple boughs which I cut froze in large drops at the end.

  How came sap there now ?

 It is remarkable that many men will go with eagerness to Walden Pond in the winter to fish for pickerel and yet not seem to care for the landscape.

  Of course it cannot be merely for the pickerel they may catch; there is some adventure in it; but any love of nature which they may feel is certainly very slight and indefinite.

  They call it going a - fishing, and so indeed it is, though, perchance, their natures know better.

  Now I go a - fishing and a - hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game, which are the least important part.

  I have learned to do without them.

  They were indispensable only as long as I was a boy. 

 I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay all the stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught.

  When we got off at some distance from our fire, returning, we saw a light bluish smoke rising as high as the woods above it, though we had not perceived it before, and thought that no one could have detected us.

  At the fall on Clematis Brook the forms of the ice were admirable.

  The coarse spray had frozen as it fell on the rocks, and formed shell - like crusts over them, with irregular but beautifully clear and sparkling surfaces like egg - shaped diamonds, each being the top of a club - shaped and branched fungus icicle.

  This spray had improved the least core —as the dead and slender rushes drooping over the water - and formed larger icicles about them, shaped exactly like horns, skulls often attached, or roots On similar slight limbs there out from the shore and rocks all fantastic forms, with broader ter bases, from which hung stalactites of ice; and on logs in the water were perfect ice fungi with the of horns.

  were built sorts of and flat of all sizes, under which the water gurgled, flat underneath and hemi spherical.

  A form like this would project over the six inches deep by four or five in and a foot long, held by the but with a slight weed for core.

  could take off the incrustations rocks, water : width rocks, You on the turn Looking down on it them up, and they were perfect shells.

 

 

 

 

**** 

 

The only birds I have seen to-day were some jays, one whistled clearly, — some of my mewing red frontlets, and some familiar chickadees. They are inquisitive, and fly along after the traveller to inspect him.

  In civilized nations there are those answering to the rain - makers and sorcerers of savages,

  Also this office ' is universal among savage tribes.

Bitter, cutting, cold northwest wind on causeway, stiffening the face, freezing the ears.

 

 

 

 

Signs of Spring

P.M. -- To Flint's Pond, down railroad.

There is something springlike in this afternoon. In winter, after middle, we are interested in what is springlike. The earth and sun appear to have approached some degrees.

The ground is partly bare. The cress is fresh and green at the bottoms of the brooks. The banks seem to to lie in the embrace of the sun.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 25, 1853

January thaw.

January 23.

Sunday. 

Rain, carrying off the snow and making slosh of the lower half of it. It is perhaps the wettest walking we ever have.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 23, 1853

The wettest walking we ever have. See January 21, 1859 (“ It is the worst or wettest of walking”)

Naming a lichen (The value of mutual intelligence)

January 15.

January 15, 2017

Mrs. Ripley told me this afternoon that Russell* had decided that that green (and sometimes yellow) dust on the under side of stones in walls was a decaying state of Lepraria chlorina, a lichen, -- the yellow another species of Lepraria. 

Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it, and it has suggested less to me and I have made less use of it. I now first feel as if I had got hold of it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1853

* John Lewis Russell, botanist. See Botanizing with Russell; Botanizing Marblehead and Salem; Botanizing the grasses and sedges; Russell is not sure but Eaton has described my rare polygonum.

Mrs. Ripley told ne this afternnoon. See May 17, 1856 ("Mrs. Ripley showed me, from her son Gore in Minnesota, a few days ago, the first spring flower of the prairie there, a hairy-stemmed, slender-divisioned, and hairy-involucred, six-petalled blue flower, probably a species of hepatica. No leaves with it. Not described in Gray.")

Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. See March 1, 1852 ("I can see that there is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses, for instance. No one masters them so as to use them in writing on the subject without being far better informed than the rabble about it. . . . No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say. "); August 29, 1858 ("With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. . . . My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing."); See also February 16, 1852 ("By the artificial system we learn the names of plants, by the natural their relations to one another; but still it remains to learn their relation to man. The poet does more for us in this department."); March 1,1852 ("Linnæus, speaking of the necessity of precise and adequate terms in any science"); March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race."); March 12, 1852 ("I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany."); March 16, 1858 ("No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names."); March 5, 1858 ("It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view."); February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us"); February 18, 1860 ("As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but . . . the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned."); February 28, 1860 ("As it is important to consider Nature from the point of view of science, remembering the nomenclature and system of men, and so, if possible, go a step further in that direction, so it is equally important often to ignore or forget all that men presume that they know, and take an original and unprejudiced view of Nature, letting her make what impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children and natural men still do.") And see also November 15, 1851 ( Linnæus['s]. . . father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnæus (Linden-tree-man ) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place. . .What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patronymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name, as memorable and distinct as their characters."); May 21, 1851 ("You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours."); See also Walking (1861 ("Travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.. . .So every man has an original wild name")

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 15

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt530115

Thus beautiful the snow.

January 14. 

Snows all day.

The place of the sun appears through the storm about three o'clock, a sign that it is near its end, though it still snows as hard as ever. It is a very light snow, lying like down or feathery scales. Examined closely, the flakes are beautifully regular six-rayed stars or wheels with a centre disk, perfect geometrical figures in thin scales far more perfect than I can draw. These thin crystals are piled about a foot deep all over the country, but as light as bran.

White walls of snow rest on the boughs of trees, in height two or three times their thickness. Already, before the storm is over, the surface of the snow in the high woods is full of indentations and hollows where some of this burden has fallen.

And now the snow has quite ceased, blue sky appears, and the sun goes down in clouds. The surface of fields, as I look toward the western light, appears as if different kinds of flakes drifted together, some glistening scales, others darker; or perhaps the same reflected the light differently from different sides of slight drifts or undulations on the surface. 

Thus beautiful the snow. These starry crystals, descending profusely, have woven a pure white garment, over all the fields.

Snow freshly fallen is one thing, to-morrow it will be another. 

It is now pure and trackless. Walking three or four miles in the woods, I see but one track of any kind, yet by to-morrow morning there will he countless tracks of all sizes all over the country.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1853

It is now pure and trackless, yet by to-morrow morning there will he countless tracks. See February 21, 1854 (“You cannot walk too early in new-fallen snow to get the sense of purity, novelty, and unexploredness.”); January 31, 1856 (“These fresh falls of snow are like turning over a new leaf of Nature’s Album.”)

I anticipate nature

January 9.

As I climb the Cliff, I pause in the sun and sit on a dry rock, dreaming. I think of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity, - runs into it and becomes of one stuff with it. 

How much - how, perhaps, all - that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth! I remember how I expanded. If the genius visits me now I am not quite taken off my feet, but I remember how this experience is like, but less than, that I had long since.

On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface. I dig one up with a stick, and, pulling it to pieces, I find deep in the centre of the plant, just beneath the ground, surrounded by all the tender leaves that are to precede it, the blossom-bud, about half is big as the head of a pin, perfectly white.

There it patiently sits, or slumbers, how full of faith, informed of a spring which the world has never seen. Destined to become a fair yellow flower above the surface, it offers to my mind a little temple into which to enter and worship.

May I lead my life the following year as innocently! May it be as fair and smell as sweet! I anticipate nature. It will go forth in April, this vestal now cherishing her fire, to be married to the sun.

How innocent are Nature's purposes!

That first day of ice when my coat and cap were glazed with a thick coat the fine rain freezing as it fell was not a cold day. I am pretty sure I have known it rain without freezing when colder. Had the fineness of the rain anything to do with it?

I saw to-day the reflected sunset sky in the river, but the colors in the reflection were different from those in the sky. The sky was dark clouds with coppery or dun colored undersides. In the water were dun colored clouds with bluish green patches or bars. 


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 9, 1853

I pause in the sun and sit on a dry rock, dreaming. See August 2, 1854 (“I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes.”)

The sky was dark clouds with coppery or dun colored undersides. See January 5, 1852 ("I thought I saw an extensive fire in the western horizon . It was a bright coppery-yellow fair-weather cloud along the edge of the horizon gold with some alloy of copper"); January 6, 1854 ("There was a low, narrow, clear segment of sky in the west at sunset, or just after (all the rest overcast), of the coppery yellow, perhaps, of some of Gilpin's pictures, all spotted coarsely with clouds like a leopard's skin."); January 7, 1852 ("In the western horizon . . . a bright coppery-yellow fair-weather cloud."); January 19, 1859 ("I noticed last night, just after sunset, a sheet of mackerel sky far in the west horizon, very finely imbricated and reflecting a coppery glow, and again I saw still more of it in the east this morning at sunrise.")

January 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 9

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt530109