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.")

 How innocent are Nature's purposes! See October 13, 1852 ("How peaceful great nature!!"); January 26, 1853 ("It is surprising how much room there is in nature, if a man will follow his proper path")

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