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

January 26

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.  . . I enjoy the retirement and solitude of an early settler . . . 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 bookshop and library in the village, and five times a day I can be whirled to Boston within an hour .

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? 

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. 

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. 

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

Now I go a-fishing and a-hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game.  See June 26, 1853 (Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest and wild. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last the naturalist or poet distinguishes that which attracted him and leaves the gun and fishing-rod behind . . .They might go there a thousand times, perchance, before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure, — before they began to angle for the pond itself.")