It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance.
I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We become, as it were, pliant and ductile again to strange but memorable influences; – we are led a little way by our genius.
We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.
Might not my Journal be called "Field Notes?"
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 21, 1853
Winter breaks up within us . . . and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. See December 26, 1854 ("I feel the winter breaking up in me; if I were home I would try to write poetry."); January 31, 1854 ("We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression."); March 9, 1852 ("[T]he air excites me. When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”)
Winter breaks up within us . . . and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. See December 26, 1854 ("I feel the winter breaking up in me; if I were home I would try to write poetry."); January 31, 1854 ("We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression."); March 9, 1852 ("[T]he air excites me. When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”)
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