It is a beautiful clear and mild winter day.

January 31.

The wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails, and is felt on the back. The snow softens and melts. It is a beautiful clear and mild winter day. Our washwoman says she is proud of it. Any clear day, methinks, the sun is ready to do his part, and let the wind be right, and it will be warm and pleasant-like, at least now that the sun runs so high a course. 

But I do not melt; there is no thaw in me; I am bound out still.

Many tracks of partridges there along the meadow-side in the maples, and their droppings where they appear to have spent the night about the roots and be tween the stems of trees. I think they eat the buds of the azalea.

In the winter, when there are no flowers and leaves are rare, even large buds are interesting and somewhat exciting. I go a-budding like a partridge. I am always attracted at this season by the buds of the swamp-pink, the poplars, and the sweet-gale.

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. There is a freshet which carries away dams of accumulated ice.

Our thoughts hide unexpressed, like the buds under their downy or resinous scales; they would hardly keep a partridge from starving. If you would know what are my winter thoughts look for them in the partridge's crop. They are like the laurel buds, — some leaf, some blossom buds, — which, though food for such indigenous creatures, will not expand into leaves and flowers until summer comes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 31, 1854

It is a beautiful clear and mild winter day. See January 31, 1855 ("A clear, cold, beautiful day.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

The wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails, and is felt on the back. See January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . .It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs.")

We too have our thaws. Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression. See March 21, 1853 ("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.")

In the winter, when there are no flowers and leaves are rare,. I go a-budding like a partridge. See January 12, 1855 ("Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. The summer is all packed in them.."); January 10, 1856 ("We are reduced to admire buds, even like the partridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice."); January 25, 1858 ("What a rich book might be made about buds.")