Let us sing Winter.

January 30.

The seasons were not made in vain.  It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was not given to us for no purpose. 

The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise these winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself.  We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields.

The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of  man's brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. This harvest of thought the great harvest of the year. The human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars.

I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked:

"We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter."

So I say, "Let us sing winter."

What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season?

Another cold morning. Mercury down to 13° below zero.  This morning, though not so cold by a degree or two as yesterday morning, the cold has got more into the house, and the frost visits nooks never known to be visited before. The sheets are frozen about the sleeper's face; the teamster's beard is white with ice. The windows are all closed up with frost, as if they were ground glass.  

The snow is dry and squeaks under the feet, and the teams creak as if they needed greasing, — sounds associated with extremely cold weather.

Up river on ice and snow to Fair Haven Pond. There is a few inches of snow, perfectly level, which now for nearly a week has covered the ice. We look at every track in the snow. 

Every little while there is the track of a fox — maybe the same one — across the river, turning aside some times to a muskrat's cabin or a point of ice, where he has left some traces, and frequently the larger track of a hound, which has followed his trail. 

As we walk up the river, a little flock of chickadees flies to us from a wood-side fifteen rods off, and utters their lively day day day, and follows us along a considerable distance, flitting by our side on the button-bushes and willows. It is the most, if not the only, sociable bird we have.

It is much easier and pleasanter to walk thus on the river, the snow being shallow and level, and there is no such loud squeaking or cronching of the snow as in the road, and this road is so wide that you do not feel confined in it, and you never meet travellers with whom you have no sympathy.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1854

The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of man's brain.... See August 7, 1854 ("Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? ...A man may hear strains in his thought far surpassing any oratorio. “)

The windows are all closed up with frost, as if they were ground glass. See December 28, 1859 ("In the morning the windows are like ground glass (covered with frost), and we cannot see out."); January 4, 1856 ("It is snapping cold this night (10 P. M.). I see the frost on the windows sparkle as I go through the passageway with a light ")'; February 1, 1860 ("Frost forms on windows."); February 5, 1855 ("It was quite cold last evening, and I saw the scuttle window reflecting the lamp from a myriad brilliant points when I went up to bed."); February 17, 1860 ("Grows colder yet at evening, and frost forms on the windows.")

The track of a fox turning aside some times to a muskrat's cabin or a point of ice, where he has left some traces. See February 5, 1854 (“.It turned aside to every muskrat-house or the like prominence near its route and left its mark there.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

A little flock of chickadees flies to us, utters their lively day day day and follows us along a considerable distance  See January 30, 1856 ("By the railroad against Walden I hear the lisping of a chickadee, and see it on a sumach.");  January 18, 1860 ("Several chickadees, uttering their faint notes, come flitting near to me as usual");\ See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Chickadee in Winter and:

The chickadee

Hops near to me.

November 8, 1857

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 30

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 ©  2009-2023