I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground.

March 4. 

A dull, cloudy day. P. M. — To Walden via Hubbard's Wood and foot of Cliff Hill. The snow has melted very rapidly the past week. There is much bare ground.

The checkerberries are revealed, — somewhat shrivelled many of them.  In Hubbard's maple swamp I see the evergreen leaves of the gold-thread as well as the mitchella and large pyrola. I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground.

In the meadow beyond I see  everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden senecio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. Who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still — or in midwinter — some green leaves which, bruised, yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in June? Nothing so realizes the summer to me now.

 In the dry pasture under the Cliff Hill, the radical leaves of the johnswort are now revealed everywhere in pretty radiating wreaths flat on the ground, with leaves recurved, reddish above, green beneath, and covered with dewy drops.

I can no longer get on to the river ice. The ice of Walden has melted or softened so much that I sink an inch or more at every step. The upper side is white and rotten and saturated with water for four or five inches. It is now fifteen and a half inches thick, having lost about an inch and a half.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1854

The checkerberries are revealed, — somewhat shrivelled many of them. See March 10, 1855 ("Those reddening leaves, as the checkerberry, lambkill, etc., etc., which at the beginning of winter were greenish, are now a deeper red, when the snow goes off.”) Also note to May 21, 1857 (“I find checkerberries still fresh and abundant. ”)

I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground. See February 18, 1857 (“I was surprised to find how sweet the whole ground smelled when I lay flat and applied my nose to it”); March 18,1853 ("To-day first I smelled the earth.”); April 2, 1856 ("I am tempted to stretch myself on the bare ground above the Cliff, to feel its warmth in my back, and smell the earth and the dry leaves.”); May 4, 1859 ("I draw near to the land; I begin to lie down and stretch myself on it. After my winter voyage I begin to smell the land.”); May 16, 1852 ("The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose.")