A new life in Nature beginning to awake.

February 21.

To Fair Haven Hill via Cut. 

A clear air, with a northwesterly, March-like wind, as yesterday. What is the peculiarity in the air that both the invalid in the chamber and the traveller on the highway say these are perfect March days? The wind is rapidly drying up earth, and elevated sands already begin to look whitish. 

How much light there is in the sky and on the surface of the russet earth! It is reflected in a flood from all cleansed surfaces which rain and snow have washed, - from the railroad rails and the mica in the rocks and the silvery latebrae of insects there, - and I never saw the white houses of the village more brightly white. 

Now look for an early crop of arrowheads, for they will shine. 

When I enter the wooded hollow on the east of the Deep Cut, it is novel and pleasant to hear the sound of the dry leaves and twigs, which have so long been damp and silent, more worn and lighter than ever, crackling again under my feet, - though there is still considerable snow about, along wall-sides. etc., - and to see the holes and galleries recently made by the mice in the fine withered grass of such places, the upper aralia hollow there. 

I see the peculiar softened blue sky of spring over the tops of the pines, and, when I am sheltered from the wind, I feel the warmer sun of the season reflected from the withered grass and twigs on the side of this elevated hollow. A warmth begins to be reflected from the partially dried ground here and there in the sun in sheltered places, very cheering to invalids who have weak lungs, who think they may weather it till summer now. Nature is more genial to them. 

When the leaves on the forest floor are dried, and begin to rustle under such a sun and wind as these, the news is told to how many myriads of grubs that underlie them! When I perceive this dryness under my feet, I feel as if I had got a new sense, or rather I realize what was incredible to me before, that there is a new life in Nature beginning to awake, that her halls are being swept and prepared for a new occupant. 

It is whispered through all the aisles of the forest that another spring is approaching. The wood mouse listens at the mouth of his burrow, and the chickadee passes the news along.

We now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness contrasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields. I look at the Peterboro mountains with my glass from Fair Haven Hill. I think that there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare, russet fields and dark forests, with perhaps a house on some remote, bare ridge seen against them. A silver edging, or ear-like handle, to this basin of the world. They look like great loaves incrusted with pure white sugar; and I think that this must have been the origin of the name “sugar-loaf” some times given to mountains, and not on account of their form. 

We look thus from russet fields into a landscape above it and where a promontory casts a shadow along the mountains’ side. I see what looks like a large lake of misty bluish water on the side of the further Peterboro mountain, its edges or shore very distinctly defined. This I conclude was the shadow of another part of the mountain. And it suggests that, in like manner, what on the surface of the moon is taken for water may be, shadows. Could not distinguish Monadnock till the sun shone on it. 

I see a train go by, which has in front a dozen dirt cars from somewhere up country, laden apparently with some kind of earth (or clay); and these, with their loads, were thickly and evenly crusted with unspotted snow, a part of that sugary crust I had viewed with my glass, which contrasted singularly with the bare tops of the other cars, which it had hitched on this side, and the twenty miles at least of bare ground over which they had rolled. It affected me as when a traveller comes into the house with snow on his coat, when I did not know it was snowing.

How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! The commonest I should say is the tawny or various shades of brown, answering to the russet which is the prevailing color of the earth’s surface, perhaps, and to the yellow of the sands beneath. The darker brown mingled with this answers to the darker-colored soil of the surface. The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; the spots of the pards, perchance, to the earth spotted with flowers or tinted leaves of autumn; the black, perhaps, to night, and muddy bottoms and dark waters. There are few or no bluish animals. 

Can it be true, as is said, that geese have gone over Boston, probably yesterday? It is in the newspapers.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 21, 1855

We now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness contrasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields. . . .See April 4, 1855 (". . . in the north western horizon, my eye rests on a range of snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun. . . . "); April 4, 1852 ("I see the snow lying thick on the south side of the Peterboro Hills, . . .probably the dividing line at present between the bare ground and the snow-clad ground stretching three thousand miles to the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie and the Icy Sea.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon


I see a train go by, which has in front a dozen dirt cars thickly and evenly crusted with unspotted snow, a part of that sugary crust I had viewed with my glass, It affected me as when a traveller comes into the house with snow on his coat, when I did not know it was snowing. See November 13, 1851 ("The cattle-train came down last night from Vermont with snow nearly a foot thick upon it. It is as if, in the fall of the year, a swift traveller should come out of the north with snow upon his coat. So it snows. Such, some years, may be our first snow.”)

Can it be true, as is said, that geese have gone over Boston, probably yesterday? See February 18, 1857 ("I hear that geese went over Cambridge last night.")