Commenced a fine half snow half rain yesterday afternoon.
All rain and harder in the night, and now quite a thaw, still raining finely, with great dark puddles amid the snow, and the cars detained by wet rails.
The steady, soaking, rushing sound of the rain on the shingles is musical. See February 15, 1859 ("the gentle, spring like rain begins. . .We rejoice to be wetted, and the very smell of wet woollen clothes exhilarates us. "); See also February 8, 1857 ("Youthful senses, not enervated by luxury, hear music in the wind and rain and running water . . . I hear it in the softened air of these warm February days which have broken the back of the winter.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; The Eaves Begin to Run
The fire needs no replenishing, and we save our fuel. See February 18, 1854 ("I begin to think that my wood will last."); February 18, 1857 (“Thermometer at 1 P.M., 65. . . I sit all this day and evening without a fire, and some even have windows open.”); Compare February 3, 1856 (“The wind whistles round the northwest corner of the house and penetrates every crevice and consumes the wood in the stoves, — soon blows it all away. An armful goes but little way. Such a day makes a great hole in the wood-pile.”) See also Walden ("One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in . . . the days have grown sensibly longer and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood pile for large fires are no longer necessary I am on the alert for the first signs of spring.")
Does not a thaw succeed that blue atmosphere observed on the 11th? — a thaw, as well as warmer nights and hoar frosts?
All day a steady, warm, imprisoning rain carrying off the snow. not unmusical on my roof.
It is a rare time for the student and reader who cannot go abroad in the afternoon, provided he can keep awake, for we are wont to be drowsy as cats in such weather. Without, it is not walking but wading.
It is so long since I have heard it that the steady, soaking, rushing sound of the rain on the shingles is musical.
February 15, 2015
The fire needs no replenishing, and we save our fuel. It seems like a distant forerunner of spring.
It is because I am allied to the elements that the sound of the rain is thus soothing to me. The sound soaks into my spirit, as the water into the earth, reminding me of the season when snow and ice will be no more, when the earth will be thawed and drink up the rain as fast as it falls.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 15, 1855
The steady, soaking, rushing sound of the rain on the shingles is musical. See February 15, 1859 ("the gentle, spring like rain begins. . .We rejoice to be wetted, and the very smell of wet woollen clothes exhilarates us. "); See also February 8, 1857 ("Youthful senses, not enervated by luxury, hear music in the wind and rain and running water . . . I hear it in the softened air of these warm February days which have broken the back of the winter.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; The Eaves Begin to Run
The fire needs no replenishing, and we save our fuel. See February 18, 1854 ("I begin to think that my wood will last."); February 18, 1857 (“Thermometer at 1 P.M., 65. . . I sit all this day and evening without a fire, and some even have windows open.”); Compare February 3, 1856 (“The wind whistles round the northwest corner of the house and penetrates every crevice and consumes the wood in the stoves, — soon blows it all away. An armful goes but little way. Such a day makes a great hole in the wood-pile.”) See also Walden ("One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in . . . the days have grown sensibly longer and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to my wood pile for large fires are no longer necessary I am on the alert for the first signs of spring.")
The musical sound
of rain on the shingles soaks
into my spirit.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The steady, soaking, rushing sound of the rain
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 © 2009-2025
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550215
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