Wintry cold -- the color of life.

April 2.

Not only the grass but the pines also were greener yesterday for being wet.  To-day, the grass being dry, the green blades are less conspicuous than yesterday. 

It would seem, then, that this color is more vivid when wet, and perhaps all green plants, like lichens, are to some extent greener in moist weather. 

Green is essentially vivid, or the color of life, and it is therefore most brilliant when a plant is moist or most alive. A plant is said to be green in opposition to being withered and dead. The word, according to Webster, is from the Saxon grene, to grow, and hence is the color of herbage when growing. 

High winds all night, rocking the house, opening doors, etc. To-day also. It is wintry cold also, and ice has formed nearly an inch thick in my boat. 

P. M. — Down the river-bank. 

The wind is still very strong and cold from the north west, filling the air with dust and blowing the water, which has slightly risen, over the rocks and bushes along the shore, where it freezes in the shape of bulls’ horns about the osiers, making coarse rakes with its dependent icicles when the osiers are horizontal, also turtle-shells over the rocks. 

It is just such a wind and freezing as that of last March (18th, I think), and, if the meadow were flooded, there would probably be as much ice as then on the bushes. There may be wind enough for this phenomenon in the winter, but then there is no open water to be blown.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1855