Wheels of the storm chariots.

January 5.

One of the coldest mornings. Thermometer —9°, say some. 

P. M. — Up river to Hubbard’s Bridge. 

It has been trying to snow all day, but has not succeeded; as if it were too cold. Though it has been falling all day, there has not been enough to whiten the coat of the traveller. 

I come to the river, for here it is the best walking. The snow is not so deep over the ice. Near the middle, the superincumbent snow has so far been converted into a coarse snow ice that it will bear me, though occasionally I slump through intervening water to another ice below. 

Also, perhaps, the snow has been somewhat blown out of the river valley. At any rate, by walking where the ice was frozen last, or over the channel, I can get along quite comfortably, while it is hard travelling through this crusted snow in the fields. 

Generally, to be sure, the river is but a white snow-field, indistinguishable from the fields, but over the channel there is a thread, commonly, of yellowish porous-looking snow ice. 

The hardback above the snow has this form: Should not that meadow where the first bridge was built be called Hardhack Meadow? Also there are countless small ferns, with terminal leafet only left on, still rising above the snow, —for I notice the herbage of the riverside now,—thus, like the large ones in swamps: 

What with the grasses —that coarse, now straw - colored grass—and the stems of the button-bushes, the snow about the button-bushes forms often broad, —several rods broad,— low mounds, nearly burying the bushes, along which the tops of the button-bushes and that broad-bladed, now straw colored grass still rise, with masses of thin, now black-looking balls, erect or dangling. 

The black willows have here and there still a very few little curled and crispy leaves. 

The river is last open, methinks, just below a bend, as now at the Bath Place and at Clamshell Hill; and quite a novel sight is the dark water there. 

How little locomotive now look the boats whose painted sterns I just detect where they are half filled with ice and almost completely buried in snow, so neglected by their improvident owners, —some frozen in the ice, opening their seams, some drawn up on the bank. This is not merely improvidence; it is ingratitude. 

Now and then I hear a sort of creaking twitter, maybe from a passing snow bunting. This is the weather for them. 

I am surprised that Nut Meadow Brook has overflowed its meadow and converted it into that coarse yellowish snow ice. Otherwise it had been a broad snow-field, concealing a little ice under it. There is a narrow thread of open water over its channel. 

The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes, as on the 13th December, but thin and partly transparent crystals. They are about a tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like, with a distinct straight and slender midrib, raying from the centre.  On each side of each midrib there is a transparent thin blade with a crenate edge.

How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coarse, neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. 

Soon the storm increases, — it was already very severe to face, —and the snow comes finer, more white and powdery. Who knows but this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that when I observe these crystal stars falling around me they are but just generated in the low mist next the earth?

I am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal, auroral, and golden hour or infancy, but commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. 

As for the circumstances under which this phenomenon occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is falling. It comes almost horizontally from the north. Methinks this kind of snow never falls in any quantity.

A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of the storm chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six. Order.

On the Saskatchewan, when no man of science is there to behold, still down they come, and not the less fulfill their destiny, perchance melt at once on the Indian’s face. 

What a world we live in! where myriads of these little disks, so beautiful to the most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller’s coat, the observant and the unobservant, and on the restless squirrel’s fur, and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells, and the mountain-tops. 

Far, far away from the haunts of man, they roll down some little slope, fall over and come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the mass, ready anon to swell some little rill with their contribution, and so, at last, the universal ocean from which they came. There they lie, like the wreck of chariot-wheels after a battle in the skies. 

Meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his snowball, or the woodman’s sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the sweeping of heaven’s floor. 

And they all sing, melting as they sing of the mysteries of the number six,—six, six, six. 

He takes up the water of the sea in his hand, leaving the salt; He disperses it in mist through the skies; He recollects and sprinkles it like grain in six-rayed snowy stars over the earth, there to lie till He dissolves its bonds again. 

Found on a young red maple near the water, in Hubbard’s riverside grove, a nest, perhaps a size bigger than a summer yellowbird’s, chiefly of bark shreds, bound and lined with lint and a little of something like dried hickory blossoms. 

A little feather, yellow at the extremity, attached to the outside. It was on a slanting twig or small branch about eighteen feet high, and I shook it down. The rim of fine shreds of grape-vine bark chiefly, the outer edge being covered with considerable of the droppings of the young birds. I thought it the same kind with that found December 30th ult. Can it be a red start, or is it  one of the vireos possibly? or a gold finch? which would account for the yellow-tipped feather. 

In the blueberry swamp near by, which was cut down by the ice, another, perhaps a little smaller, of very similar materials but more of the hickory (?) blossoms on the outside beneath, but this was in a nearly upright fork of a red maple about seven feet high. 

The little nest of June 26th, 1855, looks like the inside of one of these. Upon these two nests found to-day and on that of the 30th December, I find the same sort of dried catkin (apparently not hickory) connected with a little sort of brown bud, maybe birch or alder. This makes me suspect they may be all one kind, though the last was in an upright fork and had no droppings on it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 5, 1856

The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, . . . thin and partly transparent . . ., perfect little wheels with six spokes . . .countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. ...Also I remember the perfectly crystalline or star snows, when each flake is a perfect six-rayed wheel. This must be the chef-d'oeuvre of the Genius of the storm. ..."); January 14, 1853 (" Examined closely, the flakes are beautifully regular six-rayed stars or wheels with a centre disk, perfect geometrical figures in thin scales far more perfect than I can draw."); December 14, 1855 ("Looking more closely at the light snow... I found that it was sprinkled all over ... with regular star-shaped cottony flakes with six points, about an eighth of an inch in diameter and on an average a half an inch apart. It snowed geometry."); January 6, 1858 ("My attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle."); January 12, 1860 ("Going from the sun, I see a myriad sparkling points scattered over its surface, — little mirror-like facets, which on examination I find to be one of those star wheels (more or less entire) from an eighth to a third of an inch in diameter, which has fallen in the proper position, reflecting an intensely bright little sun, ")


Boats . . . half filled with ice and almost completely buried in snow, so neglected by their improvident owners, — . . . This is not merely improvidence; it is ingratitude. See December 15, 1856 ("When I see that a man neglects his boat thus, I do not wonder that he fails in his business.")