Uncle Charles buried. He was born in February, 1780, the winter of the Great Snow, and he dies in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows.
Cold, and the earth stiff again, after fifteen days of steady warm and, for the most part, sunny days (with out rain), in which the snow and ice have rapidly melted.
Sam Barrett tells me that a boy caught a crow in his neighborhood the other day in a trap set for mink. Its leg was broken. He brought it home under his arm, and laid it down in a shop, thinking to keep it there alive. It looked up sidewise, as it lay seemingly helpless on the floor, but, the door being open, all at once, to their surprise, it lifted itself on its wings and flitted out and away without the least trouble. Many crows have been caught in mink-traps the past winter, they have been compelled to visit the few openings in brooks, etc., so much for food.
Barrett has suffered all winter for want of water.
***
I think to say to my friend, There is but one interval between us. You are on one side of it, I on the other. You know as much about it as I, —how wide, how impassable it is.
I will endeavor not to blame you. Do not blame me. There is nothing to be said about it. Recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged.
Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that.
For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether.
For a season my path seems lonely without you. The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you.
My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching.
Yet I have faith that. in the definite future, new suns will rise, and new plains expand before me, and I trust that I shall therein encounter pilgrims who bear that same virtue that I recognized in you, who will be that very virtue that was you. I accept the everlasting and salutary law, which was promulgated as much that spring that I first knew you, as this that I seem to lose you.
My former friends, I visit you as one walks amid the columns of a ruined temple. You belong to an era, a civilization and glory, long past. I recognize still your fair proportions, notwithstanding the convulsions which we have felt, and the weeds and jackals that have sprung up around.
I come here to be reminded of the past, to read your inscriptions, the hieroglyphics, the sacred writings.
We are no longer the representatives of our former selves. Love is a thirst that is never slaked. Under the coarsest rind, the sweetest meat. If you would read a friend aright, you must be able to read through some thing thicker and opaquer than horn. If you can read a friend, all languages will be easy to you.
Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1856
Many crows have been caught in mink-traps the past winter, they have been compelled to visit the few openings in brooks for food. See February 6, 1856 ("Goodwin says that he has caught two crows this winter in his traps set in water for mink, and baited with fish. The crows, probably put to it for food and looking along the very few open brooks, attracted by this bait, got their feet into the traps.”); March 10, 1856 ("The pinched crows are feeding in the road to-day in front of the house and alighting on the elms, and blue jays also, as in the middle of the hardest winter, for such is this weather.");. March 12, 1856 ("The crow has been a common bird in our street and about our house the past winter. "); March 20, 1856 ("Perhaps these [Paludina decisa] make part of the food of the crows which visit this brook and whose tracks I now see on the edge, and have all winter. Probably they also pick up some dead frogs"); March 22, 1856 ("Many tracks of crows in snow along the edge of the open water against Merrick’s at Island. They thus visit the edge of water—this and brooks —before any ground is exposed. Is it for small shellfish?")
See also Farewell, my friend
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