Even in the middle of winter, aye, in middle of the Great Snow, Nature does not forget these her vegetable economies.

January 4. 

To my surprise a high wind arose in the night and the cold so dried the snow that this morning it is a good deal drifted. 

It did not freeze together, or crust, as you might have expected. You would not suppose it had been moist when it fell. 

About eight inches have fallen, yet there is very little on the river. It blows off, unless where water has oozed out at the sides or elsewhere, and the rough, flowing, scaly mass is frozen into a kind of batter, like mortar, or bread that has spewed out in the oven. 

Deep and drifted as the snow is, I find, when I return from my walk, some dry burs of the burdock adhering to the lining of my coat. Even in the middle of winter, aye, in middle of the Great Snow, Nature does not forget these her vegetable economies. 

It does look sometimes as if the world were on its last legs. How many there are whose principal employment it is nowadays to eat their meals and go to the post-office! 

After spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan incessantly, I especially feel the necessity of putting myself in communication with nature again, to recover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods. I thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again. It would be sweet to deal with men more, I can imagine, but where dwell they? Not in the fields which I traverse.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1857

. . .the rough, flowing, scaly mass is frozen into a kind of batter, like mortar, or bread that has spewed out in the oven. See December 20, 1854 (The river is "uneven like frozen suds, in rounded pan cakes, as when bread spews out in baking.) 

Having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, I would now bathe my temples in eternity. See Where I lived and what I lived for (“I . . .detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”); March 23, 1856 ("The eternity which I detect in Nature I predicate of myself also")