Do not despair of life.

December 27. 

Sunday. A clear, pleasant day. 

P. M. — To Goose Pond. 

Tree sparrows about the weeds in the yard. 

A snowball on every pine plume, for there has been no wind to shake it down. The pitch pines look like trees heavily laden with snow oranges. The snowballs on their plumes are like a white fruit. When I thoughtlessly strike at a limb with my hatchet, in my surveying, down comes a sudden shower of snow, whitening my coat and getting into my neck. You must be careful how you approach and jar the trees thus supporting a light snow. 

Partridges dash away through the pines, jarring down the snow.

Mice have been abroad in the night. We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks. I see where, by the shore of Goose Pond, one has pushed up just far enough to open a window through the snow three quarters of an inch across, but has not been forth. Elsewhere, when on the pond, I see in several places where one has made a circuit out on to the pond a rod or more, returning to the shore again. Such a track may, by what we call accident, be preserved for a geological period, or be obliterated by the melting of the snow. 

Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet. Near the north shore it cracks under the snow as I walk, and in many places water has oozed out and spread over the ice, mixing with the snow and making dark places. 

Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night. [Yes.] 

I frequently hear a dog bark at some distance in the night, which, strange as it may seem, reminds me of the cooing or crowing of a ring dove which I heard every night a year ago at Perth Amboy. It was sure to coo on the slightest noise in the house; as good as a watch-dog. The crowing of cocks, too, reminds me of it, and, now I think of it, it was precisely the intonation and accent of the cat owl's hoo' hoo-hoo-oo, dwelling in each case sonorously on the last syllable. They get the pitch and break ground with the first note, and then prolong and swell it in the last. 

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one. 

It is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music in any other sense. I have lain awake at night many a time to think of the barking of a dog which I had heard long before, bathing my being again in those waves of sound, as a frequenter of the opera might lie awake remembering the music he had heard. 

As my mother made my pockets once of Father's old fire-bags, with the date of the formation of the Fire Society on them, – 1794, – though they made but rotten pockets, – so we put our meaning into those old mythologies. I am sure that the Greeks were commonly innocent of any such double-entendre as we attribute to them. 

One while we do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless; we only live on by an effort of the will. Suddenly our condition is ameliorated, and even the barking of a dog is a pleasure to us. 

So closely is our happiness bound up with our physical condition, and one reacts on the other. Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. 

Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide. I saw this afternoon where probably a fox had rolled some small carcass in the snow. 

I cut a blueberry bush this afternoon, a venerable looking one bending over Goose Pond, with a gray, flat, scaly bark, the bark split into long, narrow, closely adhering scales, the inner bark dull-reddish. At several feet from the ground it was one and five sixteenths inches in diameter, and I counted about twenty-nine indistinct rings. It seems a very close-grained wood. It appears, then, that some of those old gray blueberry bushes which overhang the pond-holes have attained half the age of man. 

I am disappointed by most essays and lectures. I find that I had expected the authors would have some life, some very private experience, to report, which would make it comparatively unimportant in what style they expressed themselves, but commonly they have only a talent to exhibit. The new magazine which all have been expecting may contain only another love story as naturally told as the last, perchance, but with out the slightest novelty in it. It may be a mere vehicle for Yankee phrases. 

What interesting contrasts our climate affords! In July you rush panting into a pond, to cool yourself in the tepid water, when the stones on the bank are so heated that you cannot hold one tightly in your hand, and horses are melting on the road. Now you walk on the same pond frozen, amid the snow, with numbed fingers and feet, and see the water-target bleached and stiff in the ice.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 27, 1857

Mice have been abroad in the night. See December 27, 1853 (“ I had not seen a meadow mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals. I see where the mouse has dived into a little hole in the snow, not larger than my thumb, by the side of a weed, and a yard further reappeared again, and so on alternately above and beneath. A snug life it lives.”); January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding."); February 9, 1856 (“I see a few squirrel-tracks, but no mice-tracks, for no night has intervened since the snow.”); January 15, 1857 (“Such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow, where other creatures sink, and night, too, being the season when these tracks are made, they remind me of a fairy revel.”)

Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet. See December 13, 1857 (“This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear, though it cracks about the edges”)

Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it.”); December 27, 1856 ("Walden is still open in one place of considerable extent.. .”); see also December 21, 1854 (“Walden is frozen over, apparently about two inches thick.”); December 24, 1859 (“There is, in all, an acre or two in Walden not yet frozen, though half of it has been frozen more than a week. ”); December 24, 1858 ("Those two places in middle of Walden not frozen over yet, ..."); December 26, 1850 ("Walden not yet more than half frozen over"); December 26, 1853 (“Walden still open.”); December 29, 1855 ("Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open . . ."); December 30, 1853 ("The pond not yet frozen entirely over; about six acres open . . .”).

The commonest and cheapest sounds,produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite. See December 31, 1853 (“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate, as sound to the healthy ear. The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”); March 11, 1856; ("I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me”).

It is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music. See August 30, 1856 ("I get my new experiences still, not at the opera listening to the Swedish Nightingale, but at Beck Stow's Swamp listening to the native wood thrush.”); September 7, 1851 ("My profession is. . .to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.”)

So closely is our happiness bound up with our physical condition. See July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); August 23, 1853 ("Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.")

You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. See December 13, 1857 (“In sickness and barrenness it is encouraging to believe that our life is dammed and is coming to a head, so that there seems to be no loss, for what is lost in time is gained in power. All at once, unaccountably, as we are walking in the woods or sitting in our chamber, after a worthless fortnight, we cease to feel mean and barren.”)

We do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless; we only live on by an effort of the will. See January 15, 1857 ("We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide!”)

I cut a blueberry bush this afternoon, a venerable looking one bending over Goose Pond. . . . half the age of man .See February 8, 1858 ("I cut one, which measured eight and a half inches in circumference at the butt, and I counted pretty accurately forty-two rings. . . . It is a heavy and close-grained wood.")

Now you walk on the same pond frozen, amid the snow, with numbed fingers and feet, and see the water-target bleached and stiff in the ice. See December 13, 1857 (“I see the water-target leaves frozen in under the ice in Little Goose Pond.”)