Saturday. The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues.
The ground has been bare since the 11th. This morning was colder than before. I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time.
P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook.
A fine afternoon. There has been but little use for gloves this winter, though I have been surveying a great deal for three months. The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March.
Standing on the bridge over the Mill Brook on the Turnpike, there being but little ice on the south side, I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring.
I see the terminal shield fern very fresh, as an evergreen, at Saw Mill Brook, and (I think it is) the marginal fern and Lycopodium lucidulum.
lycopodium
I go up the brook, walking on it most of the way, surprised to find that it will bear me. How it falls from rock to rock, as down a flight of stairs, all through that rocky wood, from the swamp which is its source to the Everett farm! The bays or more stagnant parts are thickest frozen, the channel oftenest open, and here and there the water has overflowed the ice and covered it with a thickening mass of glistening spiculae. The white markings on the under side are very rich and varied, – the currency of the brook, the impression of its fleeting bubbles even. It comes out of a meadow of about an acre.
I go near enough to Flint's Pond, about 4 P. M., to hear it thundering. In summer I should not have suspected its presence an eighth of a mile off through the woods, but in such a winter day as this it speaks and betrays itself.
Returning through Britton's field, I notice the stumps of chestnuts cut a dozen years ago. This tree grows rapidly, and one layer seems not to adhere very firmly to another. I can easily count the concentric circles of growth on these old stumps as I stand over them, for they are worn into conspicuous furrows along the lines of the pores of the wood. One or more rings often gape an eighth of an inch or more, at about their twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, when the growth, in three or four cases that I examined, was most rapid.
Looking toward the woods in the horizon, it is seen to be very hazy.
At Ditch Pond I hear what I suppose to be a fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds so through the Wood, while I am in the hollow, that I cannot tell from which side it comes. I hear it bark forty or fifty times at least. It is a peculiar sound, quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know.
Walden, I think, begins to crack and boom first on the south side, which is first in the shade, for I hear it cracking there, though it is still in the sun around me. It is not so sonorous and like the dumping of frogs as I have heard it, but more like the cracking of crockery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. Most shivering, splintery, screeching cracks these are, as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is probably nine or ten inches. Methinks my weight sinks it and helps to crack sometimes.
Who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and unimagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mysterious auspicious circumstances? Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? Individuals accept their fate and live according to it, as the Indian does. Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully, — is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation.
To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless Nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary.
Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well, that he was taller than Father, and used to ride out to their house—she was a Stone and lived where she and her husband did afterward, now Darius Merriam’s —when they made cheeses, to drink the whey, being in consumption. She said that she remembered Grand mother too, Jennie Burns, how she came to the school room (in Middle Street (?), Boston) once, leading her little daughter Elizabeth, the latter so small that she could not tell her name distinctly, but spoke thick and lispingly, — “Elizabeth Orrock Thoreau.”
The dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. The former has attained to more clearness in his bark; it is more ringing and musical, more developed; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better; and beside he has made his place so good in the world that he can run without skulking in the open field.
What a smothered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox! It seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest it should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe.
I observe that the ice of Walden is heaved up more than a foot over that bar between the pond and Cyrus Hubbard’s basin. The gravelly bank or bar itself is also heaved up considerably where exposed. So that I am inclined to think that such a tilting is simply the result of a thawing beneath and not merely of a crowding or pressure on the two sides.
I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature. If I feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify? I do not think much of that chemistry that can extract corn and potatoes out of a barren [soil], but rather of that chemistry that can extract thoughts and sentiments out of the life of a man on any soil.
It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 23, 1858
I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring. See January 24, 1858 ("At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer. . . .This is something new to me. What must they think of this winter? It is like a child waked up and set to playing at midnight."); January 30, 1860 ("The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and Skaters (Hydrometridae)
A fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know. See May 20, 1858 ("She uttered at very short intervals a prolonged, shrill, screeching kind of bark, beginning lower and rising to a very high key, lasting two seconds; a very broken and ragged sound, more like the scream of a large and angry bird than the bark of a dog, trilled like a piece of vibrating metal at the end.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox
I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time. Compare January 20, 1857 ("The river has been frozen everywhere except at the very few swiftest places since about December 18th, and everywhere since about January 1st."); January 24, 1856 (" You may walk anywhere on the river now. Even the open space against Merrick’s, below the Rock, has been closed again, . . . I do not find a foot of open water, even, on this North Branch, as far as I go, . . .The river has been frozen unusually long and solidly.")
I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature. See April 23, 1857 ("Does he chiefly own the land who coldly uses it and gets corn and potatoes out of it, or he who loves it and gets inspiration from it? . . . All nature is my bride."); August 23, 1853("Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health."); July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); June 30, 1852 ("Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man."); November 16, 1850 ("My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world,”)
It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you. See October 26, 1857 ("The seasons and all their changes are in me. . . . My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her! "); October 26, 1853 ("You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day's experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show."). See also August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); September 2, 1851 ("We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. . . . It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”
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