The roosting-place of a chickadee.

December 12. 

P. M. — To Pine Hill and round Walden. 

Seeing a little hole in the side of a dead white birch, about six feet from the ground, I broke it off and found it to be made where a rotten limb had broken off. The hole was about an inch over and was of quite irregular and probably natural outline, and, within, the rotten wood had been removed to the depth of two or three inches, and on one side of this cavity, under the hole, was quite a pile of bird-droppings. The bottom was an irregular surface of the rotten wood, and there was nothing like a nest. The diameter of the birch was little more than two inches, — if at all. 

Probably it was the roosting-place of a chickadee.  

There is a certain Irish woodchopper who, when I come across him at his work in the woods in the winter, never fails to ask me what time it is, as if he were in haste to take his dinner-pail and go home. This is not as it should be. 

Every man, and the woodchopper among the rest, should love his work as much as the poet does his. All good political arrangements proceed on this supposition. If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rotteneness at the foundation of our community.

The night comes on early these days, and I soon see the pine tree tops distinctly outlined against the dun (or amber) but cold western sky. 

The snow having come, we see where is the path of the partridge, — his comings and goings from copse to copse, — and now first, as it were, we have the fox for our nightly neighbor, and countless tiny deer mice. 

So, perchance, if a still finer substance should fall from heaven (iodine ?), something delicate enough to receive the trace of their footsteps, we should see where unsuspected spirits and faery visitors had hourly crossed our steps, had held conventions and transacted their affairs in our midst. No doubt such subtle spirits transact their affairs in our midst, and we may perhaps in vent some sufficiently delicate surface to catch the impression of them. 

If in the winter there are fewer men in the fields and woods, — as in the country generally, — you see the tracks of those who had preceded you, and so are more reminded of them than in summer. 

As I talked with the woodchopper who had just cleared the top of Emerson's I got a new view of the mountains over his pile of wood in the foreground. They were very grand in their snowy mantle, which had a slight tinge of purple. But when afterward I looked at them from a higher hill, where there was no wood pile in the foreground, they affected me less. It is now that these mountains, in color as well as form, most resemble the clouds.

I am inclined to think of late that as much depends on the state of the bowels as of the stars. As are your bowels, so are the stars.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 12, 1859

Every man, and the woodchopper among the rest, should love his work as much as the poet does his. See Walden, An artist in the city of Kouroo ("in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, "); November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. . . . The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); November 20, 1851("Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man"); December 13, 1851 ("This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time."); April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey");April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work, and am somewhat listless or abandoned after it, reposing, that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.");  April 30, 1856 (" You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.”)


The night comes on early these days, and I soon see the pine tree tops distinctly outlined against the dun (or amber) but cold western sky. See December 9, 1856 ("The worker who would accomplish much these short days must shear a dusky slice off both ends of the night”); December 10, 1856 (“How short the afternoons! I hardly get out a couple of miles before the sun is setting”);  December 11, 1854 ("The day is short; it seems to be composed of two twilights merely; the morning and the evening twilight make the whole day "); and note to December 25, 1858 ("How full of soft, pure light the western sky now, after sunset! I love to see the outlines of the pines against it. . . .. In a pensive mood I enjoy the complexion of the winter sky at this hour.")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky