I never knew it to make such a business of snowing and bring so little to pass.

January 22. 

January 22, 2017

Snows all day, clearing up at night, — a remarkably fine and dry snow, which, looking out, you might suspect to be blowing snow merely. Yet thus it snows all day, driving almost horizontally, but it does not amount to much. 

P. M. — To Walden.

I never knew it to make such a business of snowing and bring so little to pass. The air is filled, so that you cannot see far against it, i.e. looking north-north west, yet but an inch or two falls all day. There is some drifting, however. 

You wonder how the tree sparrows can seek their food on the railroad causeway, flying in the face of such a fine, cold, driving snow-storm. 

Within the woods it is comparatively still. 

In the woods by Abel Brooks's rye hollow I hear a faint note, and see undoubtedly a brown creeper inspecting the branches of the oaks. It has white and black bars on the head, uttering from time to time a fine, wiry, screeping tse, tse, or tse, tse, tse. 

Brown Creeper

Minott tells me that Sam Barrett told him once when he went to mill that a song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter. When it did not help itself he used to feed it with meal, for he was glad of its company; so, what with the dashing water and the crumbs of meal, it must have fared well. 

I asked M. about the Cold Friday. He said, "It was plaguy cold; it stung like a wasp." He remembers seeing them toss up water in a shoemaker's shop, usually a very warm place, and when it struck the floor it was frozen and rattled like so many shot. 

Old John Nutting used to say, "When it is cold it is a sign it's going to be warm," and "When it 's warm it 's a sign it 's going to be cold.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1857

A remarkably fine and dry snow, . . . driving almost horizontally ... See January 19, 1857 ("A fine dry snow, intolerable to face.”);  December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north”)

I asked M. about the Cold Friday [January 19, 1810]. . . .See January 11, 2017 ("Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. . . .“);February 7, 1855 ("The old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece.”)

A song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter. See January 15, 1857 ("I saw, to my surprise, that it must be a song sparrow, . . .taken refuge in this shed")

I cannot afford to be telling my experience. I wish to be getting experience

January 11

Began snowing yesterday afternoon, and it is still snowing this forenoon. 

Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen — Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl — drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires. 

The other day a man came "just to get me to run a line in the woods." This is the usual request. "Do you know where one end of it is?" I asked. (It was the Stratton lot.) "No," said he, "I don't know either end; that is what I want to find." "Do you know either of the next sides of the lot ?" Thinking a moment, he answered, "No." "Well, do you know any one side of the whole lot, or any corner ?" After a little hesitation he said that he did not. 

Here, then, was a wood-lot of half a dozen acres, well enough described in a deed dated 1777, courses and distances given, but he could not tell exactly in what part of the universe any particular part of it was, but he expected me to find out. This was what he understood by "running." On the strength of this deed he had forbidden a man to chop wood somewhere. 

Frequently, when my employer does not know where his land lies, and has put into my hands an ancient and tattered piece of paper called his deed, which throws no light at all on the question, he turns away, saying, "I want you to make it all right. Give me all that belongs to me." 

In the deed of the Stratton wood-lot, dated 1777, there is no mention [of] any building on [it] to be conveyed, so that probably there was only a cellar-hole there then, eighty years ago, as now. For so long, at least, it has been a mere dent in the earth there, to which, from time to time, dead horses or hogs were drawn from the village and cast in. These are our Ninevehs and Babylons. I approach such a cellar-hole as Layard the scene of his labors, and I do not fail to find there relics as interesting to me as his winged bulls.

For some years past I have partially offered myself as a lecturer; have been advertised as such several years. Yet I have had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. I congratulate myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus, I am so much richer for it. I do not see what I should have got of much value, but money, by going about, but I do see what I should have lost. It seems to me that I have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. 

I cannot afford to be telling my experience, especially to those who perhaps will take no interest in it. I wish to be getting experience. You might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree and run about all winter scratching at all the hollow trees in the woods. He would be leaner in the spring than if he had stayed at home and sucked his claws. 

As for the lecture-goers, it is none of their business what I think. I perceive that most make a great account of their relations, more or less personal and direct, to many men, coming before them as lecturers, writers, or public men. But all this is impertinent and unprofitable to me. I never yet recognized, nor was recognized by, a crowd of men. I was never assured of their existence, nor they of mine. 

There was wit and even poetry in the negro's answer to the man who tried to persuade him that the slaves would not be obliged to work in heaven. "Oh, you g'way, Massa. I know better. If dere's no work for cullud folks up dar, dey'll make some fur 'em, and if dere's nuffin better to do, dey'll make 'em shub de clouds along. You can't fool this chile, Massa" 

I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, with out which dinners are a vain repetition. But how little men can help me in this! only by having a kindred experience. Of what use to tell them of my happiness? Thus, if ever we have anything important to say, it might be introduced with the remark: "It is nothing to you, in particular. It is none of your business, I know." That is what might be called going into good society. 

I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow Field. 

Men even think me odd and perverse because I do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood-god rather. But I have tried them. I have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club, and instantly — they did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. There was very little genuine goodness apparent. We are such hollow pretenders. I lost my time. 

But out there! Who shall criticise that companion? It is like the hone to the knife. I bathe in that climate and am cleansed of all social impurities. I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. There is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, "See what a great man I am!" There chiefly, and not in the society of the wits, am I cognizant of wit. Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole? There I get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, levelled. There is my country club. We dine at the sign of the Shrub Oak, the New Albion House.

I demand of my companion some evidence that he has travelled further than the sources of the Nile, that he has seen something, that he has been out of town, out of the house. Not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveller, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas? 

I expect the time when there will be founded hospitals for the founders of hospitals.  

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 11, 1857


Cold Friday [January 19, 1810]. . . .See February 7, 1855 ("The old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece.")

I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town . . .  Of what use to tell them of my happiness?") See  January 4, 1857 ("I wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods. "); January 6, 1857 ("'I stones are happy, Concord River is happy, and I am happy too.'") January 7, 1857 ("I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me . . .and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.") Note, Thoreau presented "Walking" December 18, 1856 and again in February, 1857.  See Thoreau's Lectures after Walden. 283-89

 I become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 11

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2023

The cold has stopped the clock.

February 7

The coldest night for a long, long time. People dreaded to go to bed. The ground cracked in the night as if a powder-mill had blown up, and the timbers of the house also. 

Sheets froze stiff about the faces.  My pail of water was frozen in the morning so that I could not break it. The latches are white with frost, and every nail-head in entries, etc., has a white cap. 

Thermometer at about 7.30 A. M. gone into the bulb, -19° at least. 

The cold has stopped the clock. 

Though this day is at length more moderate than yesterday, it has got more into the houses and barns. Yesterday, the 6th, will be remembered as the cold Tuesday. 

The old folks still refer to the Cold Friday, when they sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantelpiece. But they say this is as cold as that was.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 7, 1855


The coldest night for a long, long time. .See February 6, 1855 ("They say it did not rise above -6° to-day."); January 9, 1856 ("Probably it has been below zero for the greater part of the day."); January 23, 1857 ("I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature to-day”); February 8, 1861 ("Coldest day yet ; – 22 ° at least ( all we can read ), at 8 A. M., and, ( so far ) as I can learn, not above -6 ° all day.") Compare February 7, 1857 ("Another warm day, the snow fast going off. . . . The thermometer was at 52° when I came out at 3 p.m."

Cold Friday...  See January 11, 1857 ("Mother remembers the Cold Friday very well. She lived in the house where I was born. The people in the kitchen — Jack Garrison, Esther, and a Hardy girl — drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.") According to Historic Storms of New England 180 "January 19, 1810, is the date of the famous day known in the annals of New England as "Cold Friday." It was said to have been the severest day experienced here from the first settlement of the country to that time.”

It snowed Monday and a little bit each day and it is snowing lightly now we get out our snowshoes for the first time since December and hike up to the view I get winded making my own trail The snow is very light it is dark by the time we get up there and we use headlamps to return via the Undercliff trail the snow reflected in the light is dazzling watching it fall you can see the six sided crystals And anywhere you look you can find them on the hemlocks the side of the trail on your parka etc. six sided flat crystals like a myriad of mirrors It is a lot easier going down than up the temperature may be 16 to 20° We pull ice and snow off the dogs and dry them when we get back fairly early 7 o’clock

Dazzling in the light 

a myriad of mirrors 

six sided crystals.

February 7, 2015 zphx