The value of any statement may be measured by its susceptibility to be expressed in popular language.

March 2.

If the sciences are protected from being carried by assault by the mob, by a palisade or chevaux de-frise of technical terms, so also the learned man may sometimes ensconce himself and conceal his little true knowledge behind hard names.

Perhaps the value of any statement may be measured by its susceptibility to be expressed in popular language.

The greatest discoveries can be reported in the newspapers.

I thought it was a great advantage both to speakers and hearers when, at the meetings of scientific gentlemen at the Marlborough Chapel, the representatives of all departments of science were required to speak intelligibly to those of other departments, therefore dispensing with the most peculiarly technical terms.

A man may be permitted to state a very meagre truth to a fellow student, using technical terms, but when he stands up before the mass of men, he must have some distinct and important truth to communicate; and the most important it will always be the most easy to communicate to the vulgar.

If anybody thinks a thought, how sure we are to hear of it! Though it be only a half-thought or half a delusion, it gets into the newspapers, and all the country rings with it.

But how much clearing of land and plowing and planting and building of stone wall is done every summer without being reported in the newspapers or in literature! Agricultural literature is not as extensive as the fields, and the farmer's almanac is never a big book.

And yet I think that the history (or poetry) of one farm from a state of nature to the highest state of cultivation comes nearer to being the true subject of a modern epic than the siege of Jerusalem or any such paltry and ridiculous resource to which some have thought men reduced.

Was it Coleridge? The Works and Days of Hesiod, the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, are but leaves out of that epic.

The turning a swamp into a garden, though the poet may not think it an improvement, is at any rate an enterprise interesting to all men.

A wealthy farmer who has money to let was here yesterday, who said that fourteen years ago a man came to him to hire two hundred dollars for thirty days.

He told him that he should have it if he would give proper security, but the other, thinking it exorbitant to require security for so short a term, went away.

But he soon returned and gave the security.

“And,” said the farmer, "he has punctually paid me twelve dollars a year ever since. I have never said a word to him about the principle.”

It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion of cooking.

The farmer increases the extent of the habitable earth.

He makes soil.

That is an honorable occupation.

 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 2, 1852

Perhaps the value of any statement may be measured by its susceptibility to be expressed in popular language. See December 16, 1859 (“How much better to describe your object in fresh English words rather than in conventional Latinisms!”)

 

Surprised how many of these creatures live and run under the leaves in the woods

April 2. 

Cold and windy. 

April 2, 2018

2 P. M. — Thermometer 31°, or fallen 40° since yesterday, and the ground slightly whitened by a flurry of snow. 

I had expected rain to succeed the thick haze. It was cloudy behind the haze and rained a little about 9 P. M., but, the wind having gone northwest (from southwest), it turned to snow.

The shrubs whose buds had begun to unfold yesterday are the spiræa, gooseberry, lilac, and Missouri currant, — the first much the most forward and green, the rest in the order named. 

Walked to the Mayflower Path and to see the great burning of the 31st. I smelled the burnt ground a quarter of a mile off. It was a very severe burn, the ground as black as a chimney-back. The fire is said to have begun by an Irishman burning brush near Wild' s house in the south part of Acton, and ran north and northeast some two miles before the southwest wind, crossing Fort Pond Brook. I walked more than a mile along it and could not see to either end, and crossed it in two places. A thousand acres must have been burned. 

The leaves being thus cleanly burned, you see amid their cinders countless mouse-galleries, where they have run all over the wood, especially in shrub oak land, these lines crossing each other every foot and at every angle. You are surprised to see by these traces how many of these creatures live and run under the leaves in the woods, out of the way of cold and of hawks. The fire has burned off the top and half-way down their galleries. 

Every now and then we saw an oblong square mark of pale-brown or fawn-colored ashes amid the black cinders, where corded wood had been burned. In one place, though at the north edge of a wood, I saw white birch and amelanchier buds (the base of whose stems had been burned or scorched) just bursting into leaf, — evidently the effect of the fire, for none of their kind is so forward elsewhere. 

This fire ran before the wind, which was southwest, and, as nearly as I remember, the fires generally at this season begin on that side, and you need to be well protected there by a plowing or raking away the leaves. Also the men should run ahead of the fire before the wind, most of them, and stop it at some cross-road, by raking away the leaves and setting back fires. 

Look out for your wood-lots between the time when the dust first begins to blow in the streets and the leaves are partly grown. 

The earliest willows are apparently in prime. 

I find that the signs of the weather in Theophrastus are repeated by many more recent writers without being referred to him or through him; e. g., by an authority quoted by Brand in his “Popular Antiquities," who evidently does not know that they are in Theophrastus. 

Talking with a farmer who was milking sixteen cows in a row the other evening, an ox near which we stood,  at the end of the row, suddenly half lay, half fell, down on the hard and filthy floor, extending its legs helplessly to one side in a mechanical manner while its head was uncomfortably held between the stanchions as in a pillory. Thus man's fellow-laborer the ox, tired with his day's work, is compelled to take his rest, like the most wretched slave or culprit. It was evidently a difficult experiment each time to lie down at all without dislocating his neck, and his neighbors had not room to try the same at the same time.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1860

Thermometer fallen 40° since yesterday, and the ground slightly whitened by a flurry of snow. See  April 2, 1852 (“The rain now turns to snow with large flakes, so soft many cohere in the air as they fall. . . . Looking up, the flakes are black against the sky. And now the ground begins to whiten.”); April 2, 1857 ("In the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep."); April 2, 1861 ("A drifting snow-storm, perhaps a foot deep on an average.”)

The great burning of the 31st. . . Look out for your wood-lots. See March 31, 1860 ("I hear that there has been a great fire in the woods this afternoon near the factory. Some say a thousand acres have been burned over. This is the dangerous time, —between the drying of the earth, or say when dust begins to fly, and the general leafing of the trees,")

You are surprised to see by these traces how many of these creatures live and run under the leaves in the woods. Compare January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding."); January 4, 1860 ("Again see what the snow reveals.. .that the woods are nightly thronged with little creatures which most have never seen")

I saw amelanchier buds (the base of whose stems had been burned or scorched) just bursting into leaf, — evidently the effect of the fire. See April 2, 1853 ("The amelanchier buds look more forward than those of any shrub I notice.")


The earliest willows are apparently in prime. See March 25, 1860  ("One early willow on railroad . . . just sheds pollen from one anther, but probably might find another more forward"); March 31, 1858 ("The most forward willow catkins are not so silvery now, more grayish, being much enlarged and the down less compact, revealing the dark scales"); April 1, 1852 ("There is an early willow on sand-bank of the railroad, against the pond, by the fence, grayish below and yellowish above."); April 12, 1852 ("See the first blossoms (bright-yellow stamens or pistils) on the willow catkins to-day.. . . It is fit that this almost earliest spring flower should be yellow, the color of the sun."); April 15, 1852 ("I think that the largest early-catkined willow in large bushes in sand by water now blossoming -- the fertile catkins with paler blossoms, the sterile covered with pollen, a pleasant lively bright yellow -- is the brightest flower I have seen thus far.")

A farmer who was milking sixteen cows. See January 9, 1860 ("A rich old farmer . . . milks seventeen cows regularly.")

An ox . . . suddenly half lay, half fell, down on the hard and filthy floor, extending its legs helplessly to one side. See December 26, 1851 ("It is painful to think how they may sometimes be overworked. I saw that even the ox could be weary with toil.")

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring.

February 25

When it snowed yesterday very large flakes, an inch in diameter, Aunt said, “They are picking geese.” This, it seems, is an old saying.

Heard Staples, Tuttle, E. Wood, N. Barrett, and others this morning at the post-office talking about the profit of milk-farming. The general conclusion seemed to be that it was less profitable than it was three years ago. Yet Staples thought he could name half a dozen who had done well. He named one. He thought he could name eight or ten who had paid off the mortgages on their farms by this means within a few years. Tuttle said he would give him a good supper if he would name three. Staples named only the one referred to above, David Buttrick, but he added, looking at Tuttle, “There is yourself. You know you came to town with nothing in your pocket but an old razor, a few pennies, and a damned dull jack-knife, and n’t used the razor so much.”  

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,— know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. 

I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street. I think that they are heard oftener and again at the approach of spring, just as the phoebe note of the chickadee is; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. 

Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year. 

P. M. —Up river on ice.

I see a handful of the scarlet Rosa Carolina hips in the crotch of a willow on some mud, a foot or more above the ice. They are partly eaten, and I think were placed there by a musquash. The rose bush, with a few hips on it, still stands in the ice within a few feet. Goodwin says he has seen their tracks eight or ten rods long to an apple tree near the water, where they have been for apples. 

Along edge of Staples’s meadow sprout-land, the young maples, some three years old, are stripped down, i. e. the lower branches for a foot or two, by the ice falling. This barks and wounds the young trees severely. 

The ice over the middle of the river is now alternately dark and whitish. I see the river beginning to show dark through the thinnest parts, in broad crescents convex up-stream, single or connected. 

A good book is not made in the cheap and offhand manner of many of our scientific reports, ushered in by the message of the President communicating it to Congress, and the order of Congress that so many thousand copies be printed, with the letters of instruction for the Secretary of the Interior (or rather exterior); the bulk of the book being a journal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, illustrated by photographs of the traveller’s footsteps across the plains and an admirable engraving of his native village as it appeared on leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the palaeontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there, the last illustrated by very finely executed engravings of some old broken shells picked up on the road. 

There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little. I mean the trappers. 

They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about. They go about their business in a stealthy manner for fear that any shall see out-of-the-way swamps and meadows and brooks to set or examine their traps for musquash or mink, and the owners of the land commonly know nothing of it. But, few as the trappers are here, it seems by Goodwin’s accounts that they steal one another’s traps.

All the criticism which I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints at Worcester on the 22d was that I assumed that my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, — that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1859

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. See August 23, 1853 ("Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring.”); Walden (“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say . . . Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”); and note to March 17, 1857 (“No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring”)

I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. See February 24, 1854 (“Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, — tit for tat, — on different keys, — a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud distinct gnah.”); March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it. . . . It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch. . . . This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark.");April 25, 1859 (" I hear still the what what what of a nuthatch, and, directly after, its ordinary winter note of gnah gnah, quite distinct. I think the former is its spring note or breeding-note.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: The Spring Note of the Nuthatch

I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. February 25, 1857 ("Goodwin says he saw a robin this morning.”); February 28, 1860 ("C. saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard's hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Robins in Spring

February 25. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 25  

Feel your pulse – measure

your health by your sympathy

with morning and spring.

If the first bluebird 

does not thrill you– the morning  

of your life is past.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Measure your health 

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 © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-590225

I see a snow bunting, though it is pleasant and warm.

February 27

A. M. — To Hill. 

The hedges on the Hill are all cut off.

The journals think they cannot say too much on improvements in husbandry. It is a safe theme, like piety. But for me, as for one of these farms brushed up, — a model farm, — I had as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. It is simply a place where somebody is making money.

I see a snow bunting, though it is pleasant and warm.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 27, 1858

I see a snow bunting, though it is pleasant and warm. See February 1, 1857 ("Warm as it is, I see a large flock of snow buntings on the railroad causeway."). Compare January 2, 1856 ("They have come with this deeper snow and colder weather. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snow Bunting (Emberiza nivalis)