6 a. m. - To Hill.
I see near the stone bridge where the strong northwest wind of last night broke the thin ice just formed, and set the irregular triangular pieces on their edges quite perpendicular and directed northwest and southeast and pretty close together, about nine inches high, for half a dozen rods, like a dense fleet of schooners with their mainsails set.
And already, when near the road, I hear the warble of my first Concord bluebird, borne to me from the hill through the still morning air, and, looking up, I see him plainly, though so far away, a dark speck in the top of a walnut.
When I reach the Assabet above the Hemlocks, I hear a loud crashing or brattling sound, and, looking through the trees, see that it is the thin ice of the night, half an hour after sunrise, now swiftly borne down the stream in large fleets and going to wreck against the thick old ice on each side. This evidently is a phenomenon of the morning.
The river, too, has just waked up, and, no doubt, a river in midsummer as well as in winter recognizes the advent of the morning as much as a man or an animal does. They retire at night and awake in the morning. Looking northeast over Hosmer's meadow, I see still the rosy light reflected from the low snow-spits, alternating with green ice there. Apparently because the angles of incidence and excidence are equal, there fore we see the green in ice at sundown when we look aslant over the ice, our visual ray making such an angle with it as the yellow light from the western horizon does in coming to it.
P. M. — To Witherell Vale.
There are some who never do nor say anything, whose life merely excites expectation. Their excellence reaches no further than a gesture or mode of carrying themselves. They are a sash dangling from the waist, or a sculptured war-club over the shoulder. They are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming rusty in a shop-window. I like as well, if not better, to see a piece of iron or steel, out of which many such tools will be made, or the bush-whack in a man's hand.
When I meet gentlemen and ladies, I am reminded of the extent of the inhabitable and uninhabitable globe; I exclaim to myself, Surfaces! surfaces! If the outside of a man is so variegated and extensive, what must the inside be? You are high up the Platte River, traversing deserts, plains covered with soda, with no deeper hollow than a prairie-dog hole tenanted also by owls and venomous snakes.
As I look toward the woods (from Wood's Bridge), I perceive the spring in the softened air. This is to me the most interesting and affecting phenomenon of the season as yet. Apparently in consequence of the very warm sun, this still and clear day, falling on the earth four fifths covered with snow and ice, there is an almost invisible vapor held in suspension, which is like a thin coat or enamel applied to every object, and especially it gives to the woods, of pine and oak intermingled, a softened and more living appearance. They evidently stand in a more genial atmosphere than before.
Looking more low, I see that shimmering in the air over the earth which betrays the evaporation going on. Looking through this transparent vapor, all surfaces, not osiers and open waters alone, look more vivid. The hardness of winter is relaxed.
There is a fine effluence surrounding the wood, as if the sap had begun to stir and you could detect it a mile off. Such is the difference between an object seen through a warm, moist, and soft air and a cold, dry, hard one. Such is the genialness of nature that the trees appear to have put out feelers by which our senses apprehend them more tenderly.
I do not know that the woods are ever more beautiful, or affect me more.
I feel it to be a greater success as a lecturer to affect uncultivated natures than to affect the most refined, for all cultivation is necessarily superficial, and its roots may not even be directed toward the centre of the being.
Rivers, too, like the walker, unbutton their icy coats, and we see the dark bosoms of their channels in the midst of the ice. Again, in pools of melted snow, or where the river has risen, I look into clear, placid water, and see the russet grassy bottom in the sun. Look up or down the open channel now, so smooth, like a hibernating animal that has ventured to come out to the mouth of its burrow. One way, perhaps, it is like melted silver alloyed with copper. It goes nibbling off the edge of the thick ice on each side.
Here and there I see a musquash sitting in the sun on the edge of the ice, eating a clam, and the clamshells it has left are strewn along the edge. Ever and anon he drops into the liquid mirror, and soon reappears with another clam.
This clear, placid, silvery water is evidently a phenomenon of spring. Winter could not show us this.
A broad channel of water separates the dry land from the ice, and the musquash-hunter finds it hard to reach the game he has shot on the ice.
Fine red-stemmed mosses have begun to push and bud on Clamshell bank, growing in the Indian ashes where surface taken off. Carpenter says, "The first green crust upon the cinders with which the surface of Ascension Island was covered, consisted of minute mosses.”
We sit in the sun on the side of Money-Diggers' Hill, amid the crimson low blueberry shoots and the withered Andropogon scoparius and the still erect Solidago arguta (var. the common) and the tall stubble thickly hung with fresh gleaming cobwebs. There are some grayish moths out, etc.; some gnats.
I see the bridge far away over the ice resting on its black piers above the ice which is lifted around it.
It is short-legged now. This level or horizontal line resting on perpendicular black ones is always an interesting sight to me.
As we sit in this wonderful air, many sounds — that of woodchopping, for one — come to our ears agree ably blunted or muffled, even like the drumming of a partridge, not sharp and rending as in winter and recently. If a partridge should drum in winter, probably it would not reverberate so softly through the wood and sound indefinitely far.
Our voices, even, sound differently and betray the spring. We speak as in a house, in a warm apartment still, with relaxed muscles and softened voices. The voice, like a wood-chuck in his burrow, is met and lapped in and encouraged by all genial and sunny influences. There may be heard now, perhaps, under south hillsides and the south sides of houses, a slight murmur of conversation, as of insects, out of doors.
These earliest spring days are peculiarly pleasant. We shall have no more of them for a year. I am apt to forget that we may have raw and blustering days a month hence.
The combination of this delicious air, which you do not want to be warmer or softer, with the presence of ice and snow, you sitting on the bare russet portions, the south hillsides, of the earth, this is the charm of these days. It is the summer beginning to show itself like an old friend in the midst of winter.
You ramble from one drier russet patch to another.
These are your stages. You have the air and sun of summer, over snow and ice, and in some places even the rustling of dry leaves under your feet, as in Indian-summer days.
The bluebird on the apple tree, warbling so innocently to inquire if any of its mates are within call, — the angel of the spring! Fair and innocent, yet the offspring of the earth. The color of the sky above and of the subsoil beneath. Suggesting what sweet and innocent melody (terrestrial melody) may have its birthplace between the sky and the ground.
Two frogs (may have been Rana fontinalis; did not see them) jumped into Hosmer's grassy ditch.
See in one place a small swarm of insects flying or gyrating, dancing like large tipulidae. The dance within the compass of a foot always above a piece of snow of the same size in the midst of bare ground.
The most ornamental tree I have seen this spring was the willow full of catkins now showing most of their down, in front of Puffer's house.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 10, 1859
The strong northwest wind of last night broke the thin ice just formed, and set the irregular triangular pieces on their edges quite perpendicular and directed northwest and southeast and pretty close together, about nine inches high, for half a dozen rods, like a dense fleet of schooners with their mainsails set. See February 12, 1851 ("thin cakes of ice forced up on their edges and reflecting the sun like so many mirrors, whole fleets of shining sails, giving a very lively appearance to the river, — where for a dozen rods the flakes of ice stood on their edges, like a fleet beating up-stream against the sun, a fleet of ice-boats.”)
See in one place a small swarm of insects flying or gyrating, dancing like large tipulidae. The dance within the compass of a foot always above a piece of snow of the same size in the midst of bare ground. See March 19, 1858 (“I see little swarms of those fine fuzzy gnats in the air.. . . Sometimes a globular swarm two feet or more in diameter, suggesting how genial and habitable the air is become”)
Two frogs (may have been Rana fontinalis; did not see them) jumped into Hosmer's grassy ditch. See February 18, 1857 (“When I approached the bank of a ditch this after noon, I saw a frog diving to the bottom.”); February 23, 1857 ("I have seen signs of the spring. I have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in”); March 13, 1855 ("I am surprised to see, not only many pollywogs through the thin ice of the warm ditches, but, in still warmer, stagnant, unfrozen holes in this meadow, half a dozen small frogs, probably Rana palustris.”); March 26, 1857 (“Though it is rather cool and windy in exposed places, I hear a faint, stertorous croak from a frog in the open swamp; at first one faint note only, which I could not be sure that I had heard”); March 26, 1860 (“The wood frog may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in '56,”); March 28, 1852 ("In Conantum Brook a living frog, the first of the season."); ); March 28, 1858 ("Cleaning out the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I find a small frog, apparently a bullfrog, just come forth, which must have wintered in the mud there. “); March 30, 1858 (“The frogs are now heard leaping into the ditches on your approach”); March 31, 1857 (“As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill.”) and note to May 6, 1858 (the frogs of Massachusetts). Compare March 28, 1855 (“I run about these cold and blustering days, on the whole perhaps the worst to bear in the year, — partly because they disappoint expectation, — looking almost in vain for some animal or vegetable life stirring. The warmest springs hardly allow me the glimpse of a frog’s heel as he settles himself in the mud”); March 31, 1855 (“I go listening for the croak of the first frog, or peep of a hylodes.. . .I listen in vain to hear a frog”)
The most ornamental tree I have seen this spring was the willow full of catkins now showing most of their down See March 10, 1855 (“I am not aware of growth in any plant yet, unless it be the further peeping out of willow catkins. They have crept out further from under their scales, and, looking closely into them, I detect a little redness along the twigs even now”); March 10, 1853 (“Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins . . .the willow twigs, both the yellow and green, are brighter-colored than before. I cannot be deceived. They shine as if the sap were already flowing under the bark; a certain lively and glossy hue they have. ”)
