Snows again. About two inches have fallen in the night, but it turns to a fine mist. It was a damp snow.
P. M. —To Hill.
The snow turned to a fine mist or mizzling, through which I see a little blue in the snow, lurking in the ruts.
In the river meadows and on the (perhaps moist) sides of the hill, how common and conspicuous the brown spear-heads of the hardhack, above the snow, and looking black by contrast with it!
Just beyond the Assabet Spring I see where a squirrel, gray or red, dug through the snow last night in search of acorns. I know it was last night, for it was while the last snow was falling, and the tracks are partly filled by it.
This squirrel has burrowed to the ground in many places within a few yards, probing the leaves for acorns in various directions, making a short burrow under the snow, sometimes passing under the snow a yard and coming out at another place; for, though it is somewhat hardened on the surface by the nightly freezing and the hail, it is still quite soft and light beneath next the earth, and a squirrel or mouse can burrow very fast indeed there. I am surprised to find how easily I can pass my hand through it there. In many places it has dropped the leaves, etc., about the mouth of the hole. (The whole snow about ten inches deep.)
I see where it sat in a young oak and ate an acorn, dropping the shells on the snow beneath, for there is no track to the shells, but only to the base of the oak. How independently they live, not alarmed, though the snow be two feet deep!
Now, when all the fields and meadows are covered deep with snow, the warm-colored shoots of osiers, red and yellow, rising above it, remind me of flames.
It is astonishing how far a merely well-dressed and good-looking man may go without being challenged by any sentinel. What is called good society will bid high for such. The man whom the State has raised to high office, like that of governor, for instance, from some, it may be, honest but less respected calling, cannot return to his former humble but profitable pursuits, his old customers will be so shy of him. His ex-honorableness-ship stands seriously in his way, whether he is a lawyer or a shopkeeper. He can’t get ex-honorated. So he becomes a sort of State pauper, an object of charity on its hands, which the State is bound in honor to see through and provide still with offices of similar respectability, that he may not come to want.
A man who has been President becomes the Ex-President, and can’t travel or stay at home anywhere but men will persist in paying respect to his ex-ship. It is cruel as to remember his deeds so long. When his time is out, why can’t they let the poor fellow go?
H. D Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1856
The snow turned to a fine mist or mizzling, through which I see a little blue in the snow, lurking in the ruts.
January 5, 1856 ("The hardhack above the snow has this form")
Just beyond the Assabet Spring I see where a squirrel, gray or red, dug through the snow last night in search of acorns. I know it was last night, for it was while the last snow was falling, and the tracks are partly filled by it.
This squirrel has burrowed to the ground in many places within a few yards, probing the leaves for acorns in various directions, making a short burrow under the snow, sometimes passing under the snow a yard and coming out at another place; for, though it is somewhat hardened on the surface by the nightly freezing and the hail, it is still quite soft and light beneath next the earth, and a squirrel or mouse can burrow very fast indeed there. I am surprised to find how easily I can pass my hand through it there. In many places it has dropped the leaves, etc., about the mouth of the hole. (The whole snow about ten inches deep.)
I see where it sat in a young oak and ate an acorn, dropping the shells on the snow beneath, for there is no track to the shells, but only to the base of the oak. How independently they live, not alarmed, though the snow be two feet deep!
Now, when all the fields and meadows are covered deep with snow, the warm-colored shoots of osiers, red and yellow, rising above it, remind me of flames.
It is astonishing how far a merely well-dressed and good-looking man may go without being challenged by any sentinel. What is called good society will bid high for such. The man whom the State has raised to high office, like that of governor, for instance, from some, it may be, honest but less respected calling, cannot return to his former humble but profitable pursuits, his old customers will be so shy of him. His ex-honorableness-ship stands seriously in his way, whether he is a lawyer or a shopkeeper. He can’t get ex-honorated. So he becomes a sort of State pauper, an object of charity on its hands, which the State is bound in honor to see through and provide still with offices of similar respectability, that he may not come to want.
A man who has been President becomes the Ex-President, and can’t travel or stay at home anywhere but men will persist in paying respect to his ex-ship. It is cruel as to remember his deeds so long. When his time is out, why can’t they let the poor fellow go?
H. D Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1856
The snow turned to a fine mist or mizzling, through which I see a little blue in the snow, lurking in the ruts. See January 6, 1856 ("Now, at 4.15, the blue shadows are very distinct on the snowbanks.”); January 5, 1854 ("The blueness is more distinct after sunset."); January 9, 1852 ("Apparently the snow absorbs the other rays and reflects the blue."); January 14, 1852 ("There is no blueness in the ruts and crevices in the snow to-day. What kind of atmosphere does this require? . . . It is one of the most interesting phenomena of the winter."); January 15, 1856 ("My shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold."); January 19, 1855 ("I never saw the blue in snow so bright as this damp, dark, stormy morning at 7 A. M.”); January 20, 1856 ("I see the blue between the cakes of snow cast out in making a path, in the triangular recesses, though it is pretty cold, but the sky is completely overcast”); February 7, 1859 ("Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter, and is not this connected with the blue in snow in similar days?")
How common and conspicuous the brown spear-heads of the hardhack, above the snow and looking black by contrast with it! See December 6, 1856 ("Not till the snow comes are the beauty and variety and richness of vegetation ever fully revealed."); January 14, 1852 ("When I see the dead stems of the tansy, goldenrod, johnswort, asters, hardhack, etc., etc., rising above the snow by the roadside, sometimes in dense masses, which carry me back in imagination to their green summer life, I put faintly a question which I do not yet hear answered, Why stand they there?") See also January 16, 1860 ("There is no shrub nor weed which is not known to some bird."); March 14, 1855 (“This, then, is reason enough why these withered stems still stand, - that they may raise these granaries above the snow for the use of the snowbirds.”); December 17, 1859 ("I see on the pure white snow what looks like dust for half a dozen inches under a twig. Looking closely, I find that the twig is hardhack and the dust its slender, light-brown, chaffy looking seed, which falls still in copious showers, dusting the snow, when I jar it; and here are the tracks of a sparrow which has jarred the twig and picked the minute seeds")
The warm-colored shoots of osiers, red and yellow . . . remind me of flames. See January 19, 1856 ("The willow osiers of last year’s growth . . . aas bright as in the spring, the lower half yellow, the upper red."); January 26, 1859 ("The osiers there shone as brightly as in spring, showing that their brightness depends on the sun and air rather than the season.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Osier in Winter and early Spring
January 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 3
Osiers rising
above the snow-covered fields
remind me of flames.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, All the fields and meadows covered deep with snow
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 © 2009-2026
https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560103
No comments:
Post a Comment