When my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve.

January 6. 

The first snow-storm of much importance. By noon it may be six inches deep. 

P. M. — Up railroad to North River. 

The main stream, barely skimmed over with snow, which has sunk the thin ice and is saturated with water, is of a dull-brown color between the white fields. 

I detect a very tall and slender tupelo by its thorny looking twigs. It is close by a white oak, at the yellow gerardia up railroad. It is nearly fifty feet high and only one foot through at the ground. 

I derive a certain excitement, not to be refused, even from going through Dennis's Swamp on the opposite side of the railroad, where the poison-dogwood abounds. This simple stemmed bush is very full of fruit, hanging in loose, dry, pale-green drooping panicles. Some of them are a foot long. It impresses me as the most fruitful shrub thereabouts. I cannot refrain from plucking it and bringing home some pretty sprigs. 

Other fruits there are there which belong to the hard season, the enduring panicled andromeda and a few partly decayed prinos berries. I walk amid the bare midribs of cinnamon ferns, with at most a terminal leafet, and here and there I see a little dark water at the bottom of a dimple in the snow, over which the snow has not yet been able to prevail. I was feeling very cheap, nevertheless, reduced to make the most of dry dogwood berries. 

Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart? 

Sometimes the pines were worn and had lost their branches, and again it appeared as if several stars had impinged on one another at various angles, making a somewhat spherical mass. These little wheels came down like the wrecks of chariots from a battle waged in the sky. There were mingled with these starry flakes small downy pellets also. 

This was at mid-afternoon, and it has not quite ceased snowing yet (at 10 P.M.). 

We are rained and snowed on with gems. I confess that I was a little encouraged, for I was beginning to believe that Nature was poor and mean, and I was now convinced that she turned off as good work as ever. 

What a world we live in! Where are the jewellers’ shops? There is nothing handsomer than a snowflake and a dewdrop. I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill. 

The North River is not frozen over. 

I see tree sparrows twittering and moving with a low creeping and jerking motion amid the chenopodium in a field, upon the snow, so chubby or puffed out on account of the cold that at first I took them for the arctic birds, but soon I see their bright-chestnut crowns and clear white bars; as the poet says, “a thousand feeding like one,”  — though there are not more than a dozen here.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 6, 1858

It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful. See  December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. ...Also I remember the perfectly crystalline or star snows, when each flake is a perfect six-rayed wheel. This must be the chef-d'oeuvre of the Genius of the storm. ...");  January 14, 1853 ("Examined closely, the flakes are beautifully regular six-rayed stars or wheels with a centre disk, perfect geometrical figures in thin scales far more perfect than I can draw."); December 14, 1855 ("Looking more closely at the light snow... I found that it was sprinkled all over ... with regular star-shaped cottony flakes with six points, about an eighth of an inch in diameter and on an average a half an inch apart. It snowed geometry.") January 5, 1856 ("The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, . . . thin and partly transparent . . ., perfect little wheels with six spokes . . .countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six.”); January 12, 1860 ("When I look closely I see each snowflake lies as it first fell, delicate crystals with the six rays or leafets more or less perfect, not yet in the least melted by the sun.”).

These little wheels came down like the wrecks of chariots from a battle waged in the sky. See January 5, 1856 (“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. . . .A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of the storm chariots.”)

The product of enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill. See
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo.

I see tree sparrows twittering and moving with a low creeping and jerking motion amid the chenopodium in a field, upon the snow. See January 6, 1857 ("I hear and see an unusual number of merry little tree sparrows about the few weeds that are to be seen. They look very chipper, flitting restlessly about and jerking their long tails.”); January 7, 1858 (“I see some tree sparrows feeding on the fine grass seed above the snow, near the road on the hillside below the Dutch house.. . .")

January 6. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 6.

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 © 2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt580106