In cold weather fire burns with a clearer flame.

November 13. 

To Fair Haven Hill. 

A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety. 

Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. You can hardly ruck up any skin on Nature's bones. 

The sap is down; she won't peel. Now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leaving the tough bark on, — yokes for your own neck.  Finding yourself yoked to Matter and to Time. Truly a hard day, hard times these! 

Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground, with your hands in your pockets. 

Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires? 

And will not your green hickory and white oak burn clear in this frosty air? 

Now is not your manhood taxed by the great Assessor? Taxed for having a soul, a ratable soul. 

A day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground! 

What do the thoughts find to live on? What avails you now the fire you stole from heaven? Does not each thought become a vulture to gnaw your vitals? 

No Indian summer have we had this November. I see but few traces of the perennial spring. 

Now is there nothing, not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture, nothing but the echo of your steps over the frozen ground, no voice of birds nor frogs. You are dry as a farrow cow. The earth will not admit a spade.  All fields lie fallow. Shall not your mind? 

True, the freezing ground is being prepared for immeasurable snows, but there are brave thoughts within you that shall remain to rustle the winter through like white oak leaves upon your boughs, or like scrub oaks that remind the traveller of a fire upon the hillsides; or evergreen thoughts, cold even in midsummer, by their nature shall contrast the more fairly with the snow. 

Some warm springs shall still tinkle and fume, and send their column of vapor to the skies.

The walker now fares like cows in the pastures, where is no grass but hay; he gets nothing but an appetite. If we must return to hay, pray let us have that which has been stored in barns, which has not lost its sweetness.  

The poet needs to have more stomachs than the cow, for for him no fodder is stored in barns. He relies upon his instinct, which teaches him to paw away the snow to come at the withered grass.

Methinks man came very near being made a dormant creature, just as some of these animals. The ground squirrel, for instance, which lays up vast stores, is yet found to be half dormant, if you dig him out. 

Now for the oily nuts of thought which you have stored up. 

The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. Perhaps this is owing, not only to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer, but to the absence of the leaves! They are many miles nearer for it. A little mistiness occasioned by warmth would set them further off and make them fainter. 

I see snow on the Peterboro hills, reflecting the sun. It is pleasant thus to look from afar into winter. We look at a condition which we have not reached. Notwithstanding the poverty of the immediate landscape, in the horizon it is simplicity and grandeur. 

I look into valleys white with snow and now lit up by the sun, while all this country is in shade. This accounts for the cold northwest wind. 

There is a great gap in the mountain range just south of the two Peterboro hills. Methinks I have been through it, and that a road runs there. At any rate, humble as these mountains are compared with some, yet at this distance I am convinced that they answer the purpose of Andes; and, seen in the horizon, I know of nothing more grand and stupendous than this great mountain gate or pass, a great cleft or sinus in the blue banks, as in a dark evening cloud, fit portal to lead from one country, from one quarter of the earth, to another, where the children of the Israelites may file through. 

Little does the New Hampshire farmer who drives over that road realize through what a sublime gap he is passing. You would almost as soon think of a road to wind through and over a dark evening cloud. This prospect of the mountains from our low hills is what I would rather have than pastures on the mountain sides such as my neighbors own, aye, than townships at their base. 

Instead that I drive my cattle up in May, I turn my eyes that way. My eyes pasture there, and straightway the yearling thoughts come back. The grass they feed on never withers, for though they are not evergreen, they're ever blue to me. For though not ever green to you, to me they're ever blue.

I do not fear my thoughts will die, For never yet it was so dry as to scorch the azure of the sky. It knows no withering and no drought, Though all eyes crop, it ne'er gives out. My eyes my flocks are; Mountains my crops are. I do not fear my flocks will stray, For they were made to roam the day, For they can wander with the latest light, Yet be at home at night. 

Just spent a couple of hours (eight to ten) with Miss Mary Emerson at Holbrook's. 

The wittiest and most vivacious woman that I know, certainly that woman among my acquaintance whom it is most profitable to meet, the least frivolous, who will most surely provoke to good conversation and the expression of what is in you. She is singular, among women at least, in being really and perseveringly interested to know what thinkers think. 

She relates herself surely to the intellectual where she goes. It is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiarity that she, more surely than any other woman, gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality, and is not prevented by any intellectuality in it, as women commonly are. 

In short, she is a genius, as woman seldom is, reminding you less often of her sex than any woman whom I know. In that sense she is capable of a masculine appreciation of poetry and philosophy. I never talked with any other woman who I thought accompanied me so far in describing a poetic experience. 

Miss Fuller is the only woman I think of in this connection, and of her rather from her fame than from any knowledge of her. 

Miss Emerson expressed to-night a singular want of respect for her own sex, saying that they were frivolous almost without exception, that woman was the weaker vessel, etc.; that into what ever family she might go, she depended more upon the "clown " for society than upon the lady of the house. Men are more likely to have opinions of their own. 

The cattle-train came down last night from Vermont with snow nearly a foot thick upon it. It is as if, in the fall of the year, a swift traveller should come out of the north with snow upon his coat. So it snows. Such, some years, may be our first snow. 

Just in proportion to the outward poverty is the inward wealth.  In cold weather fire burns with a clearer flame.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1851

The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety. Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart . . . In cold weather fire burns with a clearer flame. See November 27, 1853 ("Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now."

Finding yourself yoked to Matter and to Time. See September 7, 1851 ("I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it"); February 5, 1852 ("Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. The world may perchance reach its end for us in a profounder thought, and Time itself run down."); September 24, 1859 ("Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created.") and There was an artist in the city of Kouroo ("As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way")

Not a mosquito left. Not an insect. Crickets gone into winter quarters. See November 13, 1858 ("Of course frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs."); See also November 12, 1851 ("The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes.")  and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November

Just spent a couple of hours (eight to ten) with Miss Mary Emerson. See November 14. 1851 ("Was introduced to two young women.")

The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. See November 9, 1851 ("To-day the mountains seen from the pasture above are dark blue, so dark that they look like new mountains and make a new impression, and the intervening town of Acton is seen against them in a new relation, a new neighborhood.");  March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top . . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Mountains in the Horizon

I see snow on the Peterboro hills, reflecting the sun. See February 21,1855 ("I look at the Peterboro mountains with my glass from Fair Haven Hill. I think that there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them.")

Instead that I drive my cattle up in May, I turn my eyes that way. My eyes pasture there . . . The grass they feed on never withers. See October 22, 1857 ("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? . . . My eyes it is alone that wander to those blue pastures, which no drought affects.")

The cattle-train came down last night from Vermont with snow nearly a foot thick upon it. See February 21, 1855 ("I see a train go by . . . from somewhere up country. . . thickly and evenly crusted with unspotted snow . . . It affected me as when a traveller comes into the house with snow on his coat, when I did not know it was snowing.")

Such, some years, may be our first snow.  See November 13, 1858 (“We looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight, — only there was no moon.") See also note to November 29, 1856 ("This the first snow.")

November 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  November 13

Now is there nothing

but the echo of your steps

over frozen ground.

In this cold weather

 your deep inward fires burn

 with a clearer flame.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, In cold weather a clearer flame.

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

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