To the sweet-gale meadow or swamp up Assabet.

December 31. 

Thermometer at 7.45 a. m., -1°, yet even more vapor is rising from the open water below my boat's place than on the 29th, when it was -15°. 

The wind is southwesterly, i. e. considerably south of west. This shows that fog over the water is a phenomenon of the morning chiefly, as well in winter as in summer. You will see a fog over the water in a winter morning, though the temperature may be considerably higher than at midday when no fog is seen. 

There has evidently been a slight fog generally in the night, and the trees are white with it. The crystals are directed southwesterly, or toward the wind. I think that these crystals are particularly large and numerous, and the trees (willows) particularly white, next to the open water spaces, where the vapor even now is abundantly rising. 

Is this fog in the night occasioned by the cold earth condensing the moisture which a warmer wind has brought to us?

At 10 a. m., thermometer 18°.

December 30, 2018

I see no vapor from the water. 

Crows yesterday flitted silently, if not ominously, over the street, just after the snow had fallen, as if men, being further within, were just as far off as usual. This is a phenomenon of both cold weather and snowy. You hear nothing; you merely see these black apparitions, though they come near enough to look down your chimney and scent the boiling pot, and pass between the house and barn. 

Just saw moved a white oak, Leighton's, some five inches in diameter, with a frozen mass of earth some five or five and a half feet in diameter and two plus thick. It was dug round before the frost, — a trench about a foot wide and filled with stalks, etc., — and now pried up with levers till on a level with the ground, then dragged off. It would not have cost half so much if a sloping path had been dug to it on one side so that the drag could have been placed under it in the hole and another dug at the hole it was removed to, — unless the last were planked over and it was dragged on to it. 

They were teaming ice before sunrise (from Sam Barrett's Pond) on the morning of the 29th, when the thermometer was 16 or 20 degrees below. Cold work, you would say. Yet some say it is colder in thawing weather, if you have to touch the ice. 

P. M. — To the sweet-gale meadow or swamp up Assabet. 

I notice that one or more of the terminal leafets remain on the branches of the flowering fern commonly. 

See where probably a shrike (do I ever see a small hawk in winter ?) has torn a small bird in pieces and its slate-colored down and its feathers have been blown far and wide over the snow. 

There is a great deal of hemlock scales scattered over the recent snow (at the Hemlocks), evidently by birds on the trees, and the wind has blown them south east, — scales, seeds, and cones, — and I see the tracks of small birds that have apparently picked the seeds from the snow also. It may have been done by gold finches. I see a tree sparrow hopping close by, and perhaps they eat them on the snow. Some of the seeds have blown at least fifteen rods southeast. So the hemlock seed is important to some birds in the winter. 

All the sound witch-hazel nuts that I examine are empty. 

How vain to try to teach youth, or anybody, truths ! They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready. I do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to show what it amounts to. A hundred boys at college are drilled in physics and metaphysics, languages, etc. There may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old perchance, who approaches the subject from a similar point of view to his teachers, but as for the rest, and the most promising, it is like agricultural chemistry to so many Indians. They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons. The young men, being young, necessarily listen to the lec turer in history, just as they do to the singing of a bird.

They expect to be affected by something he may say. It is a kind of poetic pabulum and imagery that they get. Nothing comes quite amiss to their mill. 

I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations. 

The oblong-conical sterile flower-buds or catkins of the sweet-gale, half a dozen at the end of each black twig, dark-red, oblong-conical, spotted with black, and about half an inch long, are among the most interesting buds of the winter. The leaf-buds are comparatively minute. The white edges of their scales and their regular red and black colors make the imbrication of the bud very distinct. The sterile and fertile flowers are not only on distinct plants, but they commonly grow in distinct patches. Sometimes I detect the one only for a quarter of a mile, and then the other begins to prevail, or both may be found together. It grows along the wet edge of banks and the river and in open swamps. 

The mulleins are full of minute brown seeds, which a jar sprinkles over the snow, and [they] look black there; also the primrose, of larger brown seeds, which rattle out in the same manner. 

One of the two large docks, perhaps obtusifolius, commonly holds its seeds now, but they are very ready to fall. (Mainly one-seeded; vide three-ribbed goldenrod meadow.) 

There appears to be not much (compared with the fall) seed left on the common or gray goldenrod, its down being mostly gone, and the seed is attached to that.

Potentilla Norvegica appears to have some sound seed in its closed heads. 

The very gray flattish heads of the calamint are quite full of minute dark-brown seed. 

The conical heads of the cone-flower also are full of long blackish seeds. Both the last drop their seeds on being inverted and shaken. 

I see also the yellow lily (L. Canadense) pods with its three now gray divisions spreading open like the petals of a flower, and more than half the great red flattish triangularish or semicircularish seeds gone. The pod boys throw with a humming sound. 

Even the sidesaddle-flower, where it shows its head above the snow, now gray and leathery, dry, is covered beneath its cap with pretty large close-set light-brown seeds. 

I see one or more sedges with seeds yet, one apparently the Carex debilis, if it is not flava? 

A man may be old and infirm. What, then, are the thoughts he thinks? what the life he lives? They and it are, like himself, infirm. But a man may be young, athletic, active, beautiful. Then, too, his thoughts will be like his person. They will wander in a living and beautiful world. If you are well, then how brave you are! How you hope! You are conversant with joy! A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggerate the importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters. Do you suppose they were a race of consumptives and dyspeptics who in vented Grecian mythology and poetry? The poet's words are, "You would almost say the body thought!" I quite say it. I trust we have a good body then.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 31, 1859

Thermometer at 7.45 a. m., -1°, yet even more vapor is rising from the open water . . . wind is southwesterly, i. e. considerably south of west. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The weather, New Year's Eve

There has evidently been a slight fog generally in the night, and the trees are white with it. The crystals are directed southwesterly, or toward the wind. See December 31, 1855 ("It is one of the mornings of creation, and the trees, shrubs, etc., etc., are covered with a fine leaf frost, as if they had their morning robes on, seen against the sun. There has been a mist in the night . . . This accounts for the frost on the twigs. It consists of minute leaves, the longest an eighth of an inch, all around the twigs, but longest commonly on one side, in one instance the southwest side.")

Crows yesterday flitted silently, if not ominously, over the street. See December 15, 1855 ("How like a bird of ill omen the crow behaves!") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

They were teaming ice before sunrise (from Sam Barrett's Pond) on the morning of the 29th, when the thermometer was 16 or 20 degrees below. See  January 10, 1859 ("At Sam Barrett’s Pond, where Joe Brown is now get ting his ice, I think I see about ten different freezings in ice some fifteen or more inches thick. Perhaps the successive cold nights might be discovered recorded in each cake of ice."); January 30, 1854 (Sometimes one of those great cakes of green ice from Walden or Sam Barrett's Pond slips from the ice-man's sled in the street and lies there like a great emerald, an object of interest to all travellers)

There is a great deal of hemlock scales scattered over the recent snow (at the Hemlocks), evidently by birds on the trees. See January 14, 1857 ("Up Assabet on ice . . . Hemlock seeds are scattered over the snow."); January 20, 1860 ("The snow and ice under the hemlocks is strewn with cones and seeds and tracked with birds and squirrels. What a bountiful supply of winter food is here provided for them!") See also November 1. 1853 ("As I paddle under the Leaning Hemlocks, the breeze rustles the boughs, and showers of their fresh winged seeds come wafted down to the water and are carried round and onward in the great eddy there.") and note to October 13, 1859 ("The hemlock seed is now in the midst of its fall, some of it, with the leaves, floating on the river. The cones, being thus expanded, are more conspicuous on the trees.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, at the Leaning Hemlocks

Sweet-gale grows along the wet edge of banks and the river and in open swamps. See November 29, 1857 (" Going through a partly frozen meadow . . .i, scraping through the sweet-gale, I am pleasantly scented with its odoriferous fruit."); December 19, 1850 ("I find the sweet-gale (Myrica) by the river also."); December 14, 1850 ("I find a low, branching shrub frozen into the edge of the ice, with a fine spicy scent . . .. When I rub the dry-looking fruit in my hands, it feels greasy and stains them a permanent yellow, which I cannot wash out. It lasts several days, and my fingers smell medicinal. I conclude that it is sweetgale, and we name the island Myrica Island."); January 31, 1854 ("In the winter, when there are no flowers and leaves are rare, even large buds are interesting and somewhat exciting. I go a-budding like a partridge. I am always attracted at this season by the buds of the swamp-pink, the poplars, and the sweet-gale.");  February 9, 1854 ("I have brought home some alder and sweet-gale and put them in water.") See also April 13, 1860 (“It distinctly occurred to me that, perhaps, if I came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, I might discover something else interesting.”) and note to April 30, 1852 ("The sweet gale is in blossom.")

The sidesaddle-flower, where it shows its head above the snow. Sarracenia purpurea, also known as the purple pitcherplant or northern pitcher plant, the only pitcherplant native to New England. See note to June 12, 1856 ("Sidesaddle flower numerously out now.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant

The poet's words are, "You would almost say the body thought!" I quite say it. See November 9, 1851 ("Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); See also September 2, 1851 ("Expression is the act of the whole man.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A body awake in the world.

Elegy on Mistress Elizabeth Drury

By John Donne (1572–1631)

SHE, of whose soul, if we may say, ’twas gold, Her body was the Electrum, and did hold Many degrees of that; we understood Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,         5 That one might almost say, her body thought.