May we measure our lives by our joys.

February 23

2 P. M. — Thermometer 56°. Wind south. 

3 P. M. — Thermometer 58° and snow almost gone. River rising. 

We have not had such a warm day since the beginning of December (which was remarkably warm). 

I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup, shepherd's purse (circular), sorrel, chickweed, cerastium, etc., revealed. 

February 23, 2019

About 4 P. M. a smart shower, ushered in by thunder and succeeded by a brilliant rainbow and yellow light from under the dark cloud in the west. Thus the first remarkable heat brings a thunder-shower. 

The words “pardall” and “libbard,” applied by Gesner to the same animal, express as much of the wild beast as any. 

I read in Brand's “Popular Antiquities  that “Bishop Stillingfleet observes, that among the Saxons of the northern nations, the Feast of the New Year was observed with more than ordinary jollity: thence , as Olaus Wormius and Scheffer observe, they reckoned their age by so many Iolas.” (Iola, to make merry. – Gothic.) 

So may we measure our lives by our joys. We have lived, not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth, but in proportion as we have enjoyed. 

February is pronounced the coldest month in the year. In B.'s “Popular Antiquities” is quoted this from the Harleian Manuscripts:

"Février de tous les mois, 

Le plus court et moins courtois.”

In the same work it is said that this saying is still current in the north of England: 

“On the first of March, 

The crows begin to search.”

Would it not apply to the crows searching for their food in our meadows, along the water's edge, a little later? 

A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread. 

Ultimately the moral is all in all, and we do not mind it if inferior truth is sacrificed to superior, as when the moralist fables and makes animals speak and act like men. It must be warm, moist, incarnated, — have been breathed on at least. 

A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, February 23. 1860

We have not had such a warm day since the beginning of December. See February 23, 1856 ("At 2 P. M. the thermometer is 47°. Whenever it is near 40 there is a speedy softening of the snow") and note to February 8. 1860 ("40° and upward may be called a warm day in the winter. We have had much of this weather for a month past, reminding us of spring.")

See the green radical leaves of the shepherd's purse. See January 7, 1855 ("The delicious soft, spring-suggesting air, how it fills my veins with life ! . . . On the slopes the ground is laid bare and radical leaves revealed, crowfoot, shepherd's-purse, clover, etc., a fresh green, and, in the meadow, the skunk-cabbage buds, with a bluish bloom, and the red leaves of the meadow saxifrage; and these and the many withered plants laid bare remind me of spring."); January 23, 1855 ("The radical leaves of the shepherd’s-purse, seen in green circles on the water-washed plowed grounds, remind me of the internal heat and life of the globe, anon to burst forth anew."); March 8, 1859 ("The shepherd's-purse radical leaves are particularly bright"); April 25, 1855 ("Shepherd's-purse will bloom to-day, the first I have noticed which has sprung from the ground this season, or of an age.")

 The first remarkable heat brings a thunder-shower. See February 14, 1861 ("A little thunder and lightning late in the afternoon. I see two flashes and hear two claps.")

A brilliant rainbow and yellow light from under the dark cloud in the west. See August 7, 1852 ("If I were to choose a time for a friend to make a passing visit to this world for the first time, in the full possession of all his faculties, perchance it would be at a moment when the sun was setting with splendor in the west, his light reflected far and wide through the clarified air after a rain, and a brilliant rainbow, as now, o'erarching the eastern sky.")

So may we measure our lives by our joys. See July 13, 1852 ("A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy.")

Crows searching for their food in our meadows, along the water's edge, a little later? See March 5, 1859 ("I see crows walking about on the ice half covered with snow in the middle of the meadows, where there is no grass, apparently to pick up the worms and other insects left there since the midwinter freshet"); March 22, 1855 ("I have noticed crows in the meadows ever since they were first partially bare, three weeks ago."); March 22, 1856 ("Many tracks of crows in snow along the edge of the open water against Merrick’s at Island. They thus visit the edge of water—this and brooks —before any ground is exposed. Is it for small shellfish?")

A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. See December 16, 1837 ("The fact will one day flower out into a truth."); August 5, 1851 ("The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”); November 9, 1851 ("Facts should be material to the mythology which I am writing; I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic.”); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samara?, tinged with his expectation.”); June 21, 1852 ("Nature has looked uncommonly bare and dry to me for a day or two. With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our own physical and corresponding moral revolutions . . . The perception of beauty is a moral test"); May 6, 1854 (“There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective.")

February 23.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 23

A brilliant rainbow –

yellow light from under the

dark cloud in the west.

A bare fact is dry –

a man has not seen a thing 

who has not felt it.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  May we measure our lives by our joys.

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 © 2009-2025

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