Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape

November 29

I dug for frogs at Heart-leaf Pond, but found none.

The ice is two inches thick there, and already, the day being warm, is creased irregularly but agreeably on the upper surface.

What is the law of these figures as on watered silks? Has it anything to do with the waves of the wind, or are they the outlines of the crystals as they originally shot, the bones of the ice?

It would be worth the while to watch some water while freezing.

***

It has been cloudy and milder this afternoon, but now I begin to see, under the clouds in the west horizon, a clear crescent of yellowish sky, and suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape - - russet fields and hillsides, evergreens and rustling oaks and single leafless trees.

In addition to the clearness of the air at this season, the light is all from one side, and, none being absorbed or dissipated in the heavens, but it being reflected both from the russet earth and the clouds, it is intensely bright, and all the limbs of a maple seen far eastward rising over a hill are wonderfully distinct and lit.

November 29, 2021

I think that we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year.  I should call it the russet afterglow of the year.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 29, 1853

It would be worth the while to watch some water while freezing. See November 11, 1858 (“Here, in the sun in the shelter of the wood, the smooth shallow water, with the stubble standing in it, is waiting for ice.  . . . The sight of such water now reminds me of ice as much as water.”)

Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape. . . .The afterglow of the year. See November 29, 1852 ("About 4 o'clock, the sun sank below some clouds, or they rose above it, and it shone out with that bright, calm, memorable light which I have elsewhere described.") . See also November 9, 1858 (“ We had a true November sunset after a dark, cloudy afternoon. The sun reached a clear stratum just before setting, beneath the dark cloud, though ready to enter another on the horizon’s edge, and a cold, yellow sunlight suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon as, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year."); November 10, 1858 ("Dark-blue or slate-colored clouds in the west, and the sun going down in them. All the light of November may be called an afterglow."); November 22, 1851 ("The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine. . . .After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire."); November 14, 1853 ("The clear, white, leafless twilight of November, and whatever more glowing sunset or Indian summer we have then is the afterglow of the year.”); November 23, 1851 ("Another such a sunset to-night as the last."); November 25, 1851 ("That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn. The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.");  December 23, 1851 (“Now the sun has quite disappeared, but the afterglow, as I may call it, apparently the reflection from the cloud beyond which the sun went down on the thick atmosphere of the horizon, is unusually bright and lasting. Long, broken clouds in the horizon, in the dun atmosphere, — as if the fires of day were still smoking there, — hang with red and golden edging like the saddle cloths of the steeds of the sun. ”)