What hieroglyphics in the winter sky!

January 27

2 p. m. — Up river to Fair Haven Pond, and return by Walden. 

Half a dozen redpolls busily picking the seeds out of the larch cones behind Monroe's. They are pretty twigs which are beaded with cones, and swing and teeter there while they perseveringly peck at them, trying now this one, now that, and sometimes appearing to pick out and swallow them quite fast. I notice no redness or carmine at first, but when the top of one's head comes between me and the sun it unexpectedly glows. 

Fair and hardly a cloud to be seen. Thermometer 28. (But it is overcast from the northwest before sun set.) 

After the January thaw we have more or less of crusted snow, i. e. more consolidated and crispy. When the thermometer is not above 32 this snow for the most part bears, — if not too deep. 

Now I see, as I am on the ice by Hubbard's meadow, some wisps of vapor in the west and southwest advancing. They are of a fine, white, thready grain, curved like skates at the end. Have we not more finely divided clouds in winter than in summer? flame-shaped, asbestos-like? I doubt if the clouds show as fine a grain in warm weather. They are wrung dry now. They are not expanded but contracted, like spicule? What hieroglyphics in the winter sky! 

Those wisps in the west advanced and increased like white flames with curving tongues, — like an aurora by day. Now I see a few hard and distinct ripple-marks at right angles with them, or parallel with the horizon, the lines indicating the ridges of the ripple-marks. These are like the abdominal plates of a snake. This occupies only a very small space in the sky. 

Looking right up overhead, I see some gauzy cloud-stuff there, so thin as to be grayish, — brain-like, finely reticulated; so thin yet so firmly drawn, membranous. These, methinks, are always seen overhead only. 

Now, underneath the flamy asbestos part, I detect an almost imperceptible rippling in a thin lower vapor, — an incipient mackerel-ling (in form). Now, nearly to the zenith, I see, not a mackerel sky, but blue and thin, blue-white, finely mixed, like fleece finely picked and even strewn over a blue ground. The white is in small roundish flocks. In a mackerel sky there is a parallelism of oblongish scales. This is so remote as to appear stationary, while a lower vapor is rapidly moving eastward. 

Such clouds as the above are the very thin advance-guard of the cloud behind. It soon comes on more densely from the northwest, and darkens all. 

No bright sunset to-night. What fine and pure reds we see in the sunset sky! Yet earth is not ransacked for dye-stuffs. It is all accomplished by the sunlight on vapor at the right angle, and the sunset sky is constant if you are at the right angle. The sunset sky is sometimes more northerly, sometimes more southerly. 

I saw one the other day occupying only the south horizon, but very fine, and reaching more than half-way to the zenith from west to east. This may either be for want of clouds or from excess of them on certain sides. 

As I go along the edge of Hubbard's Wood, on the ice, it is very warm in the sun — and calm there. There are certain spots I could name, by hill and wood sides, which are always thus sunny and warm in fair weather, and have been, for aught I know, since the world was made. What a distinction they enjoy! 

How many memorable localities in a river walk ! Here is the warm wood-side; next, the good fishing bay; and next, where the old settler was drowned when crossing on the ice a hundred years ago. It is all storied. 

I occasionally hear a musquash plunge under the ice next the shore. 

These winter days I occasionally hear the note of a goldfinch, or maybe a redpoll, unseen, passing high overhead. 

When you think that your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 27, 1860

Half a dozen redpolls busily picking the seeds out of the larch cones behind Monroe's. See January 24, 1860 ("See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder) in Dennis Swamp by railroad . . .They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse"); January 29, 1860 ("To-day I see quite a flock of the lesser redpolls eating the seeds of the alder, picking them out of the cones just as they do the larch, often head downward; and I see, under the alders, where they have run and picked up the fallen seeds, making chain-like tracks, two parallel lines.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Lesser Redpoll

There are certain spots I could name, by hill and wood sides, which are always thus sunny and warm in fair weather, and have been, for aught I know, since the world was made. See October 26, 1852 ("At this season we seek warm sunny lees and hillsides, as that under the pitch pines by Walden shore, where we cuddle and warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire, where we may get some of its reflected as well as direct heat.”); November 11, 1858 ("Now seek sunny and sheltered places as in early spring, the south side the island, for example. Certain localities are thus distinguished. And they retain this peculiarity permanently, unless it depends on a wood which may be cut. Thousands of years hence this may still be the warmest and sunniest spot in the spring and fall.")

These winter days I occasionally hear the note of a goldfinch, or maybe a redpoll, unseen, passing high overhead. See January 20, 1857 ("Heard, in the Dennis swamp by the railroad this afternoon, the peculiar goldfinch-like mew — also like some canaries — of, I think, the lesser redpoll (?)."); January 8, 1860 ("Hear the goldfinch notes (they may be linarias), and see a few on the top of a small black birch by the pond-shore, of course eating the seed. Thus they distinguish its fruit from afar. When I heard their note, I looked to find them on a birch, and lo, it was a black birch! [Were they not linarias? ]"); January 24, 1860 ("[Redpolls] are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast.")

When you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, [your walk ] is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open. See January 27, 1858  ("You can not go home yet; you stay and sit in the rain."); See also May 23, 1853 ("When the chaste and pensive eve draws on...a certain lateness ... releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. I have passed the Rubicon of staying out. I have said to myself, that way is not homeward; I will wander further from what I have called my home — to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me."); June 14, 1853 ("This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind . . . open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. Then . . . home is farther away than ever. Here is home"); June 13, 1854 ("When I have stayed out thus late many miles from home . . . I have felt that I was not far from home after all."); April 16, 1855 ('We are glad that we stayed out so late and feel no need to go home now in a hurry");  January 7, 1857 ("But alone in distant woods or fields, . . . even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this,. . . I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine")

January 27.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  January 27

When you can't persuade 

yourself not to return – then 

your moment arrives.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, What hieroglyphics in the winter sky! 

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 © 2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-600127

I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground.

March 4. 

A dull, cloudy day. P. M. — To Walden via Hubbard's Wood and foot of Cliff Hill. 

The snow has melted very rapidly the past week. There is much bare ground.

The checkerberries are revealed, — somewhat shrivelled many of them.  In Hubbard's maple swamp I see the evergreen leaves of the gold-thread as well as the mitchella and large pyrola. I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground.

In the meadow beyond I see  everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden senecio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. Who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still — or in midwinter — some green leaves which, bruised, yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in June? Nothing so realizes the summer to me now.

In the dry pasture under the Cliff Hill, the radical leaves of the johnswort are now revealed everywhere in pretty radiating wreaths flat on the ground, with leaves recurved, reddish above, green beneath, and covered with dewy drops.

I can no longer get on to the river ice. 

The ice of Walden has melted or softened so much that I sink an inch or more at every step. The upper side is white and rotten and saturated with water for four or five inches. It is now fifteen and a half inches thick, having lost about an inch and a half.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1854

The checkerberries are revealed, — somewhat shrivelled many of them. See March 10, 1855 ("Those reddening leaves, as the checkerberry, lambkill, etc., etc., which at the beginning of winter were greenish, are now a deeper red, when the snow goes off.”) Also note to May 21, 1857 (“I find checkerberries still fresh and abundant. ”)

I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground. See February 18, 1857 (“I was surprised to find how sweet the whole ground smelled when I lay flat and applied my nose to it”); March 18,1853 ("To-day first I smelled the earth.”); April 2, 1856 ("I am tempted to stretch myself on the bare ground above the Cliff, to feel its warmth in my back, and smell the earth and the dry leaves.”); May 4, 1859 ("I draw near to the land; I begin to lie down and stretch myself on it. After my winter voyage I begin to smell the land.”); May 16, 1852 ("The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose.")

March 4. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 4

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

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

Though on the back track, I draw nearer to the fox – my thoughts grow foxy.

February 5. 

The fox that invaded the farmer's poultry-yard last night came from a great distance. 

At Hubbard's blueberry swamp woods, near the bathing-place, came across a fox's track, which I think was made last night or since. The tracks were about two inches long, or a little less, by one and a half wide, shaped thus where the snow was only half an inch deep on ice:

generally from nine to fifteen inches apart longitudinally and three to four inches apart transversely. It came from the west. 

I followed it back. At first it was difficult to trace, to investigate, it, amid some rabbit tracks, of which I did not know whether they had been made before or since. It soon led out of the woods on to the ice of the meadow to a slight prominence, then turned and followed along the side of the wood, then crossed the meadow directly to the riverside just below the mouth of Nut Meadow Brook, visited a muskrat- house there and left its mark, — watered, — for, dog-like, it turned aside to every muskrat-house or the like prominence near its route and left its mark there. You could easily scent it there. 

It turned into the meadow eastward once or twice as it went up the riverside, and, after visiting another muskrat's house, where it left its manure, large and light-colored, as if composed of fir, crossed the river and John Hosmer's meadow and potato-field and the road south of Nut Meadow Bridge. (If it had been a dog it would have turned when it reached the road.) 

It was not lost then, but led straight across, through J. Hosmer's field and meadow again, and over ditch and up side-hill in the woods; and there, on the side of the hill, I could see where its tail had grazed the snow. It was then mixed with rabbit-tracks, but was easily unravelled. Passed out of the wood into J. P. Brown's land, over some mice or mole tracks, then over the middle of Brown's meadows westward, to Tarbell's meadows, till at last, by the brook, I found that it had had a companion up to that point, which turned off. 

Then I saw the large tracks of hounds on the trail. Still it held on, from straight across the road again, some way on an old dog's trail; had trodden and nosed very much about some hardhacks in the field beyond, where were a few mice-tracks, as if for food, the hound's tracks numerous with it; and so I traced it into the Ministerial Swamp, where, the snow-storm increasing, I left it, having traced it back more than a mile westward in a pretty direct course.  

Here was one track that crossed the road, — did not turn in it like a dog, — track of a wilder life. How distinct from the others! Such as was made before roads were, as if the road were a more recent track. This traveller does not turn when he strikes the trail of man.

I followed on this trail so long that my thoughts grew foxy; though I was on the back track, I drew nearer and nearer to the fox each step.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1854

Though I was on the back track, I drew nearer and nearer to the fox each step. See January 27, 1855 ("Its route was for the most part a little below the edge of the Cliff, occasionally surmounting it. At length, after going perhaps half a mile, it turned as if to descend a dozen rods beyond the juniper, and suddenly came to end. Looking closely I find the entrance (apparently) to its hole, under a prominent rock . . . I had never associated that rock with a fox’s den, though perhaps I had sat on it many a time.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

Though on the back track

I draw nearer to the fox – 

my thoughts grow foxy.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, on the back track

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/hdt540205

I am detained to contemplate Hubbard's hillside.

February 5

The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day.

The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night. The oaks bare of leaves on Hubbard's hillside are now a light gray in the sun, and their boughs, seen against the pines behind, are a very agreeable maze.

The stems of the white pines also are quite gray at this distance, with their lichens. The boughs, feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove, as if both the silvery-lighted and greenish bough and the shadowy intervals of the shade behind belong to one tree.

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.

I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1852

The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day. See February 4, 1852 ("Coming home through the village by this full moonlight, . . . the sky is the most glorious blue I ever beheld, even a light blue on some sides, as if I actually saw into day."); January 21, 1853 (''The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day — is an everlasting surprise to me."); May 11, 1853 ("Blue is the color of the day, and the sky is blue by night as well as by day, because it knows no night.")

The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night. See September 10, 1851 ("As I watch the groves on the meadow opposite our house, I see how differently they look at different hours of the day."); February 9, 1852 ("Objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.”) See also January 13, 1859 ("I can see about a quarter of a mile through the mist, and when, later, it is somewhat thinner, the woods, the pine woods, at a distance are a dark-blue color."); January 18, 1852 ("The pines, some of them, seen through this fine driving snow, have a bluish hue."); January 18, 1859 ("When the fog was a little thinner, so that you could see the pine woods a mile or more off, they were a distinct dark blue."); February 6, 1852 (A mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker and more primitive.); February 7, 1859 ("Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter."); February 7, 1856 (" During the rain the air is thick, the distant woods bluish, and the single trees on the hill, under the dull mist-covered sky, remarkably distinct and black.")

Feathery boughs, of the white pines, tier above tier, reflect a silvery light against the darkness of the grove. See February 4, 1852 ("Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually. . . The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them.") and note to December 8, 1855 ("the silvery sheen . . . from masses of white pine needles.")

Time never passes so rapidly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in recording my thoughts. See  January 27, 1858 ("Time never passes so quickly and unaccountably, as when I am engaged in composition, i. e. in writing down my thoughts. Clocks seem to have been put forward."); March 8, 1859 ("Such a day as this, I. . . explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants, while the storm blows overhead, and I forget how the time is passing"); see also Walden  ("Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.")

I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains. See December 16, 1859 ("[Gerard] describes according to his natural delight in the plants. It is a man's knowledge added to a child's keen joy who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends.")

Silvery-lighted boughs

and shadowy intervals

belong to one tree.

To Conantum in moonlight.

August 8.

7.30 P.M. The light from the western sky is stronger still than that of the moon, which has not yet quite filled her horns. When I hold up my hand, the west side is lighted while the side toward the moon is comparatively dark.

But now that I have put this dark wood (Hubbard's) between me and the west, I see the moonlight plainly on my paper; I am even startled by it. One star, too, - is it Venus ? - I see in the west. Starlight! that would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise.

I hear the clock striking eight faintly. I smell the late shorn meadows. And now I strike the road at the causeway. It is hard, and I hear the sound of my steps. The fireflies are not so numerous as they have been. There is no dew as yet.

The planks and railing of Hubbard's Bridge are removed. I walk over on the string-pieces, resting in the middle until the moon comes out of a cloud, that I may see my path, for between the next piers the string pieces also are removed and there is only a rather narrow plank, let down three or four feet. I essay to cross it, but it springs a little and I mistrust myself, whether I shall not plunge into the river. I put out my foot, but I am checked, as if some power had laid a hand on my breast and chilled me back. Nevertheless, I cross, stopping at first, and gain the other side.

On Conantum I sit awhile in the shade of the woods and look out on the moonlit fields. The air is warmer than the rocks now. It is perfectly warm and I am tempted to stay out all night and observe each phenomenon of the night until day dawns. I could lie out here on this pinnacle rock all night without cold.

To lie here on your back with nothing between your eye and the stars, - nothing but space, - they your nearest neighbors on that side, who could ever go to sleep under these circumstances ?

I hear the nine o'clock bell ringing in Bedford. Pleasantly sounds the voice of one village to another. Since I sat here a bright star has gone behind the stem of a tree, proving that my machine is moving, - proving it better for me than a rotating pendulum. I hear a solitary whip-poor-will, and a bullfrog on the river, - fewer sounds than in spring. The gray cliffs across the river are plain to be seen.

And now the star appears on the other side of the tree, and I must go. The woods and the separate trees cast longer shadows than by day, for the moon goes lower in her course at this season.

Some dew at last in the meadow. As I recross the string-pieces of the bridge, I see the water-bugs swimming briskly in the moonlight and scent the Roman wormwood in the potato fields.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 8, 1851

I put out my foot, but I am checked, as if some power had laid a hand on my breast and chilled me back. See December 11, 1855 (“My body is all sentient.”); August 8, 1852 ("[I]am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.")

  

The air is warmer than the rocks now. See May 16, 1851(“ Lay on a rock near a meadow, which had absorbed and retained much heat, so that I could warm my back on it, it being a cold night.”);June 11, 1851 (“The rocks do not feel warm to-night, for the air is warmest; ”);  July 16, 1850 (“The rocks retain the warmth of the sun.”); August 12, 1851 (“The sand is cool on the surface but warm two or three inches beneath, and the rocks are quite warm to the hand, so that he sits on them or leans against them for warmth.")

To lie here on your back with nothing between your eye and the stars, - nothing but space. See August 5, 1851 ("As the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more and more bright, I begin to distinguish myself, who I am and where. I become more collected and composed, and sensible of my own existence, as when a lamp is brought into a dark apartment and I see who the company are.")

August 8. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 8

 

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 © 2009-2021

Landscape histories

October 22.

I notice that the first shrubs and trees to spring up in the sand on railroad cuts in the woods are sweet-fern, birches, willows, and aspens, and pines, white and pitch; but all but the last two chiefly disappear in the thick wood that follows.  The former are the pioneers.

You may conveniently tell the age of a pine, especially white pine, by cutting off the lowest branch that is still growing and counting its rings. Then estimate or count the rings of a pine growing near in an opening, of the same height as to that branch, and add the two sums together.

Count the rings of a white pine stump in Hubbard's oak wood by railroad. Ninety-four years. So this is probably second growth.

I see how meadows were primitively kept in the state of meadow by the aid of water, - and even fire and wind.

Swamps are, of course, least changed with us,- are nearest to their primitive state of any woodland.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  October 22, 1860

See a bream swimming in that small pool by Walden cut off from the pond.

July 26. 

I see a bream swimming about in that smaller pool by Walden in Hubbard's Wood, though entirely cut off from the pond now. So they may be well off in the Wyman meadow or Pout's Nest.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 26, 1860

I see a bream swimming about in that smaller pool by Walden . . . cut off from the pond, See June 21, 1854 ("In the little meadow pool, or bay, in Hubbard's shore, I see two old pouts tending their countless young close to the shore. . . . I think also that I see the young breams in schools hovering over their nests while the old are still protecting them.")

In November, 1858 Thoreau had discovered a new species of bream in Walden pond. See November 26, 1858 (" a great many minnows about one inch long . . . shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch.”); November 27, 1858 ("I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. “);November 30, 1858 (“How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it!”)

So they may be well off in the Wyman meadow or Pout's Nest. ["Pout’s Nest": HDT's name for Wyman's Meadow near Walden. Place Names of Henry David Thoreau in Concord,] Complare June 7, 1858 ("Pouts, then, make their nests in shallow mud-holes or bays, in masses of weedy mud, or probably in the muddy bank; and the old pout hovers over the spawn or keeps guard at the entrance. Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to this meadow?")

July 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 26

See a bream swimming

in that small pool by Walden 

cut off from the pond.

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 © 2009-2021