The Yankee belongs properly to the northern temperate fauna.

October 14.

Down the railroad before sunrise. A freight-train in the Deep Cut. The sun rising over the woods.

When the vapor from the engine rose above the woods, the level rays of the rising sun fell on it. It presented the same redness, — morning red, — inclining to saffron, which the clouds in the eastern horizon do.

There was but little wind this morning, yet I heard the telegraph harp. It does not require a strong wind to wake its strings; it depends more on its direction and the tension of the wire apparently. A gentle but steady breeze will often call forth its finest strains, when a strong but unsteady gale, blowing at the wrong angle withal, fails to elicit any melodious sound.

In the psychological world there are phenomena analogous to what zoologists call alternate reproduction, in which it requires several generations unlike each other to evolve the perfect animal. Some men's lives are but an aspiration, a yearning toward a higher state, and they are wholly misapprehended, until they are referred to, or traced through, all their metamorphoses.

We cannot pronounce upon a man's intellectual and moral state until we foresee what metamorphosis it is preparing him for.

It is said that “the working bees. are barren females. The attributes of their sex seem to consist only in their solicitude for the welfare of the new generation, of which they are the natural guardians, but not the parents.” (Agassiz and Gould.) This phenomenon is paralleled in man by maiden aunts and bachelor uncles, who perform a similar function.

“The muskrat,” according to Agassiz and Gould, “ is found from the mouth of Mackenzie's River to Florida." It is moreover of a type peculiar to temperate America. He is a native American surely. He neither dies of consumption in New England nor of fever and ague at the South and West. Thoroughly acclimated and naturalized.

“The hyenas, wild-boars, and rhinoceroses of the Cape of Good Hope have no analogues on the American continent.” At the last menagerie I visited they told me that one of the hyenas came from South America! There is something significant and interesting in the fact that the fauna of Europe and that of the United States are very similar, pointing to the fitness of this country for the settlement of Europeans.

They say, “There are . . .  many species of animals whose numbers are daily diminishing, and whose extinction may be foreseen; as the Canada deer (Wapiti), the Ibex of the Alps, the Lämmergeyer, the bison, the beaver, the wild turkey, etc.” With these, of course, is to be associated the Indian.

They say that the house-fly has followed man in his migrations.

One would say that the Yankee belonged properly to the northern temperate fauna, the region of the pines.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 14, 1851

The telegraph harp. See note to January 3, 1852 ("Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire?")

The muskrat. . . peculiar to temperate America . . .a native American surely. See December 23, 1858 ("How perfectly at home the musquash is on our river.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

Blueberries and poets

January 8.

Trees, etc., covered with a dense hoar frost. It is not leaf - like, but composed of large spiculæ —spear like — on the northeast sides of the twigs, the side from which the mist was blown. All trees are bristling with these spiculæ on that side, especially firs and arbor vitæ.


They taught us not only the use of corn and how to plant it, but also of whortleberries and how to dry them for winter, and made us baskets to put them in. We should have hesitated long to eat some kinds, if they had not set us the example, knowing by old experience that they were not only harmless but salutary. I have added a few to my number of edible berries by walking behind an Indian in Maine, who ate such as I never thought of tasting before. Of course they made a much greater account of wild fruits than we do.

It appears from the above evidence that the Indians used their dried berries commonly in the form of huckleberry cake, and also of huckleberry porridge or pudding. What we call huckleberry cake, made of Indian meal and huckleberries, was evidently the principal cake of the aborigines, and was generally known and used by them all over this part of North America, as much or more than plum-cake by us. They enjoyed it all alone ages before our ancestors heard of Indian meal or huckleberries.

We have no national cake so universal and well known as this was in all parts of the country where corn and huckleberries grew. If you had travelled here a thousand years ago, it would probably have been offered you alike on the Connecticut, the Potomac, the Niagara, the Ottawa, and the Mississippi.

Botanists have long been inclined to associate this family in some way with Mt. Ida, and, according to Tournefort arrange [ sic ] whortleberries were what the ancients meant by the vine of Mt. Ida, and the common English raspberry is called Rubus Idæus from the old Greek name. The truth of it seems to be that blueberries and raspberries flourish best in cool and airy situations on hills and mountains, and I can easily believe that something like them, at least, grows on Mt. Ida. But Mt. Monadnock is as good as Mt. Ida, and probably better for blueberries, though it does not [ sic ] mean “bad rock,” — but the worst rocks are the best for blueberries and for poets.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 8, 1861

The Indians used their dried berries commonly in the form of huckleberry cake, and also of huckleberry porridge or pudding. It would probably have been offered you alike on the Connecticut, the Potomac, the Niagara, the Ottawa, and the Mississippi. See December 30, 1860 ("The Whortleberry Family"); January 3, 1861 ("The berries which I celebrate appear to have a range -- most of them — very nearly coterminous with what has been called the Algonquin Family of Indians, whose territories are now occupied by the Eastern, Middle, and Northwestern States and the Canadas")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 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 ©  2009-2023

lichenous thoughts

December 29.

Now it is like a street in Nova Zembla
The cars are nowhere.
True winter birds, these winged snowballs.
Some lichenous thoughts still adhere to us.

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

There is something of spring in all seasons.

March 8.

2.30 P. M. — 50°. To Cliffs and Walden.

See a small flock of grackles on the willow-row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering! for it cannot be called singing, and no improvement from age to age perhaps. Yet, as nature is a becoming, their notes may become melodious at last. At length, on my very near approach, they fit suspiciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. 

This is the first flock of blackbirds I have chanced to see, though Channing saw one the 6th. I suspect that I have seen only grackles as yet.

I saw, in Monroe's well by the edge of the river, the other day, a dozen frogs, chiefly shad frogs, which had been dead a good while. It may be that they get into that sort of spring-hole in the fall to hibernate, but for some reason die; or perhaps they are always jumping into it in the summer, but at that season are devoured by some animal before they infest the water.

Now and for some days I see farmers walking about their fields, knocking to pieces and distributing the cow dung left there in the fall, that so, with the aid of the spring rains, they fertilize a larger surface and more equally.

To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude; for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places, always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little further every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing [in] the maples in midwinter in some days, perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life or motion or growth is to be detected every winter.

There is something of spring in all seasons. There is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be new growth of the spring. At the pool on the south side of Hubbard's Grove, I notice that the crowfoot, i. e. buttercup, leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. 

Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere. 

In some respects our spring, in its beginning, fluctuates a whole month, so far as it respects ice and snow, walking, sleighing, etc., etc.; for some years winter may be said to end about the first of March, and other years it may extend into April.

That willow-clump by railroad at Walden looks really silvery. 

I see there that moles have worked for several days. There are several piles on the grass, some quite fresh and some made before the last rain. One is as wide as a bushel-basket and six inches high; contains a peck at least. When I carefully remove this dirt, I cannot see, and can scarcely detect by feeling, any looseness in the sod beneath where the mole came to the surface and discharged all this dirt. I do feel it, to be sure, but it is scarcely perceptible to my fingers. The mole must have filled up this doorway very densely with earth, perhaps for its protection.

Those small green balls in the Pout's-Nest — and in the river, etc. — are evidently the buds by which the Utricularia vulgaris are propagated. I find them attached to the root as well as adrift.

I noticed a very curious phenomenon in this pond. It is melted for two or three rods around the open side, and in many places partly filled with a very slender thread-like spike-rush (apparently Eleocharis tenuis?) which is matted more or less horizontally and floating, and is much bleached being killed. In this fine matting I noticed perfectly straight or even cuts a rod or more in length,just as if one had severed this mass of fine rush as it lay [?] with some exceeding sharp instrument. However, you could not do it with a scythe, though you might with scissors, if it were ruled. It is as if you were to cover a floor with very fine flaccid grass and tread it to one inch in thickness, and then cut this web straight across. The fact is, this floating matting (it also rests partly on soft mud) was not cut at all, but pulled apart on a straight line, producing the exact appearance of a cut, as if you were to pull a piece of felt apart by a force on each side and yet leave the edge as straight as if it had been cut. It had been frozen in, and when the ice cracked it was in an instant thus pulled apart, without further disturbing the relative position of the fibres. I first conjectured this, and then saw the evidence of it for, glancing my eye along such a cut, which ran at right angles with the shore, I saw that it exactly corresponded at its termination to an old crack in the ice which was still unmelted and which continued its course exactly. This in the ice had been filled and cemented so as to look like a white seam. Would this account for such a crack being continued into the meadow itself, as I have noticed?

I meet some Indians just camped on Brister's Hill. As usual, they are chiefly concerned to find where black ash grows, for their baskets. This is what they set about to ascertain as soon as they arrive in any strange neighborhood.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 8, 1860


See a small flock of grackles on the willow-row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering! See March 9, 1859 ("C. also saw a skater-insect on the 7th, and a single blackbird flying over Cassandra Ponds, which he thought a grackle."); March 13, 1859 ("Probably grackles have been seen some days. I think I saw them on the 11th?"): March 14, 1859 ("I see a large flock of grackles searching for food along the water's edge, just below Dr. Bartlett's. Some wade in the water. They are within a dozen rods of me and the road.It must be something just washed up that they are searching for, for the water has just risen and is still rising fast.. . .When a grackle sings, it is as if his mouth were full of cotton, which he was trying to spit out"); March 18, 1858 ("Each new year is a surprise to us.We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence... . The blackbird — probably grackle this time —wings his way direct above the swamp northward, with a regular tchuck, carrier haste, calling the summer months along,"); March 19, 1858 ("Met Channing and walked on with him to what we will call Grackle Swamp. . .In the swamp, see grackles, four or five, with the light ring about eye, — their bead eyes. They utter only those ineffectual split notes, no conqueree"); March 29, 1858 ("I see what I suppose is the female rusty grackle; black body with green reflections and purplish-brown head and neck, but I notice no light iris"); March 29, 1857 ("When I have put my boat in its harbor, I hear that sign-squeaking blackbird, and, looking up, see half a dozen on the top of the elm at the foot of Whiting’s lot. . .on the whole I think them grackles (?). Possibly those I heard on the 18th were the same ?? Does the red-wing ever make a noise like a rusty sign?")

I saw, in Monroe's well by the edge of the river, the other day, a dozen frogs, chiefly shad frogs, which had been dead a good while. See February 26, 1856 ("I see at bottom of the mill brook, below Emerson’s, two dead frogs. The brook has part way yet a snowy bridge over it. Were they left by a mink, or killed by cold and ice? ")

At the pool on the south side of Hubbard's Grove, I notice that the crowfoot, i. e. buttercup, leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced. See November 8, 1858 (The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence. ""); January 9, 1853 ("On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface. I dig one up with a stick, and, pulling it to pieces, I find deep in the centre of the plant, just beneath the ground, surrounded by all the tender leaves that are to precede it, the blossom-bud, about half is big as the head of a pin, perfectly white. There it patiently sits, or slumbers, how full of faith, informed of a spring which the world has never seen.”); February 18, 1857 ("The snow is nearly all gone, and it is so warm and springlike that I walk over to the hill, listening for spring birds. The roads are beginning to be settled. I step excited over the moist mossy ground, dotted with the green stars of thistles, crowfoot, etc., the outsides of which are withered."); February 23, 1860 ("I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup"); February 28, 1857 ("At the Cliff, the tower-mustard, early crowfoot, and perhaps buttercup appear to have started of late.")


Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places. See April 8, 1859 ("Cold as it is, and has been for several weeks, in all exposed places, I find it unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the sun shines. And so it always is in April. The cold wind from the northwest seems distinct and separable from the air here warmed by the sun."); April 26, 1857 ("How well adapted we are to our climate! In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates."); May 10, 1857 ("But now at last I do not go seeking the warm, sunny, and sheltered coves; the strong wind is enlivening and agreeable.”) May 22, 1854 (“I rest in the orchard, doubtful whether to sit in shade or sun.”); May 22, 1857 ("Is it not summer when we do not go seeking sunny and sheltered places, but also love the wind and shade? "); October 26, 1852 ("At this season we seek warm sunny lees and hillsides "); November 18, 1857 ("Now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places.")

That willow-clump by railroad at Walden looks really silvery. See  March 7, 1855 ("Methinks the buds of the early willows, the willows of the railroad bank, show more of the silvery down than ten days ago")

I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly,

May 2. 

May 2, 2019

Small pewee and young lackey caterpillars. 

I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honey bees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

Those swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river, sometimes constantly falling to and touching the surface and then rising again. When at rest they are seen to be blackish-winged, but flying they look light-colored. They flutter low and continuously over the same place. Theirs is a sort of dance. 

A peetweet and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. The river seems really inhabited when the peetweet is back and those little light-winged millers (?). This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. He is perched on the accustomed rock. Its note peoples the river, like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. 

I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun, against the dark-brown twigs of the wood, though these leafets are yet but thinly dispersed. It is very enlivening. 

I heard yesterday, and perhaps for several days, the soft purring sound of what I take to be the Rana palustris, breeding, though I did not this time see the frog. 

I feel no desire to go to California or Pike's Peak, but I often think at night with inexpressible satisfaction and yearning of the arrowheadiferous sands of Concord. I have often spent whole afternoons, especially in the spring, pacing back and forth over a sandy field, looking for these relics of a race. This is the gold which our sands yield. 

The soil of that rocky spot on Simon Brown's land is quite ash-colored — now that the sod is turned up — by Indian fires, with numerous pieces of coal in it. There is a great deal of this ash-colored soil in the country. We do literally plow up the hearths of a people and plant in their ashes. The ashes of their fires color much of our soil.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 2, 1859

Small pewee. See April 30, 1856 (“I hear the small pewee’s tche-vet’ repeatedly.”);  May 3, 1854 (“What I have called the small pewee on the willow by my boat, — quite small, uttering a short tchevet from time to time); May 3, 1855 “Small pewee; tchevet, with a jerk of the head.”); May 5, 1858 ("Saw and heard the small pewee yesterday.”); May 7, 1852 (“he first small pewee sings now che-vet, or rather chirrups chevet, tche-vet — a rather delicate bird with a large head and two white bars on wings. . . . Now I remember the yellowbird comes when the willows begin to leave out. (And the small pewee on the willows also.) ”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Small Pewee

I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honey bees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. See  May 6, 1858 (“The Salix rostrata staminate flowers are of very peculiar yellow, — a bright, what you might call yellow yellow.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Willows on the Causeway

Swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river. Compare May 1, 1854 ("The water is strewn with myriads of wrecked shad-flies, erect on the surface, with their wings up like so many schooners all headed one way. . . .”); May 1, 1858 (“Ephemerae quite common over the water.”); May 4, 1856 ("Shad-flies on the water, schooner-like.”)

The tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly. See May 2, 1855 ("The young aspens are the first of indigenous trees conspicuously leafed”); May 4, 1856 ("The aspen there [the Island]just begun to leaf."); May 5, 1858 ("The aspen leaves at Island to-day appear as big as a nine pence suddenly"); May 17, 1860 ("Standing in the meadow near the early aspen at the island, I hear the first fluttering of leaves, - a peculiar sound, at first unaccountable to me”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau the Aspens.

A peetweet and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. See May 2, 1858 (“Peetweet on a rock”); April 30, 1856 (“As I go along the Assabet, a peetweet skims away from the shore.”); May 4, 1856 (“See a peetweet on Dove Rock, which just peeps out. As soon as the rocks begin to be bare the peetweet comes and is seen teetering on them and skimming away from me.”)

Five minutes before 3 P. M.

February 3

Five minutes before 3 P. M., Father died.

After a sickness of some two years, going down-town in pleasant weather, doing a little business from time to time, hoeing a little in the garden, etc., Father took to his chamber January 13th, and did not come down again. Most of the time previously he had coughed and expectorated a great deal. Latterly he did not cough, but continued to raise. He continued to sit up in his chamber till within a week before he died. He sat up for a little while on the Sunday four days before he died. Generally he was very silent for many months. He was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy that we should not have been aware that he was dying, though we were sitting around his bed, if we had not watched very closely.

I have touched a body which was flexible and warm, yet tenantless, — warmed by what fire? When the spirit that animated some matter has left it, who else, what else, can animate it? 

How enduring are our bodies, after all! The forms of our brothers and sisters, our parents and children and wives, lie still in the hills and fields round about us, not to mention those of our remoter ancestors, and the matter which composed the body of our first human father still exists under another name.

When in sickness the body is emaciated, and the expression of the face in various ways is changed, you perceive unexpected resemblances to other members of the same family; as if within the same family there was a greater general similarity in the framework of the face than in its filling up and clothing. 

Father first came to this town to live with his father about the end of the last century, when he was about twelve years old. (His father died in 1801.) Afterward he went to the Lexington Academy (Parker’s ?) a short time, perhaps a year, then into Deacon White’s store as clerk; then learned the dry—goods business in a store in Salem. (Aunt J. shows me a letter from him directly after his going there, dated 1807.) Was with a Hathaway. When about twenty-one, opened a store for himself on the corner where the town house stands of late years, a yellow building, now moved and altered into John Keyes’s house. 

He did so well there-that Isaac Hurd went into partnership with him, to his injury. They soon dissolved, but could not settle without going to law, when my father gained the case, bringing his books into court. Then, I think, he went to Bangor and set up with Billings, selling to Indians (among others); married; lived in Boston; writes thence to aunts at Bangor in 1815 with John on his knee; moved to Concord (where I was born), then to Chelmsford, to Boston, to Concord again, and here remained. Mother first came to Concord about the same age that father did, but a little before him. 

As far as I know, Father, when he died, was not only one of the oldest men in the middle of Concord, but the one perhaps best acquainted with the inhabitants, and the local, social, and street history of the middle of the town, for the last fifty years. He belonged in a peculiar sense to the village street; loved to sit in the shops or at the post-office and read the daily papers. I think that he remembered more about the worthies (and unworthies) of Concord village forty years ago, both from dealing as a trader and from familiar intercourse with them, than any one else. 

Our other neighbors, now living or very recently dead, have either come to the town more recently than he, or have lived more aloof from the mass of the inhabitants. 

Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserved to be remembered,—using only the terms “miserable,” “wretched,” “pitiful,” and the like. In writing their histories of this country they have so hastily disposed of this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it) which littered and defiled the shore and the interior. But even the indigenous animals are inexhaustibly interesting to us. How much more, then, the indigenous man of America! 

If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in these woods, and they had their fancies and beliefs connected with the sea and the forest, which concern us quite as much as the fables of Oriental nations do. 

It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man, or gold-digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle. One tells you with more contempt than pity that the Indian had no religion, holding up both hands, and this to all the shallow-brained and bigoted seems to mean something important, but it is commonly a distinction without a difference. Pray how much more religion has the historian? If Henry Ward Beecher knows so much more about God than another, if he has made some discovery of truth in this direction, I would thank him to publish it in Silliman’s Journal, with as few flourishes as possible. 

It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. The thought of a so-called savage tribe is generally far more just than that of a single civilized man. 

I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sick-bed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things. 

The writer must to some extent inspire himself. Most but when all are arranged, some life and color will be reflected on them from the mature and successful lines; they will appear to pulsate with fresh life, and he will be enabled to eke out their slumbering sense, and make them worthy of their neighborhood. In his first essay on a given theme, he produces scarcely more than a frame and groundwork for his sentiment and poetry. Each clear thought that he attains to draws in its train many divided thoughts or perceptions. 

The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation. 

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, February 3, 1859

Father first came to this town to live with his father about the end of the last century, when he was about twelve years old. See December 28, 1858 ("Father says that he and his sisters (except Elizabeth) were born in Richmond Street, Boston, between Salem and Hanover Streets, on the spot where a bethel now stands, on the left hand going from Hanover Street. They had milk of a neighbor, who used to drive his cows to and from the Common every day.”)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 3

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 ©  2009-2023

The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on.

March 16.

P. M. — To Conantum. 

A thick mist, spiriting away the snow. Very bad walking. This fog is one of the first decidedly spring signs; also the withered grass bedewed by it and wetting my feet. A still, foggy, and rather warm day. 

I heard this morning, also, quite a steady warbling from tree sparrows on the dripping bushes, and that peculiar drawling note of a hen, who has this peevish way of expressing her content at the sight of bare ground and mild weather. The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on. 

How conversant the Indian who lived out of doors, who lay on the ground, must have been with mouse-ear leaves, pine-needles, mosses, and lichens, which form the crust of the earth. No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names. 

I walk in muddy fields, hearing the tinkling of new born rills. Where the melted snow has made a swift rill in the rut of a cart-path, flowing over an icy bottom and between icy banks, I see, just below a little fall of one inch, a circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter, slowly revolving but never moving off. The swift stream at the fall appears to strike one side, as it might the side of a water-wheel, and so cause it to revolve, but in the angle between this and the fall, and half an inch distant, is another circle of bubbles, individually larger and more evanescent, only half an inch in diameter, revolving very rapidly in the opposite direction. The laws, perchance, by which the world was made, and according to which the systems revolve, are seen in full operation in a rill of melted snow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1858

The crowing of cocks and the cawing of crows tell the same story. See January 12, 1855 ("Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . .It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs.");  February 16, 1855 ("A thick fog without rain. Sounds sweet and musical through this air, as crows, cocks, and striking on the rails at a distance.”); December 17, 1855 ("the sound of cock-crowing is so sweet, and I hear the sound of the sawmill even at the door, also the cawing of crows."). See alsoA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: The crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows

The ice is soggy and dangerous to be walked on. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-Out

No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names. See March 5, 1858 ("It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view."); January 15, 1853 ("Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. . ."); May 21, 1851 ("You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.")

I walk in muddy fields, hearing the tinkling of new born rills See March 16, 1854 ("Willows and alders along watercourses all alive these mornings and ringing with the trills and jingles and warbles of birds, even as the waters have lately broken loose and tinkle below.") See also February 18, 1855 ("I listen ever for something springlike in the notes of birds, some peculiar tinkling notes."); March 7, 1859 ("I walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground"); March 13, 1853.("Listening for early birds, I hear a faint tinkling sound in the leafless woods, as if a piece of glass rattled against a stone."); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”); March 18, 1858 ("The note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath."). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Braided ripples of melting snow

A circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter. See February 13, 1852 ("I now sit by the little brook in Conant's meadow, where it falls over an oak rail . . .. Bubbles on the surface make a coarse foam. . . .")

A musquash sitting on thin ice on the Assabet.

March 5.

Went to hear a Chippeway Indian, a Doctor Mung-somebody, —assisted by a Penobscot, who said nothing. He made the audience laugh unintentionally by putting an m after the word too, which he brought in continually and unnecessarily, and almost after this word alone, emphasizing and prolonging that sound, as, “They carried them home toom-ah,” as if it were a necessity for bringing in so much of the Indian language for a relief to his organs or a compensation for “twisting his jaws about,” as he said, in his attempt to speak English. So Polis and the Penobscots continually put the um_ or em to our words, — as paddlum, littlum, etc. There was so much of unsubdued Indian accent resounding through his speech, so much of the “bow-arrow tang!” I have no doubt it was a great relief to him and seemed the word best pronounced

He thought his ancestors came from Asia, and was sure that Behring’s Strait was no obstacle, since Indians of his tribe cross Lakes Huron and Superior in birch-bark canoes. Thought Indians might be Jews, because of a similarity of customs. When a party of his warriors wish to tell an advanced party concealed in a dangerous position to retreat, they shoot an arrow close past them; if to stay, they shoot an arrow over their heads; and exactly this, he declared, the Jews did. I inferred from his statement that the totem (a deer in his case) takes the place of the surname with us, for he said that his children would have the same totem. He did not use this word. Said they had a secret fraternity like the Masonic, by which they knew and befriended members anywhere.

Had some ornaments of snake-skins, four or five inches broad, with a bead edging, —broad belts, — worn diagonally across the breast or for a garter, or for a very large and broad string handle to a bag, passing round the neck. Also an otter-skin pouch. The head left on was evidently very convenient as well as important, to hold it when caught under the belt. It was thus very quickly returned to its place; Had head, feet, and all. Had on an eagle-feather cap, i. e. a band with long black eagles’ feathers standing from it. This not worn every day. A buffalo-skin blanket, worked with porcupine quills. Showed the cradle. The mother cuts a notch in the lower end for each day that passes and one at the top for each moon. If it falls into the water it floats on this. Said the first poetry made at Plymouth was suggested by the sight of this cradle swinging from a tree, viz. “Rock-a-by, baby,” etc.

 Exhibited very handsome birch-bark trays, ornamented with moose-hair in worked in the false bottom and side, representing strawberries, etc., very well. Only the white hair was not dyed. These were made without communication with the whites.

They place the feet of the child in the cradle straight, or as they would have them. Indians step with the feet straight, but whites, who toe out, seem to have no use for any toes but the great one in walking. Indian women are brought up to toe in. It is improper for them to toe out. Shot small arrows through a blow gun very straight at an apple a rod off, lodging them all in it. The gun was of elder with the pith out, about six feet long; the arrows, quite slender, of hard wood, with a large and dense cylindrical mass of thistle-down at what is commonly the feathered end.

The Penobscot, who chanced to be Joe Polis’s brother, told me that the shecorway of the Maine lakes was the sheldrake, and that when they call out the moose at night they imitate the voice of the cow moose. That of the bull is very different.

The former carried the cradle low down on his back with a strap round his head, and showed how the mother had both hands free and could chop wood, etc., with her infant on her back. The same blanket covered both if necessary, and the child was prevented from being smothered by the bow over its face holding up the blanket. He regretted that their marriage customs were not so good as ours, that they did not choose for  themselves but their parents for them.

We read the English poets; we study botany and zoology and geology, lean and dry as they are; and it is rare that we get a new suggestion. It is ebb-tide with the scientific reports, Professor in the chair. We would fain know something more about these animals and stones and trees around us. We are ready to skin the animals alive to come at them. Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race. How little I know of that arbor-vita’ when I have learned only what science can tell me! It is but a word. It is not a tree of life. But there are twenty words for the tree and its different parts which the Indian gave, which are not in our botanies, which imply a more practical and vital science. He used it every day. He was well acquainted with its wood, and its bark, and its leaves. No science does more than arrange what knowledge we have of any class of objects. But,‘g generally speaking, how much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are, and in his language is implied all that intimacy, as much as ours is expressed in our language. How many words in his language about a moose, or birch bark, and the like! The Indian stood nearer to wild nature than wG-1 The wildest and noblest quadrupeds, even the largest fresh-water fishes, some of the wildest and noblest birds and the fairest flowers have actually receded as we advanced, and we have but the most distant knowledge of them. A rumor has come down to us that the skin of a lion was seen and his roar heard here by an early settler. But there was a race here that slept on his skin. It was a new light when my; guide gave me Indian names for things for which had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.

 A dictionary of the Indian language reveals another and wholly new life to us. Look at the word “canoe,” - and see what a story it tells of outdoor life, with the names of all its parts and modes of using it, as our words describing the different parts and seats of a coach, —with the difference in practical knowledge between him who rides and him who walks; or at the word “wigwam,” and see how close it brings you to the ground; or “ Indian corn,” and see which race was most familiar with it. It reveals to me a life within a life, or rather a life without a life, as it were threading the woods between our towns still, and yet we can never tread in its trail. The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as heaven is.

I saw yesterday a musquash sitting on thin ice on the Assabet, by a hole which it had kept open, gnawing a white root. Now and then it would dive and bring up more. I waited for it to dive again, that I might run nearer to it meanwhile, but it sat ten minutes all wet in the freezing wind while my feet and ears grew numb, so tough it is; but at last I got quite near. When I frightened it, it dove with a sudden slap of its tail. I feel pretty sure that this is an involuntary movement, the tail by the sudden turn of the body being brought down on the water or ice like a whip-lash.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 5, 1858

I saw yesterday a musquash sitting on thin ice.See March 6, 1854 ("The bare water here and there on the meadow begins to look smooth, and I look to see it rippled by a muskrat. ")

Surveying the W farm.

December 30

Surveying the W farm. 

Parker, the Shaker that was, my assistant, says that the first year he came to live with W, he worked on the farm, and that when he was digging potatoes on that jog (of about an acre) next to the site of the old Lee house, he found snakes' eggs in many hills, perhaps half a dozen together, he thinks as many as seventy in all. He did not perceive that they were united as he hoed them out, but may have separated them. When he broke the eggs, the young snakes, two or three inches long, wriggled out and about. 

Had the experience of losing a pin and then hunting for it a long time in vain. 

What an evidence it is, after all, of civilization, or of a capacity for improvement, that savages like our Indians, who in their protracted wars stealthily slay men, women, and children without mercy, with delight, who delight to burn, torture, and devour one another, proving themselves more inhuman in these respects even than beasts, — what a wonderful evidence it is, I say, of their capacity for improvement that even they can enter into the most formal compact or treaty of peace, burying the hatchet, etc., etc., and treating with each other with as much consideration as the most enlightened states. You would say that they had a genius for diplomacy as well as for war. 

Consider that Iroquois, torturing his captive, roasting him before a slow fire, biting off the fingers of him alive, and finally eating the heart of him dead, betraying not the slightest evidence of humanity; and now behold him in the council-chamber, where he meets the representatives of the hostile nation to treat of peace, conducting with such perfect dignity and decorum, betraying such a sense of justness.

These savages are equal to us civilized men in their treaties, and, I fear, not essentially worse in their wars.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 30, 1856

They never did any man harm that I know.

December 17. 

P. M. — Cold, with a piercing northwest wind and bare ground still. 

The river, which was raised by the rain of the 14th and ran partly over the meadows, is frozen over again, and I go along the edge of the meadow under Clamshell and back by Hubbard's Bridge. 

At Clamshell, to my surprise, scare up either a woodcock or a snipe. I think the former, for I plainly saw considerable red on the breast, also a light stripe along the neck. It was feeding alone, close to the edge of the hill, where it is springy and still soft, almost the only place of this character in the neighborhood, and though I started it three times, it each time flew but little way, round to the hillside again, perhaps the same spot it had left a moment before, as if unwilling to leave this unfrozen and comparatively warm locality. It was a great surprise this bitter cold day, when so many springs were frozen up, to see this hardy bird loitering still. Once alighted, you could not see it till it arose again. 

In Saw Mill Brook, as I crossed it, I saw the tail disappearing of some muskrat or other animal, flapping in the cold water, where all was ice around.

A flock of a dozen or more tree sparrows flitting through the edge of the birches, etc., by the meadow front of Puffer's. They make excursions into the open meadow and, as I approach, take refuge in the brush. I hear their faint cheep, a very feeble evidence of their existence, and also a pretty little suppressed warbling from them. 

To-day, though so cold, there is much of the frozen overflow, a broad border of it, along the meadow, a discolored yellowish and soft ice (it probably ran out yesterday or last night), the river still rising a little. 

The wind is so cold and strong that the Indians that are encamped in three wigwams of cloth in the railroad wood-yard have all moved into two and closed them up tight. 

That feeble cheep of the tree sparrow, like the tinkling of an icicle, or the chafing of two hard shrub oak twigs, is probably a call to their mates, by which they keep together. These birds, when perched, look larger than usual this cold and windy day; they are puffed up for warmth, have added a porch to their doors. 

It is pretty poor picking out of doors to-day. There 's but little comfort to be found. You go stumping over bare frozen ground, sometimes clothed with curly yellowish withered grass like the back of half-starved cattle late in the fall, now beating this ear, now that, to keep them warm. 

It is comparatively summer-like under the south side of woods and hills. 

When I returned from the South the other day, I was greeted by withered shrub oak leaves which I had not seen there. It was the most homely and agreeable object that met me. I found that I had no such friend as the shrub oak hereabouts. A farmer once asked me what shrub oaks were made for, not knowing any use they served. But I can tell him that they do me good. They are my parish ministers, regularly settled. They never did any man harm that I know.

Yesterday afternoon I was running a line through the woods. How many days have I spent thus, sighting my way in direct lines through dense woods, through cat-briar and viburnum in New Jersey, through shrub oak in New England, requiring my axeman to shear off twigs and bushes and dead limbs and masses of withered leaves that obstruct the view, and then set up a freshly barked stake exactly on the line; looking at these barked stakes from far and near as if I loved them; not knowing where I shall come out; my duty then and there perhaps merely to locate a straight line between two points. 

Now you have the foliage of summer painted in brown. Go through the shrub oaks. All growth has ceased; no greenness meets the eye, except what there may be in the bark of this shrub. The green leaves are all turned to brown, quite dry and sapless. The little buds are sleeping at the base of the slender shrunken petioles. Who observed when they passed from green to brown? I do not remember the transition; it was very gradual. 

But these leaves still have a kind of life in them. They are exceedingly beautiful in their withered state. If they hang on, it is like the perseverance of the saints. Their colors are as wholesome, their forms as perfect, as ever. Now that the crowd and bustle of summer is passed, I have leisure to admire them. 

Their figures never weary my eye. Look at the few broad scallops in their sides. When was that pattern first cut? With what a free stroke the curve was struck! With how little, yet just enough, variety in their forms! Look at the fine bristles which arm each pointed lobe, as perfect now as when the wild bee hummed about them, or the chewink scratched beneath them. What pleasing and harmonious colors within and without, above and below! 

The smooth, delicately brown-tanned upper surface, acorn- color, the very pale (some silvery or ashy) ribbed under side. How poetically, how like saints or innocent and beneficent beings, they give up the ghost! How spiritual! Though they have lost their sap, they have not given up the ghost. Rarely touched by worm or insect, they are as fair as ever. These are the forms of some: — When was it ordained that this leaf should turn brown in the fall ?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1856

The Indians that are encamped in three wigwams of cloth in the railroad wood-yard have all moved into two and closed them up tight. . . .See December 5, 1856 (“[T]hey do not appear to mind the cold, though one side the tent is partly open, and all are flapping in the wind, and there is a sick child in one.”)

That feeble cheep of the tree sparrow, like the tinkling of an icicle. . . is probably a call to their mates, by which they keep together. See December 4, 1856 ("Saw and heard cheep faintly one little tree sparrow, the neat chestnut crowned and winged and white- barred bird, perched on a large and solitary white birch. So clean and tough, made to withstand the winter. This color reminds me of the upper side of the shrub oak leaf.”); December 28, 1853 ("By their sharp silvery chip, perchance, they inform each other of their whereabouts and keep together.")

When I returned from the South ... See November 25, 1856 (“Am glad to get back to New England, the dry, sandy, wholesome land, land of scrub oaks and birches and white pines . . .”); December 1, 1856 ("I love and could embrace the shrub oak . . .”)

Merely to locate

a straight line between two points,

where shall I come out?

Born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time.

December 5

Clear, cold winter weather. What a contrast between this week and last, when I talked of setting out apple trees! 

December 5,  2020

P. M. — Walked over the Hill. 

The Indians have at length got a regular load of wood. It is odd to see a pile of good oak wood beside their thin cotton tents in the snow, the wood-pile which is to be burnt within is so much more substantial than the house. Yet they do not appear to mind the cold, though one side the tent is partly open, and all are flapping in the wind, and there is a sick child in one. The children play in the snow in front, as before more substantial houses. 

The river is well skimmed over in most places, though it will not bear, — wherever there is least current, as in broad places, or where there is least wind, as by the bridges. The ice trap was sprung last night. 

As I walk along the side of the Hill, a pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut, flying low in mid- course and then ascending to the tree. I hear one's faint tut tut or gnah gnah — no doubt heard a good way by its mate now flown into the next tree — as it is ascending the trunk or branch of a walnut in a zigzag manner, hitching along, prying into the crevices of the bark; and now it has found a savory morsel, which it pauses to devour, then flits to a new bough. It is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black. 

It is a perfectly cloudless and simple winter sky. A white moon, half full, in the pale or dull blue heaven and a whiteness like the reflection of the snow, extending up from the horizon all around a quarter the way up to the zenith. I can imagine that I see it shooting up like an aurora. This at 4 p. m. About the sun it is only whiter than elsewhere, or there is only the faintest possible tinge of yellow there. 

There are a great many walnuts on the trees, seen black against the sky, and the wind has scattered many over the snow-crust. It would be easier gathering them now than ever. 

The johnswort and the larger pinweed are conspicuous above the snow. Some fine straw-colored grasses, as delicate as the down on a young man's cheek, still rise above this crusted snow, and even a recess is melted around them, so gently has it been deposited. 

The sun goes down and leaves not a blush in the sky. 

This morning I saw Riordan's cock thrust out the window on to the snow to seek his sustenance, and now, as I go by at night, he is waiting on the front door-step to be let in. 

My themes shall not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures. Friends ! Society! It seems to me that I have an abundance of it, there is so much that I rejoice and sympathize with, and men, too, that I never speak to but only know and think of. 

What you call bareness and poverty is to me simplicity. God could not be unkind to me if he should try. 

I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold, for it compels the prisoner to try new fields and resources. 

I love to have the river closed up for a season and a pause put to my boating, to be obliged to get my boat in. I shall launch it again in the spring with so much more pleasure. This is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation compared with the seaside boating, where the boat ever lies on the shore.  I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times. 

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am. What you consider my disadvantage, I consider my advantage. While you are pleased to get knowledge and culture in many ways, I am delighted to think that I am getting rid of them. 

I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 5, 1856



The ice trap was sprung last night. See December 4, 1856 ("Smooth white reaches of ice, as long as the river, on each side are threatening to bridge over its dark-blue artery any night. ") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First Ice.

I love to have the river closed up for a season and a pause put to my boating. See December 2, 1856 ("Got in my boat."); December 5, 1853 ("Got my boat in. The river frozen over thinly in most places and whitened with snow.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Boat in Boat out.

I love best to have each thing in its season only. See August 23, 1853 ("Live in each season as it passes."); November 3, 1853 ("There are very few phenomena which can be described indifferently as occurring at different seasons of the year, for they will occur with some essential difference.");  August 22, 1854 ("There is, no doubt, a particular season of the year when each place may be visited with most profit and pleasure, and it may be worth the while to consider what that season is in each case."); April 24, 1859 ("There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed, it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season").

A pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut. See November 26, 1860 ("I detect it on the trunk of an oak much nearer than I suspected, and its mate or companion not far off.");   December 1, 1857  ("I  thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch

It is a perfectly cloudless and simple winter sky. A white moon, half full,  See January 1, 1852 ("Moon little more than half full. Not a cloud in the sky.") April 30, 1852 ("Then when I turned, I saw in the east, just over the woods, the modest, pale, cloud-like moon, two thirds full, looking spirit-like on these daylight scenes. Such a sight excites me. The earth is worthy to inhabit.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December  Moonlight

I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures. Compare October 18, 1856 ("Give me simple, cheap, and homely themes.")

I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold. See December 8, 1850 ("The ground is now covered, - our first snow, two inches deep. . . . I am struck by this sudden solitude and remoteness that these places have acquired. The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!”);  April 13, 1852 ("The imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts.”)

I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too. See Henry Thoreau, A Week (Wednesday) ("I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources."); August 3, 1852 ("By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe."); August 6, 1852 ("We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower."); August 23, 1853 ("Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end"); February 19, 1854 ("Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world?”) Walden ("Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength."); September 9, 1854 ("The earth is the mother of all creatures."); December 11, 1855 ("The-winter, with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected. It is as it was designed and made to be.");  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man (the anthropic principle)

December 5. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 5

A half full white moon

in a cloudless and simple 

pale blue winter sky.

To be born into

the most estimable place

in the nick of time.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

Born into the most estimable place in the nick of time.

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

https://tinyurl.com/HDT561205