Winter comes unnoticed – already foxes have left their tracks.

December 8

P. M. —Up river and meadow on ice to Hubbard Bridge and thence to Walden.

Winter has come unnoticed by me, I have been so busy writing. This is the life most lead in respect to Nature. How different from my habitual one! It is hasty, coarse, and trivial, as if you were a spindle in a factory. The other is leisurely, fine, and glorious, like a flower. In the first case you are merely getting your living; in the second you live as you go along. You travel only on roads of the proper grade without jar or running off the track, and sweep round the hills by beautiful curves.

Here is the river frozen over in many places, I am not sure whether the fourth night or later, but the skating is hobbly or all hobbled like a coat of mail or thickly bossed shield, apparently sleet frozen in water. Very little smooth ice.

December 8, 2024

How black the water where the river is open when I look from the light, by contrast with the surrounding white, the ice and snow! A black artery here and there concealed under a pellicle of ice.

Go over the fields on the crust to Walden, over side of Bear Garden. Already foxes have left their tracks. 

How the crust shines afar, the sun now setting! There is a glorious clear sunset sky, soft and delicate and warm even like a pigeon’s neck. 

Why do the mountains never look so fair as from my native fields?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 8, 1854

Up river and on ice to Hubbard Bridge. See December 13, 1859 (“My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer.”)

Winter has come unnoticed by me, I have been so busy writing . . . hasty, coarse, and trivial, as if you were a spindle in a factory. See December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating . . . but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture . . . After lecturing twice this winter I feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself."); December 12, 1851("I have been surveying for twenty or thirty days, living coarsely, - indeed, leading a quite trivial life ");  December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but . . .I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business.") See also December 7, 1856 ("That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine . . . I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow . . . It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to see it flit away by the time I again looked over my shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it.")

Already foxes have left their tracks. Compare December 8, 1855 ("Saturday. Still no snow, nor ice noticeable . . .Let a snow come and clothe the ground and trees, and I shall see the tracks of many inhabitants now unsuspected"); See  December 12, 1855 ("The snow having come, we see . . . now first, as it were, we have the fox for our nightly neighbor, and countless tiny deer mice."); December 13, 1859  ("I see that the fox too has already taken the same walk before me, just along the edge of the button-bushes, where not even he can go in the summer. We both turn our steps hither at the same time."); December 14, 1855 ("Thus by the snow I was made aware in this short walk of the recent presence there of squirrels, a fox, and countless mice, whose trail I had crossed, but none of which I saw, or probably should have seen before the snow fell.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

Clear sunset sky, soft and delicate.  See December 8, 1853 ("Now the sun is set, Walden (I am on the east side) is more light than the sky . . . while the sky is yellowish in the horizon and a dusky blue above "); See also December 5, 1856 ("It is a perfectly cloudless and simple winter sky . . . The sun goes down and leaves not a blush in the sky."); December 9, 1859 ("Methinks it often happens that as the weather is harder the sky seems softer." ); December 14, 1852 ("Ah, who can tell the serenity and clarity of a New England winter sunset? This could not be till the cold and the snow came.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Sunsets

How the crust shines afar, the sun now setting! See December 8, 1850 ("This evening for the first time the new moon is reflected from the frozen snow-crust.")

Why do the mountains never look so fair as from my native fields? See November 11, 1851 ("The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another . . . to him who has."); August 2, 1852 ("In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth,  . . . These hills extend our plot of earth; they make our native valley or indentation in the earth so much the larger."); September 27, 1852 ("From the mountains we do not discern our native hills; but from our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them."); March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon

To travel only

on roads of the proper grade

and sweep round the curves.

How black the water 

 when I look from the light – how  

 white the ice and snow.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

Winter comes unnoticed – already foxes have left their tracks.

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/hdt-541208

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

April 12.

Surveying for Parks in Lincoln. 

April 12, 2019

A white frost this morning, after the clear moonlight. 

I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work, and am somewhat listless or abandoned after it, reposing, that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

The music of the spheres is but another name for the Vulcanic force. May not such a record as this be kept on one page of the Book of Life : "A man was melted to-day " 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 12, 1854

The clear moonlight. See April 11, 1854 ("Evening on river. Fine full moon; river smooth.. . . This the first moon to walk by. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April Moonlight

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light. See April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey"); April 12, 1858 ("The woods are all alive with pine warblers now. Their note is the music to which I survey."); September 2, 1851 ("It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart."); November 18 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); November 20, 1851 ("Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last, and . . . I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. "); April 30, 1856 (" Again, it is with the side of the ear that you hear . . . You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.”); May 12, 1857 ("Methinks I hear these sounds, have these reminiscences, only when well employed."); November 18, 1857 ("You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. ") October 4, 1859 ("You have got to be in a different state from common.") ; Walden ([W]e are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day.

It is from out the

shadow of my toil that I

look into the light.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, From out of the Shadow

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/hdt-540412

A day or two surveying is equal to a journey.

April 8. 

At the Lyceum the other night I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself and so failed to interest me as much as formerly. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. The poet deals with his privatest experience. There was no central nor centralizing thought in the lecture.

I find that I can criticise my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it, — when I do not see it, for instance. I make a little chapter of contents which enables me to recall it page by page to my mind, and judge it more impartially when my manuscript is out of the way. The distraction of surveying enables me rapidly to take new points of view. A day or two surveying is equal to a journey.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1854

At the Lyceum... See Life without Principle.

I find that I can criticise my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it. See March 1, 1854 ("In correcting my manuscripts . . . having purified the main body and thus created a distinct standard for comparison, I can review the rejected sentences and easily detect those which deserve to be readmitted.");  February 3, 1859 (“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 [the writer] begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.”); February 20, 1859 ("In the composition it is the greatest art to find out as quickly as possible which are the best passages you have written, and tear the rest away"); March 11, 1859 ("Find out as soon as possible what are the best things in your composition, and then shape the rest to fit them.")  See also Do not tread on the heels your experience.

The distraction of surveying enables me rapidly to take new points of view. See December 13, 1851 ("This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time."); April 12, 1854 ("It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.")

I can criticise 

my composition best at 

a little distance.

Lighting up of the mist by the sun.

February 27. 

Saw to-day on Pine Hill behind Mr. Joseph Merriam's house a Norway pine, the first I have seen in Concord. Mr. Gleason pointed it out to me as a singular pine which he did not know the name of. It was a very handsome tree, about twenty-five feet high.

E. Wood thinks that he has lost the surface of two acres of his meadow by the ice. Got fifteen cartloads out of a hummock left on another meadow. Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. 

Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare  knows that he knows nothing, and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all, — what great advantage has the latter over the former ? which is the best to deal with? 

I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense, than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 27, 1851

Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. See February 25, 1851 ("The crust of the meadow afloat. . . .When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in the distribution of plants.")

It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. See Walking