Hoar frost, crystallized fog, on the north side of every twig.

January 13. 

January 13, 2019

The cold spell is over, and here this morning is a fog or mist; the wind, if there is any, I think, northerly; and there is built out horizontally on the north side of every twig and other surface a very remarkable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing. 

Mr. Edwin Morton was telling me night before last of a similar phenomenon witnessed in central New York, the fog of highlands or mountains crystallizing in this way and forming a white fringe or frost on the trees even to an inch and a half. 

This is already full an inch deep on many trees, and gets to be much more, perhaps an inch and a half even, on some in the course of the day. It is quite rare here, at least on  this scale. 

The mist lasts all this day, though it is far from warm (+ 11° at 8 A. M.), and till noon of the 14th, when it becomes rain, and all this time there is exceedingly little if any wind. 

I go to the river this morning and walk up it to see the trees and bushes along it. 

As the frostwork (which is not thin and transparent like ice, but white and snow-like, or between the distinctly leaf with veins and a mere aggregation of snow, though you easily distinguish the distinct leaves) is built out northward from each surface, spreading at an angle of about forty-five degrees, i. e. some twenty-odd each side of the north, you must stand on the north side and look south at the trees, etc., when they appear, except the large limbs and trunk, wholly of snow or frostwork, mere ghosts of trees, seen softly against the mist for a background. 

It is mist on mist. 

The outline and character of each tree is more distinctly exhibited, being exaggerated, and you notice any peculiarity in the disposition of the twigs. 

• Some elm twigs, thus enlarged into snowy fingers, are strikingly regular and handsome.

• In the case of most evergreens, it amounts to a very rich sugaring, being so firmly attached. 

• The weeping willow seems to weep with more remarkable and regular curve than ever, and stands still and white with thickened twigs, as if carved in white marble or alabaster. 

• Those trees, like alders, which have not grown much the past year — which have short and angular twigs—are the richest in effect. The end of each alder twig is recurved where the drooping catkin is concealed. On one side you see the dark-brown fruit, but on the north that too is concealed. 

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.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 13, 1859

A very remarkable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing, an inch deep on many trees, and gets to be much more, perhaps an inch and a half even, on some in the course of the day. It is quite rare here, at least on this scale. See November 23, 1852 (“You must go forth very early to see a hoar frost, which is rare here”); December 16 1853 (“These days, when the earth is still bare and the weather is so warm as to create much vapor by day, are the best for these frost works.”); February 9, 1860 ("A hoar frost on the ground this morning — for the open fields are mostly bare — was quite a novel sight. I had noticed some vapor in the air late last evening"); February 12, 1855 (“All trees covered this morning with a hoar frost, very handsome looking toward the sun, —the ghosts of trees.”)

Through the mist the woods, the pine woods, at a distance are a dark-blue color. See January 21, 1855 ("The snow is turning to rain through a fine hail.Pines and oaks seen at a distance — say two miles off — are considerably blended and make one harmonious impression. The former, if you attend, are seen to be of a blue or misty black," ); 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."); February 7, 1859 ("Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter."); see also note to February 6, 1852 ("mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker, and more imposing."

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

January 13.  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 13

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 © 2009-2022

A new species?

November 26. 

The various evergreens, large and small, may be said generally to turn green or to have turned reddish about the middle of November. 

Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual). 

A good many leaves of the sweet-fern, though withered now, still hold on; so that this shrub may be put with the oaks in this respect. So far as I remember, it is peculiar among shrubs in this.

Walden is very low, compared with itself for some years. The bar between pond and Hubbard’s pond hole is four feet wide, but the main bar is not bare. There is a shore at least six feet wide inside the alders at my old shore, and what is remarkable, I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes only four or five rods over, such as Little Goose Pond, shallow as they are. 

I begin to suspect, therefore, that this rise and fall extending through a long series of years is not peculiar to the Walden system of ponds, but is true of ponds generally, and perhaps of rivers, though in their case it may be more difficult to detect. Even around Little Goose Pond the shore is laid bare for a space even wider than at Walden, it being less abrupt. The Pout’s Nest, also, has lost ten feet on all sides. 

Those pouts’ nests which I discovered in the spring are high and dry six feet from the water. I overhauled one, ripping up the frozen roof with my hands. The roof was only three inches thick, then a cavity and a bottom of wet mud. In this mud I found two small frogs, one apparently a Rana palustris less than an inch long, the other apparently a young R. pipiens an inch and a half long. They were quite sluggish and had evidently gone into winter quarters there, but probably some mink would have got them. 

The Pout’s Nest was frozen just enough to bear, with two or three breathing-places left. The principal of these was a narrow opening about a rod long by eighteen inches wide within six feet of the southwest side of the pond-hole, and the immediately adjacent ice was darker and thinner than the rest, having formed quite recently. 

I observed that the water at this breathing-chink was all alive with pollywogs, mostly of large size, though some were small, which apparently had collected there chiefly, as the water-surface was steadily contracted, for the sake of the air (?). There [were] more than a hundred of them there, or ten or a dozen in a square foot, and many more under the ice. 

I saw one firmly frozen in and dead. One had legs, and his tail was half eaten off by some creature, yet he was alive. There were also one or two frogs stirring among them. Here was evidently warmer water, probably a spring, and they had crowded to it. 

Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows about one inch long either floating dead there or frozen into the ice,—at least fifty of them. They were shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch. 

There were more pollywogs in other parts of the pond-hole, and at the north end I saw two perch about seven inches long, dead, close to the shore, and turned a bright green,— which are commonly yellow, — as if poisoned by the water or something they had eaten. Perhaps the fishes had suffered by the falling of this pond-hole and consequent isolation from the main pond, which has left this part still more shallow and stagnant than before. It is full of the target-weed. 

If the pond continues to fall, undoubtedly all the fishes thus landlocked will die. I noticed at the above-named chink tracks which looked like those of an otter, where some animal had entered and come out of the water, leaving weeds and fragments of ice at the edge of the hole. No doubt several creatures, like otter and mink and foxes, know where to resort for their food at this season. This is now a perfect otter’s or mink’s preserve. 

Perhaps such a mass of decaying weeds is fatal to the fishes here. It is evident that those frogs would have been frozen stiff the first colder night in such a shallow retreat. It is very likely that that hole (i. e. pout’s hole) was under water when they took refuge there, and, the water going down, they were chilled. In such cases, then, pollywogs and fishes, and even frogs, resort to the last part to freeze, the warmest water, where it is open longest. 

Examining those minnows by day, I find that they are one and one sixth inches long by two fifths of an inch wide (this my largest); in form like a bream; of a very pale golden like a perch, or more bluish. Have but one dorsal fin and, as near as I can count, rays, dorsal 19 (first, 9 stouter and stiff and more distinctly pointed, then 10 longer and flexible, whole fin about three times as long as average height), caudal 17 [?], anal 13 or 14, ventral 6, pectoral 10 (?). They have about seven transverse dusky bars like a perch! Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? Have young breams transverse bars? A little narrower than this.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1858

Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual). See note to November 26, 1857 (“Got my boat up this afternoon. (It is Thanksgiving Day.) One end had frozen in. ”)

I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes. See December 13, 1852 (“I judge from his account of the rise and fall of Flint's Pond that, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlet, it sympathizes with Walden. “)

The Pout’s Nest was frozen just enough to bear, with two or three breathing-places left. "Pout’s Nest": HDT's name for Wyman's Meadow near Walden. See note to July 26, 1860 (I see a bream swimming about in that smaller pool by Walden in Hubbard's Wood. . . So they may be well off in the Wyman meadow or Pout's Nest."); also June 7, 1858 ("Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to this meadow?")

If the pond continues to fall, undoubtedly all the fishes thus landlocked will die. See August 28, 1854 (“The meadow is drier than ever, and new pools are dried up. The breams, from one to two and a half inches long, lying on the sides and quirking from time to time, a dozen together where there is but a pint of water on the mud, are a handsome but sad sight, — pretty green jewels, dying in the sun. I saved a dozen or more by putting them in deeper pools.”)

A new species? See November 30, 1858 ("When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it...I can only poise my thought there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment. I can only see the bream in its orbit, as I see a star...The bream, appreciated, floats in the pond as the centre of the system, another image of God. Its life no man can explain more than he can his own."). The fish shaped like a bream but with markings like a perch.is presented at the next meeting of the Boston Natural History Society an later ridentified as the Pomotis obesus Girard 1854 (banded sunfish).

The manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us

November 17

November 17, 2015

November 17, 2018

The ground has remained frozen since the morning of the 12th. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

The polypody on the rock is much shrivelled by the late cold. The edges are curled up, and it is not nearly so fair as it was ten days ago. 

I see a small botrychium in the swampy wood west of river, opposite Emerson’s field, quite fresh, not at all injured. 

The musquash are more active since the cold weather. I see more of them about the river now, swimming back and forth across the river, and diving in the middle, where I lose them. They dive off the round-backed, black mossy stones, which, when small and slightly exposed, look much like themselves. In swimming show commonly three parts with water between. One sitting in the sun, as if for warmth, on the opposite shore to me looks quite reddish brown. They avail themselves of the edge of the ice now found along the sides of the river to feed on. 

Much Lycopodium complanatum did not shed pollen on the 3d, and the Lycopodium dendroideum var. obscurum sheds it only within a very few days  (was apparently in its prime yesterday). So it would seem that these lycopodiums, at least, which have their habitat on the forest floor and but lately attracted my attention there (since the withered leaves fell around them and revealed them by the contrast of their color and they emerged from obscurity), —it would seem that they at the same time attained to their prime, their flowering season. It was coincident with this prominence. 

Leaving my boat, I walk through the low wood west of Dove Rock, toward the scarlet oak. The very sunlight on the pale-brown bleached fields is an interesting object these cold days. I naturally look toward [it] as to a wood-fire. 

Not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and of mind to appreciate different objects at different seasons. I see one thing when it is cold and another when it is warm. 

Looking toward the sun now when an hour high, there being many small alders and birches between me and it for half a dozen rods, the light reflected from their with closely concentric lines, of which I see about one fourth, on account of the upward curve of the twigs on each side, and the light not being reflected to me at all from one side of the trees directly in front of me. The light is thus very pleasantly diffused. 

We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us. 

Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, shortly after, the sun appearing but a point above the sweet-fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare downy twigs of this plant in a surprising manner which would not be believed if described. It was quite like the sunlight reflected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. Yet in an ordinary light these are but dark or dusky looking twigs with scarcely a noticeable downiness. Yet as I saw it, there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left. 

A myriad of surfaces are now prepared to reflect the light. This is one of the hundred silvery lights of November. The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights" would be a theme for me. 

I am surprised to see a stake-driver fly up from the weeds within a stone’s throw of my boat’s place. It drops its excrement from thirty feet in the air, and this falling, one part being heavier than another, takes the form of a snake, and suggests that this may be the origin of some of the stories of this bird swallowing a snake or eel which passed through it.

Nature is moderate and loves degrees. 

Winter is not all white and sere. Some trees are evergreen to cheer us, and on the forest floor our eyes do not fall on sere brown leaves alone, but some evergreen shrubs are placed there to relieve the eye. Mountain laurel, lambkill, checkerberry, Wintergreen, etc., etc., etc., and a few evergreen ferns scattered about keep up the semblance of summer still. 

Aspidium spinulosum

As for the evergreen ferns, I see now —

• Common polypody (though shrivelled by cold where exposed). 
• Asplenium trichomanes. 
• A. ebeneum.  
• Aspidium spinulosum (?). large frond, small-fruited, in swamp southeast Brister’s Spring, on 16th. 
• A. cristatum (?), Grackle Swamp on the 15th, with oftener what I take to be the narrower and more open sterile frond. 
• A. marginale (common). 
• A. achrostichoides (terminal shield).

The first one and the last two are particularly handsome, the last especially, it has so thick a frond.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 17, 1853 

The polypody on the rock. See November 16, 1853 ("I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock. ") See alss A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Polypody, Marginal Shield Fern, Terminal Shield Fern

Not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and of mind to appreciate different objects at different seasons. See June 11, 1851 (“Hardly two nights are alike. . . .No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons.”); May 23, 1853 ( Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.”;  October 26, 1857 (“The seasons and all their changes are in me. . . . My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike.”); 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.”); May 6, 1854 ("I can be said to note the flower's fall only when I see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the flower appears to me.”);   June 6, 1857 (“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. . . . Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. ”); August 7, 1853("The objects I behold correspond to my mood”);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....The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's.”); see also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Moods and Seasons of the Mind.

The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. See November 13, 1858 ("Now for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows in the horizon in the early twilight”)

The hundred silvery lights of November. See November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”) See also October 25, 1858 (“Also I notice, when the sun is low, the light reflected from the parallel twigs of birches recently bare, etc., like the gleam from gossamer lines. This is another Novemberish phenomenon. Call these November Lights. Hers is a cool, silvery light.”); November 2, 1853( "We come home in the autumn twilight . . . — clear white light, which penetrates the woods”);  November 10, 1858 (""This a November phenomenon, — the silvery light reflected from a myriad of downy surfaces . . . A cool and silvery light is the prevailing one;); November 11, 1851 (" Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light. . . . the sun shines in upon the stems of trees which it has not shone on since spring.): November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight on russet and frosty fields.”); .November 14, 1853("The clear, white, leafless twilight of November"); November 15, 1859 ("I see several musquash-cabins off Hubbard Shore distinctly outlined as usual in the November light"); November 20, 1858 ("The glory of November is in its silvery, sparkling lights”)

Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, the sun appearing but a point above the sweet-fern .there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left. See December 7, 1857 (“I would rather sit at this table with the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun than at the king’s.”)

I am surprised to see a stake-driver fly up. See September 20, 1855("The great bittern, as it flies off from near the rail road bridge, filthily drops its dirt and utters a low hoarse kwa kwa; then runs and hides in the grass, and I land and search within ten feet of it before it rises. “); and note to April, 25 1858 ("Goodwin says he heard a stake-driver several days ago.")

Nature is moderate and loves degrees. See June 14, 1851 ("How moderate, deliberate, is Nature!"); January 26, 1858 ("Nature loves gradation.")

As for the evergreen ferns, I see now —

• Common polypody  [Polypodium virginianum — rock polypody] (though shrivelled by cold where exposed)
• Asplenium trichomanes [maidenhair spleenwort].
• A. ebeneum [or Asplenium platyneuron – ebony spleenwort or brownstem spleenwort].
• Aspidium spinulosum (?) [or Dryopteris carthusiana or Polypodium spinulosum, –  spinulose shield fern, spinulose woodfern or toothed wood fern] large frond, small-fruited, in swamp southeast Brister’s Spring, on 16th.
• A. cristatum (?) [or Dryopteris cristata – crested wood fern], Grackle Swamp on the 15th, with oftener what I take to be the narrower and more open sterile frond.
• A. marginale (common) [or Dryopteris marginalis, – marginal shield fern or marginal wood fern]
• A. achrostichoides (terminal shield)[or Polystichum acrostichoides, – Christmas fern]

See September 30, 1859 ("Of the twenty-three ferns which I seem to know here, seven may be called evergreens."). See also August 30, 1853  ('I find at this time in fruit: (1) Polypodium vulgare,

. . .( 5 ) Asplenium Trichomanes ( dwarf spleenwort), also ( 6 ) A. ebeneum ( ebony spleenwort ),. . .(8) Dryopteris marginalis  marginal shield fern), (9) Polystichum acrostichoides (terminal shield fern). . . Nos . 1, 5 , 6 , and 8 common at Lee's Cliff . No.. . . 9 at Brister's Hill.")  See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Polypody, Marginal Shield Fern, Terminal Shield Fern; A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Aspidium spinulosum  & Aspidium cristatum; A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Evergreen Ferns, Part One: Maidenhair and Ebony Spleenwort

The last especially[ handsome], it has so thick a frond. See July 29, 1853 ("Brister's Hill. There are some beautiful glossy, firm ferns there, – Polytichum acrostichoides (?), shield fern. Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.")

Note: Did HDT observe Dryopteris intermedia? Although intermediate woodfern (Dryopteris intermedia) a/k/a "evergreen woodfern" is a common evergreen fern, Henry's only reference to “intermediate fern" is likely a mistranscription of "interrupted fern" (Osmunda claytoniana. The Botanical Index to Thoreau's Journal. See May 13, 1860 (“The intermediate ferns and cinnamon, a foot and a half high, have just leafeted out.”) Compare May 12, 1858 ("The cinnamon and interrupted ferns are both about two feet high in some places."); May 23, 1860 (" Interrupted fern fruit probably a day or two, and cinnamon, say the same or just after."); May 26, 1855 ("Interrupted fern pollen the 23d; may have been a day or two. Cinnamon fern to-day.")

November 17.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 17

November 17, 2015

The manifold ways

at this season that light is 

reflected to us.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us

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-531117

A cold and blustering afternoon. They want me to agree not to breathe castles.

November 16.

November 16, 2018

P. M. -— To Hubbard’s Close. 

A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. 

The Cornus Canadensis is called by Loudon “a deciduous herbaceous plant,” the pyrolas “ever-green herbaceous plants.” The bunchberry leaves are now little if any withered, but generally drooping, the four hanging together as is the habit of the sericea and florida, the lambkill, etc. The plant dies down to its perennial spring. You can see its pink bud already strongly formed. But this year’s plant is very slow to die, and I suspect many of the leaves remain green all winter under the snow. They are now generally purplish-tinged. Let me observe in what respect the pyrolas are more evergreen. The new bud is formed between the present two leaves, the old leaves, lower on the stem or vine, being mostly decayed. 

There are many large limbs strewn about the woods, which were broken off by that strong southeast wind in peach time. These are now thickly leaved, the dead wood not being able to cast off the withered leaves; but the leaves having died thus prematurely are of a different color from that their companions changed to, — a peculiar yellow-brown (i. e. chestnuts and oaks) with more or less green in it.

I see a gray squirrel, eight or ten rods off in Hubbard’s large wood, scamper over the leaves and run up an oak. From the oak it crosses ascending into a tall white pine top, and there lies concealed, and I can see no more of him. 

The earth half covered with this slight snow, merely grayed with [it], is the more like the bare gray limbs of oak woods now, and such woods and the earth make the more uniform impression. 

Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our handsomest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods. The mountain laurel, the lycopodium dendroideum, complanatum, and lucidulum, and the terminal shield fern are also very interesting.

Preaching? Lecturing? Who are ye that ask for these things? What do ye want to hear, ye puling infants? A trumpet-sound that would train you up to mankind, or a nurse’s lullaby? The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. It would be a relief to breathe one’s self occasionally among men. If there, were any magnanimity in us, any grandeur of soul, anything but sects and parties undertaking to patronize God and keep the mind within bounds, how often we might encourage and provoke one another by a free expression! I will not consent to walk with my mouth muzzled, not till I am rabid, until there is danger, that I shall bite the unoffending and that my bite will produce hydrophobia. 

Freedom of speech! It hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what those words mean. It is not leave given me by your sect to say this or that; it is when leave is given to your sect to withdraw. The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. I ask only that one fourth part of my honest thoughts be spoken aloud. 'What is it you tolerate, you church to-day? Not truth, but a lifelong hypocrisy. Let us have institutions framed not out of our rottenness, but out of our soundness. This factitious piety is like stale gingerbread. I would like to suggest what a pack of fools and cowards we mankind are. They want me to agree not to breathe castles. If I should draw a long breath in the neighborhood of these institutions, their weak and flabby sides would fall out, for my own inspiration would exhaust the air about them. The church! it is eminently the timid institution, and the heads and pillars of it are constitutionally and by principle the greatest cowards in the community. The voice that goes up from the monthly concerts is not so brave and so cheering as that which rises from the frogponds of the land. The best “preachers,” so called, are an effeminate class; their bravest thoughts wear petticoats. If they have any manhood they are sure to forsake the ministry, though they were to turn their attention to baseball. Look at your editors of popular magazines. I have dealt with two or three the most liberal of them. They are afraid to print a whole sentence, a round sentence, a free-spoken sentence. They want to get thirty thousand subscribers, and they will do anything to get them. They consult the D.D.’s and all the letters of the alphabet before printing a 'sentence.‘ I have been into many of these cowardly New England towns where they profess Christianity, — invited to speak, perchance, —where they were trembling in their shoes at the thought of the things you might say, as if they knew their weak side, — that they were weak on all sides. The devil they have covenanted with is a timid devil. If they would let their sores alone they might heal, and they could to the wars again like men; but in stead of that they get together in meeting-house cellars, rip off the bandages and poultice them with sermons.

One of our New England towns is scaled up hermetically like a molasses-hogshead,— such is its sweet Christianity, — only a little of the sweet trickling out at the cracks enough to daub you. The few more liberal-minded or indifferent inhabitants are the flies that buzz about it. It is Christianity bunged up. I see awful eyes looking out through a bull’s-eye at the bung-hole. It is doubtful if they can fellowship with me. 

The further you go up country, I think the worse it is, the more benighted they are. On the one side you will find a barroom which holds the “Scoffers,” so called, on the other a vestry where is a monthly concert of prayer. There is just as little to cheer you in one of these companies as the other. It may be often the truth and righteousness of the barroom that saves the town. There is nothing to redeem the bigotry and moral cowardice of New-Englanders in my eyes. You may find a cape which runs six miles into the sea that has not a man of moral courage upon it. What is called faith is an immense prejudice. Like the Hindoos and Russians and Sandwich-Islanders (that were), they are the creatures of an institution. They do not think; they adhere like oysters to what their fathers and grandfathers adhered to. How often is it that the shoemaker, by thinking over his last, can think as valuable a thought as he makes a valuable shoe? 

I have been into the town, being invited to speak to the inhabitants, not valuing, not having read even, the Assembly’s Catechism, and I try to stimulate them by reporting the best of my experience. I see the craven priest looking round for a hole to escape at, alarmed  because it was he that invited me thither, and an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony and shallow ground. 

The following are our shrubby evergreen plants (not including Coniferas): — 

• Mitchella repens 
• Linnaea 
• Andromeda Polifolia 
• Cassandra calyculata 
• Mayflower 
• Checkerberry 
• Mountain laurel 
• Lambkill 
• Kalmia glauca 
• Labrador tea 
• Common cranberry 
• European cranberry 

To which I will add the herbaceous:— 

• Chimaphila umbellata 
•                  maculata 

N. B. — Rubus hispidus leaves last through the winter, turning reddish.

It is no compliment to be invited to lecture before the rich Institutes and Lyceums. The settled lecturers are as tame as the settled ministers. The audiences do not want to hear any prophets; they do not wish to be stimulated and instructed, but entertained. They, their wives and daughters, go to the Lyceum to suck a sugarplum. The little of medicine they get is disguised with sugar. It is never the reformer they hear there, but a faint and timid echo of him only. They seek a pass time merely. Their greatest guns and sons of thunder are only wooden guns and great-grandsons of thunder, who give them smooth words well pronounced from manuscripts well punctuated, — they who have stolen the little fire they have from prophets whom the audience would quake to hear. They ask for orators that will entertain them and leave them where they found them. The most successful lecturing on Washington, or what-not, is an awful scratching of backs to the tune, it may be, of fifty thousand dollars. Sluggards that want to have a lullaby sung to them! Such manikins as I have described are they, alas, who have made the greatest stir (and what a shallow stir) in the church and Lyceum, and in Congress. They want a medicine that will not interfere with their daily meals. 

There is the Lowell Institute with its restrictions, requiring a certain faith in the lecturers. How can any free thinking man accept its terms? It is as if you were to resolve that you would not eat oysters that were not of a particular faith, — that, for instance, did not believe the Thirty-Nine Articles,— for the faith that is in an oyster is just as valuable as the faith referred to in Mr. Lowell’s will. These popular lecturers, our preachers, and magazines are for women and children in the bad sense. 

The curators have on their lists the names of the men who came before the Philomathean Institute in the next large town and did no harm; left things in statu quo, so that all slept the better for it; only confirmed the audience in their previous badness; spoke a good word for youngsters to be good boys. A man may have a good deal to say who has not any desk to thump on, who does not thunder in bad air. 

They want all of a man but his truth and independence and manhood. 

One who spoke to their condition would of course make them wince, and they would retaliate, i. e. kick him out, or stop their ears. 

The cold weather which began on the 12th, with the snow of the 13th and since, suddenly killed the few remaining living leaves, without any exceptions to speak of. Most foreign plants at once dropped their leaves, though pretty thick before, but there are many still on the privet. The sweet-fern in some places has still many green, more than any indigenous shrub or tree, though far the greater part of them (the sweet-ferns) are bare or withered. Probably the larch about fallen.

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

Walden, \\"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” )

A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. See November 13, 1851 (“A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety.”)

Church, state and school – all

mankind want me to agree 

not to breathe castles.  

It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature

November 13. 

8.30 A. M. — To Hill. 

I notice of late the darker green (livid ?) of the arbor vitae and other evergreens, the effect of cold. So they are never so purely bright a green as immediately after their fall. They are not perfectly ever-green. 

I hear go over, not far from the house, goldfinches, as I think, — their mewing note and ricochet flight, -— I think not redpolls, for I hear no rattling notes. Also hear a robin’s note. 

Last night was quite cold, and the ground is white with frost. Thus gradually, but steadily, winter approaches. First there is the bleached grass, then the frost, then snow, the fields growing more and more hoary. There is frost not only on all the withered grass and stubble, but it is particularly thick and white and handsome around the throat of every hole and chink in the earth’s surface, the congealed breath of the earth as it were, so that you would think at first it was the entry to some woodchuck’s, or squirrel’s, or mouse’s, retreat. But it is the great dormant earth gone into winter quarters here, the earth letting off steam after the summer’s work is over. 

As I stand on the hill at 9 A. M., it looks like snow; the sky is overcast; smokes go up thickly from the village, answering to the frost in the chinks; and there is a remarkable stillness, as if it were earlier, the effect of the colder weather merely, as it were stiffening things. Leaves, twigs, birds (except the chickadee, and its feeble note seems to enhance the stillness), and insects are hushed. The few tinkling sounds — the chopping, or the like — are heard far and distinctly. It is like the calm before a hurricane or an earthquake, this stillness which precedes the winter’s setting in. 


Larches now look dark or brownish yellow. Now, on the advent of much colder weather, the last Populus tremuliformis has lost its leaves, the sheltered dogwood is withered, and even the scarlet oak may be considered as extinguished, and the larch looks brown and nearly bare, and the few leaves left here and there on the indigenous shrubs named on the 9th are being rapidly killed by the same cause, and are falling. 

Now for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows in the horizon in the early twilight. 

One hickory at least (on the hill) has not lost its leaves yet, i. e., has a good many left. So they are a month falling. 

I see some feathers of a blue jay scattered along a wood-path, and at length come to the body of the bird. What a neat and delicately ornamented creature, finer than any work of art in a lady’s boudoir, with its soft light purplish-blue crest and its dark-blue or purplish secondaries (the narrow half) finely barred with dusky. It is the more glorious to live in Concord because the jay is so splendidly painted.

A large flock of geese go over just before night. 

After expecting snow all day, —'though we did not know but it would prove rain,—we looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight, — only there was no moon. Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth. 

Of course frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs. 

It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature. The light reflected from bare twigs at this season — i. e., since they began to be bare, in the latter part of October — is not only like that from gossamer, but like that which will ere long be reflected from the ice that will incrust them. So the bleached herbage of the fields is like frost, and frost like snow, and one prepares for the other.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1858

I think not redpolls, for I hear no rattling notes. See November 13, 1852 ("When startled, they went off with a jingling sound somewhat like emptying a bag of coin. Is it the yellow redpoll?"); September 19, 1854 ("Did I see a returned yellow redpoll fly by? "); November 21, 1852 ("The commonest bird I see and hear nowadays is that little red crowned or fronted bird I described the 13th. I hear now more music from them. They have a mewing note which reminds me of a canary-bird. They make very good forerunners of winter. Is it not the {lesser redpoll}?”); December 11, 1855 ("Standing there, though in this bare November landscape, I am reminded of the incredible phenomenon of small birds in winter. ... The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. Now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser redpolls.")


Now, on the advent of much colder weather, the last Populus tremuliformis has lost its leaves. See October 25, 1858 ("Aspens (tremuliformis) generally bare"); October 29, 1858 ("Am surprised to see, by the path to Baker Farm, a very tall and slender large Populus tremuliformis still thickly clothed with leaves which are merely yellowish greén."); November 10, 1853 ("There are still a few leaves on the large Populus tremuliformis, but they will be all gone in a day or two. They have turned quite yellow.")

Now for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows in the horizon in the early twilight. See November 17, 1858 ("The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights" would be a theme for me. “)

A large flock of geese go over just before night. See November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest"); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 14, 1858 ('The principal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days.") ; November 18, 1854 ("Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while.”); November 30, 1857 (“You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. . . . According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky.”)

It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature. See Walden ("Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."): January 26, 1858 (" Nature loves gradation")

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen.

February 11. 

At 8 P. M. it is 11° and windy. 

I think it is the coldest day of this winter. The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time. 

P. M. — To Hill. 

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen, but I see none burst. They are very tightly filled and smooth, apparently stretched. 

The leaves of the round-leaved pyrola, so exposed this winter, look not only dark but as if frozen. I am not sure that they are stiffened however. 

I see that the hemlock leaves also have this frozen or frozen thawed, cadaverous look, dark and slightly imbrowned, especially the most exposed twigs, while some sheltered ones are still a bright green. The same is the case even with the white pines and, as far as I observe, other evergreens. 

There is a change in their leaves with cold weather, corresponding to the reddening and darkening of checkerberry and pyrola leaves. They change, though they do not fall, and are to some extent affected, even as those trees which, like the oaks, retain a part of their leaves during the winter in a withered state; i. e., they have begun to wither or be killed. 

I have often before noticed that the pines, when cold weather came, were of a darker and duller green, somewhat like a frozen apple. In the hemlock, at least, there is a positive tendency to redness. The evergreens, then, though they do not fall the first year, lose their original summer greenness; they are changed and partially killed by the cold, like pyrola and checkerberry and lambkill, and even, in a degree, like oak leaves. Perhaps the pitch pine is the least affected. 

Cut a club of celtis wood. It is hard but, I think, brittle. The celastrus (waxwork) is a soft, spongy, and flexible wood, though of very slow growth. You can easily sink your knife into it. I count twenty-five rings in the heart-wood of one which is not quite an inch in diameter. In the sap there is no evidence of rings at all.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 11, 1858

11° and windy. I think it is the coldest day of this winter. Compare January 23, 1857 ("I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature to-day.”) January 9, 1856 ("Probably it has been below zero for the greater part of the day."); February 6, 1855 ("They say it did not rise above -6° to-day.”); February 11, 1855 (“Smith’s thermometer early this morning at -22°; ours at 8 A. M. -10°.”)

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen.  See November 16, 1852 ("At Holden's Spruce Swamp. The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf.")

The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time. Compare January 20, 1857 ("The river has been frozen everywhere except at the very few swiftest places since about December 18th, and everywhere since about January 1st.”)

How important the dark evergreens now; how interesting the huckleberries.

May 27

P. M. —To Fair Haven Pond, taking boat opposite Puffer’s. 

Still a very strong wind from northerly, and hazy and rather cool for season. 

The fields now begin to wear the aspect of June, their grass just beginning to wave; the light-colored withered grass seen between the blades, foliage thickening and casting darker shadows over the meadows, elm-tree-tops thick in distance, deciduous trees rapidly investing evergreens, haze with the strong wind. How important the dark evergreens now seen through the haze in the distance  and contrasting with the gauze-like, as yet thin-clad deciduous trees! They are like solid protuberances of earth. 

A thrasher’s nest on the bare open ground with four eggs which were seen three days ago. The nest is as open and exposed as it well can be, lined with roots, on a slight ridge where a rail fence has been, some rods from any bush. 

Saw the yellow-legs on one side flying over the meadow against the strong wind and at first mistook it for a hawk. It appeared now quite brown, with its white rump; and, excepting for its bill and head, I should have taken it for a hawk; between the size of male harrier and the male pigeon hawk, or say the size of a dove. It alighted on the shore. And now again I think it must be the large one. 

The blue yellow-back or parti-colored warbler still, with the chestnut crescent on breast, near my Kalmia Swamp nest. 

See a painted turtle on a hill forty or fifty feet above river, probably laying eggs. 

Some mountain sumach has grown one inch, some not started; some button-bush three inches, some not started. The first must be put after the last. 

Myosotis stricta under Cliffs, how long? 

The meadow fragrance to-day. 

How interesting the huckleberries now generally in blossom on the knoll below the Cliff — countless wholesome red bells, beneath the fresh yellow green foliage! The berry-bearing vaccinium! It is a rich sight. 

Geranium at Bittern Cliff, apparently several days, -and Arabis rhomboidea there in meadow, apparently still longer — say seven or eight days; but I am doubtful about the “slender style tipped with a conspicuous stigma.” 

Carrion-flower a foot high. Crimson gall on a shrub oak. 

A loose-spiked sedge at Bittern Cliff Meadow, — forgot to bring, — a foot high.

May 27, 2015

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 27, 1855

The fields now begin to wear the aspect of June, their grass just beginning to wave. . . foliage thickening and casting darker shadows over the meadows, elm-tree-tops thick in distance, deciduous trees rapidly investing evergreens. See May 27, 1853 ("A new season has commenced - summer - leafy June. The elms begin to droop and are heavy with shade."); May 22, 1855 ("The deciduous trees leafing begin to clothe or invest the evergreens.");  May 18, 1852 ("They are now being invested with the light, sunny, yellowish-green of the deciduous trees.").  See also May 19, 1860 ("The grass, especially the meadow-grasses, are seen to wave distinctly, and the shadows of the bright fair-weather cumuli are sweeping over them."); May 26, 1854 (At sight of this deep and dense field all vibrating with motion and light, winter recedes many degrees in my memory. . . . The season of grass, now everywhere green and luxuriant.”); May 28, 1858 (“These various shades of grass remind me of June.”); May 30, 1852 (Now is the summer come. . . . A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave."); June 30, 1860 ("The foliage of deciduous trees is now so nearly as dark as evergreens that I am not struck by the contrast. The shadows under the edge of woods are less noticed now because the woods themselves are darker.")  See also note to June 6, 1855 ("The dark eye and shade of June").

A thrasher’s nest on the bare open ground with four eggs which were seen three days ago. See May 23, 1858 ("Brown thrasher's nest on ground, under a small tree, with four eggs"); May 28, 1855 ("I find the feathers apparently of a brown thrasher in the path, plucked since we passed here last night."); June 5, 1856 (" A brown thrasher’s nest with four eggs considerably developed, under a small white pine on the old north edge of the desert, lined with root-fibres.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Brown Thrasher

My Kalmia Swamp nest.  See May 26, 1855 ("What that neat song-sparrow-like nest of grass merely, in the wet sphagnum under the andromeda there, with three eggs, -- in that very secluded place, surrounded by the watery swamp and andromeda?")

How interesting the huckleberries now generally in blossom.  See May 26, 1859 ("Tall swamp huckleberry just budded to bloom."); May 28, 1854 ('' huckleberries . . . now generally in blossom, their rich clear red contrasting with the light-green leaves; frequented by honey-bees, full of promise for the summer."). See also December 30, 1860 ("the whortleberry family")

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

The fields now begin

to wear the aspect of June –

their grass just waving.

Now seen through the haze

dark evergreens contrast with 

deciduous trees.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  How important the dark evergreens now

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550527