Pickerel of at least three different forms and color.

January 29.

To Walden.

Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday sheldrakes; being small, then wood sheldrakes. [I judge from the plate they were velvet ducks, or white-winged coots.] He never shot any at this season.

Saw a woodcock last month; never before.

Killed a goshawk (which was eating a rabbit) and a cat owl lately.

Says I hear the cat owl.

Has got only three or four minks this year.

Never saw an otter track.

I saw a little grayish mouse frozen into Walden, three or four rods from the shore, its tail sticking out a hole. It had apparently run into this hole when full of water, as if on land, and been drowned and frozen. Headed downward, it was.

The ice is eight inches thick. It is full of short, faint, flake-like perpendicular cleavages, an inch or two broad, or varying somewhat from the perpendicular.

Melvin thinks that the "thundering" of the pond scares the pickerel.

Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon:

• first, a long and shallow kind most like those caught in the river, steel-colored with greenish or brownish lines, darker on the back and white beneath;

• second, a bright-golden fish with greenish reflections, remarkably deep, with a shorter head; both of these are mottled on the sides with an irregular network of dark-brown lines, often extending over the back, the meshes three fourths of an inch long, more or less, producing longitudinal stripes more or less distinct and continuous, very pure white beneath;

• third, shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark-brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name of reticulatus would not describe this.

These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises.

The perch also, and indeed all the fishes which in habit this pond, are as much handsomer than ordinary, as the water is purer than that of other ponds.

Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties, at least, of most of them..

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

 Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday sheldrakes. January 28, 1853 ("See three ducks sailing in the river behind Prichard's this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed."); See also March 6, 1853 ("Stedman Buttrick calls the ducks which we see in the winter, widgeons and wood sheldrakes.")

Melvin has got only three or four minks this year. See December 19, 1859 ("Farmer . . . saw but one mink-track in all his rides, and thinks that they are scarce this year."); March 13, 1859 ("Garfield . . . asked if I had seen any mink]. I said that I commonly saw two or three in a year. He said that he had not seen one alive for eight or ten years. [but] "I catch thirty or forty dollars' worth every winter.")

I saw a little grayish mouse frozen into Walden.  See January 7, 1860 ("I saw yesterday the track of a fox, and. .. on the just visible ground lay frozen a stale-looking mouse.")

Melvin thinks that the "thundering" of the pond scares the pickerel. See Walden ("The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting.")

Mevin never saw an otter track. See January 21, 1853 (“I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat's only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, as if it had waddled along.”);December 31, 1854 (“ On the edge of A. Wheeler’s cranberry meadow I see the track of an otter made since yesterday morning.”);December 6, 1856 (“The river was all tracked up with otters, from Bittern Cliff upward. Sometimes one had trailed his tail, apparently edge wise, making a mark like the tail of a deer mouse; sometimes they were moving fast, and there was an interval of five feet between the tracks.”);  February 8, 1857 (“The otter must roam about a great deal, for I rarely see fresh tracks in the same neighborhood a second time the same winter, though the old tracks may be apparent all the winter through.”) See also  April 6, 1855 ("It reminds me of an otter, which however I have never seen.");March 31, 1857 ("The existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thousand)!")  

Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon. See January 25, 1853 ("The pickerel of Walden!. . .I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were a fabulous fish, . . . handsome as flowers and gems, golden and emerald, — a transcendent and dazzling beauty. . . they have, if possible, to my eye, yet rarer colors, like precious stones. It is surprising that . . . in this deep and capacious spring, . . . this great gold and emerald fish swims") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 29

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

A true winter sunset.

December 27

High wind with more snow in the night. The snow is damp and covers the panes, darkening the room. At first I did not know that more snow had fallen, it was so drifted. Snowy ridges cross the village street and make it look as wild and bleak as a pass of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevada. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond up meadows and river. 

The snow blows like spray, fifteen feet high, across the fields, while the wind roars in the trees as in the rigging of a vessel. It is altogether like the ocean in a storm. The snow blowing over the ice is like a vapor rising or curling from a roof.

Most plowed fields are quite bare, but I am surprised to find behind the walls on the south side, like a skulking company of rangers in ambuscade or regular troops that have retreated to another parallel, a solid column of snow six or eight feet deep. The wind, eddying through and over the wall, is scooping it out in fantastic forms, — shells and troughs and glyphs of all kinds. Sometimes the drift is pierced with many holes as big as one's fist, where the fine snow-drift is passing through like steam. As it flows over, it builds out eaves to the bank of razor sharpness. 

It is surprising what things the snow betrays. I had not seen a meadow mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals. I see where the mouse has dived into a little hole in the snow, not larger than my thumb, by the side of a weed, and a yard further reappeared again, and so on alternately above and beneath. A snug life it lives. 

The crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, apparently being put to it for food. I saw them yesterday also. 

The wind has now shaken the snow from the trees, and it lies in irregular little heaps on the snow beneath, except that there is a white ridge up and down their trunks on the northwest side, showing which side the storm came from, which, better than the moss, would enable one to find his way in the night. 

I went to hear the pond whoop, but did not hear much. 

I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky. 

It is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold indigo-y along the horizon. The evening (?) star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun. A rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. 

A TRUE WINTER SUNSET
December 27, 2017

The outline of the mountains is wonderfully distinct and hard, and they are a dark blue and very near. 

Wachusett looks like a right whale over our bow, plowing the continent, with his flukes well down. He has a vicious look, as if he had a harpoon in him.

I wish that I could buy at the shops some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all that in my writing which it now costs me so many perusals, so many months if not years, and so much reluctance, to erase.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 27, 1853

It is surprising what things the snow betrays. See . December 27, 1857 ("Mice have been abroad in the night.  We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks."): See also February 16, 1854 ("That Indian trail on the hillside about Walden is revealed with remarkable distinctness to me standing on the middle of the pond, by the slight snow which had lodged on it forming a clear white line unobscured by weeds and twigs. (For snow is a great revealer not only of tracks made in itself, but even in the earth before it fell.)"); December 8, 1855 ("Let a snow come and clothe the ground and trees, and I shall see the tracks of many inhabitants now unsuspected"); 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 Wild Mouse

The crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, apparently being put to it for food. See January 23, 1852 ("The snow is so deep and the cold so intense that the crows are compelled to be very bold in seeking their food, and come very near the houses in the village."); January 7, 1856 ("The cold weather has brought the crows, and for the first time this winter I hear them cawing amid the houses. "); January 14, 1856 (" The crows are flitting about the houses and alight upon the elms. "); February 1, 1856 ("The crows have been remarkably bold, coming to eat the scraps cast out behind the houses. They alight in our yard")

There is a white ridge up and down their trunks on the northwest side, showing which side the storm came from, which, better than the moss, would enable one to find his way in the night. See note to December 23, 1851 ("There is a narrow ridge of snow, a white line, on the storm side of the stem of every exposed tree.")

It is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold indigo-y along the horizon. The evening star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun. See December 27, 1851 ("The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset . . . Venus - I suppose it is - is now the evening star, and very bright she is immediately after sunset in the early twilight."); Compare December 23, 1851 ("The evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red, . . . and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon."); September 18, 1858 ("The cooler air is so clear that we see Venus plainly some time before sundown.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Serene as the Sky and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Winter Sunsets

A rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. See December 9, 1856 ("A slight blush begins to suffuse the eastern horizon, and so the picture of the day is done and set in a gilded frame. Such is a winter eve."); January 10, 1859 ("This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun.").  Compare January 14, 1852 ("I notice to-night, about sundown, that the clouds in the eastern horizon are the deepest indigo-blue of any I ever saw. Commencing with a pale blue or slate in the west, the color deepens toward the east.")

The mountains are a dark blue and very near. See November 13, 1851("The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. Perhaps this is owing . . . to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer")

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

The evening star seen 

shining brightly before the 

twilight has begun.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A true winter sunset.

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-531227

The pond began to boom or whoop.

December 25

P. M. — Skated to Fair Haven and above. 

At seven this morning the water had already oozed out at the sides of the river and flowed over the ice. It appears to be the result of this bridging of the river in the night and so obstructing the channel or usual outlet. 

About 4 p. m. the sun sunk behind a cloud, and the pond began to boom or whoop. I noticed the same yesterday at the same hour at Flint's. It was perfectly silent before. The weather in both cases clear, cold, and windy. It is a sort of belching, and, as C. said, is somewhat frog-like. I suspect it did not continue to whoop long either night. It is a very pleasing phenomenon, so dependent on the altitude of the sun. 

December 25, 2019

When I go to Boston, I go naturally straight through the city down to the end of Long Wharf and look off, for I have no cousins in the back alleys. The water and the vessels are novel and interesting. 

What are our maritime cities but the shops and dwellings of merchants, about a wharf projecting into the sea, where there is a convenient harbor, on which to land the produce of other climes and at which to load the exports of our own? 

Next in interest to me is the market where the produce of our own country is collected. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, and many others are the names of wharves projecting into the sea. They are good places to take in and to discharge a cargo. Everybody in Boston lives at No. so-and-so, Long Wharf. 

I see a great many barrels and fig-drums and piles of wood for umbrella-sticks and blocks of granite and ice, etc., and that is Boston. 

Great piles of goods and the means of packing and conveying them, much wrapping-paper and twine, many crates and hogsheads and trucks, that is Boston. The more barrels, the more Boston. 

The museums and scientific societies and libraries are accidentals. They gather around the barrels, to save carting. 

Apparently the ice is held down on the sides of the river by being frozen to the shore and the weeds, and so is overflowed there, but in the middle it is lifted up and makes room for the tide. 

I saw, just above Fair Haven Pond, two or three places where, just before the last freezing, when the ice was softened and partly covered with sleet, there had been a narrow canal, about eight inches wide, quite across the river from meadow to meadow. I am constrained to believe, from the peculiar character of it on the meadow end, where in one case it divided and crossed itself, that it was made either by muskrats or otters or minks repeatedly crossing there. One end was for some distance like an otter trail in the soft upper part of the ice, not worn through.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 25, 1853

 Skated to Fair Haven and above. See ; December 5, 1853 (" Fair Haven Pond is skimmed completely over."); December 7, 1856 ("Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond”); December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”); December 24, 1853 ("Skated across Flint's Pond.")

About 4 p. m. the sun sunk behind a cloud, and the pond began to boom or whoop. I noticed the same yesterday at the same hour at Flint's. It is a very pleasing phenomenon, so dependent on the altitude of the sun. See February 12, 1854 ("The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering, . . . [y]et it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should"); December 25, 1858 (“I stayed later to hear the pond crack, but it did not much. ”)

A green light which advertises me of the lateness of the hour.

December 23. 

The third fine, clear, bright, and rather mild winter day.

P. M. — To Ball's Hill across meadow. 

The gardener at Sleepy Hollow says that they caught many small pouts and some pickerel that weighed half a pound (!) in the little pond lately dug there. I think this pond, say a third of an acre, was commenced about three years ago and completed last summer. It has no inlet and a very slight outlet, a shallow ditch that previously existed in the meadow, but in digging they have laid open two or three very deep spring-holes, and the pickerel were found in them. These fishes, no doubt, came up the shallow ditch. This proves that if you dig a pond in a meadow and connect it by the smallest rill or ditch with other water in which fishes live, however far off, the pond will be at once stocked with fishes. They are always ready to extend their territory. 


The Great Meadows are more than half covered with ice, and now I see that there was a very slight fall of snow last night. It is only betrayed here, having covered the ice about an eighth of an inch thick, except where there are cracks running quite across the meadow, where the water has oozed a foot or two each way and dissolved the snow, making conspicuous dark lines. 

In this slight snow I am surprised to see countless tracks of small birds, which have run over it in every direction from one end to the other of this great meadow since morning. By the length of the hind toe I know them to be snow buntings. 

Indeed, soon after I see them running still on one side of the meadow. I was puzzled to tell what they got by running there. Yet I [saw them] stopping repeatedly and picking up something. Of course I thought of those caterpillars which are washed out by a rain and freshet at this season, but I could not find one of them. It rained on the 18th and again the 20th, and over a good part of the meadow the top of the stubble left by the scythe rises a little above the ice, i. e. an inch or two, not enough to disturb a skater. The birds have run here chiefly, visiting each little collection or tuft of stubble, and found their food chiefly in and about this thin stubble. 

I examined such places a long time and very carefully, but I could not find there the seed of any plant whatever. It was merely the stubble of sedge, with never any head left, and a few cranberry leaves projecting. All that I could find was pretty often (in some places very often) a little black, or else a brown, spider (sometimes quite a large one) motionless on the snow or ice; and therefore I am constrained to think that they eat them, for I saw them running and picking in exactly such places a little way from me, and here were their tracks all around. Yet they are called graminivorous. 

Wilson says that he has seen them feeding on the seeds of aquatic plants on the Seneca River, clinging to their heads. I think he means wool-grass. Yet its seeds are too minute and involved in the wool. Though there was wool-grass hereabouts, the birds did not go near it. To be sure, it has but little seed now. If they are so common at the extreme north, where there is so little vegetation but perhaps a great many spiders, is it not likely that they feed on these insects ?

It is interesting to see how busy this flock is, exploring this great meadow to-day. If it were not for this slight snow, revealing their tracks but hardly at all concealing the stubble, I should not suspect it, though I might see them at their work. Now I see them running briskly over the ice, most commonly near the shore, where there is most stubble (though very little); and they explore the ground so fast that they are continually changing their ground, and if I do not keep my eye on them I lose the direction. 

Then here they come, with a stiff rip of their wings as they suddenly wheel, and those peculiar rippling notes, flying low quite across the meadow, half a mile even, to explore the other side, though that too is already tracked by them. Not the fisher nor skater range the meadow a thousandth part so much in a week as these birds in a day. They hardly notice me as they come on. Indeed, the flock, flying about as high as my head, divides, and half passes on each side of me. Thus they sport over these broad meadows of ice this pleasant winter day. The spiders lie torpid and plain to see on the snow, and if it is they that they are after they never know what kills them. 

I have loitered so long on the meadow that before I get to Ball's Hill those patches of bare ice (where water has oozed out and frozen) already reflect a green light which advertises me of the lateness of the hour. You may walk eastward in the winter afternoon till the ice begins to look green, half to three quarters of an hour before sunset, the sun having sunk behind you to the proper angle. Then it is time to turn your steps homeward. 

Soon after, too, the ice began to boom, or fire its evening gun, another warning that the end of the day was at hand, and a little after the snow reflected a distinct rosy light, the sun having reached the grosser atmosphere of the earth. These signs successively prompt us once more to retrace our steps. 

Even the fisherman, who perhaps has not observed any sign but that the sun is ready to sink beneath the horizon, is winding up his lines and starting for home; or perhaps he leaves them to freeze in. In a clear but pleasant winter day, I walk away till the ice begins to look green and I hear it boom, or perhaps till the snow reflects a rosy light. 

I ascended Ball's Hill to see the sun set. How red its light at this hour! I covered its orb with my hand, and let its rays light up the fine woollen fibres of my glove. They were a dazzling rose-color. It takes the gross atmosphere of earth to make this redness. 

You notice the long and slender light-brown or grayish downy racemes of the clethra seeds about the edges of ponds and pond-holes. The pods contain many very minute chaffy-looking seeds. 

You find in the cluster of the sweet-fern fruit now one or two rather large flattish conical hard-shelled seeds with a small meat. 

The pinweed — the larger (say thymifolia) — pods open, showing their three pretty leather-brown inner divisions open like a little calyx, a third or half containing still the little hemispherical or else triangular red dish-brown seeds. They are hard and abundant. 

That large juncus (paradoxus-like ?) of the river meadows — long white-tailed seed — just rising above the ice is full of seed now, glossy, pale-brown, white-tailed, chaffy to look at. 

The wool-grass wool is at least half gone, and its minute almost white [ ? ] seed or achenium in it; but a little is left, not more than the thirtieth of an inch long. It looks too minute and involved in the wool for a snow bunting to eat. The above plants are all now more or less recurved, bent by the cold and the blasts of autumn. 

The now bare or empty heads of the liatris look somewhat like dusky daisies surmounted by a little button instead of a disk. The last, a stiff, round, parchment-like skin, the base on which its flowerets stood, is pierced by many little round holes just like the end of a thimble, where the cavities are worn through, and it is convex like that. It readily scales off and you can look through it. 

I noticed on the 18th that the plumes of the pine which had been covered with snow and glaze and were then thawed and wet with the mist and rain were very much contracted or narrowed, — and this gave a peculiar and more open character to the tree.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 23, 1859

By the length of the hind toe I know them to be snow buntings. See. March 2, 1858 (" Their track is much like a small crow’s track, showing a long heel and furrowing the snow between with their toes")  See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Snow Bunting

You may walk eastward in the winter afternoon till the ice begins to look green, half to three quarters of an hour before sunset, the sun having sunk behind you to the proper angle. Then it is time to turn your steps homeward. See January 7, 1856 (“ It is probably a constant phenomenon in cold weather when the ground is covered with snow and the sun is low, morning or evening, and you are looking from it.”); December 25, 1858 (“The sun getting low now, say at 3.30, I see the ice green, southeast.”); January 10, 1859 ("About half an hour before sunset this intensely clear cold evening (thermometer at five -6°), I observe all the sheets of ice (and they abound everywhere now in the fields), when I look from one side about at right angles with the sun’s rays, reflect a green light. This is the case even when they are in the shade"); January 19, 1859 ("To-night I notice, this warm evening, that there is most green in the ice when I go directly from the sun. There is also considerable when I go directly toward it, but more than that a little one side; but when I look at right angles with the sun, I see none at all.") ; January 20, 1859 ("The green of the ice and water begins to be visible about half an hour before sunset. Is it produced by the reflected blue of the sky mingling with the yellow or pink of the setting sun?"). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The hour before sunset

I ascended Ball's Hill to see the sun set. See June 5, 1854 ("I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature."); August 14, 1854 ("I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon, — to behold and commune with something grander than man.”)

Bubbles in Walden ice.

January  8. 

I see what are probably the anther cells distinctly in the large buds of the poplar, which for a long time have shown their wool one sixth of an inch long. Also similar cells in the alder catkins, but greener and less springlike. The birch ones are the yellowest. 

At Walden. — The bubbles which I made under the ice by casting on stones here night before last, or forty- eight hours ago, nearly half a foot in diameter, still remain. . . .

I inferred, therefore, that all those infinite minute bubbles I had seen first on the under side of the ice were now frozen in with it, and that each, in its proportion or degree, like the large ones, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath it to rot it. And probably it is the expanding and shrinking of the air in them, as well as in the water, which cracks the ice and makes the whooping sound.

Perhaps those minute bubbles that are seen one above another in the freshest ice have been frozen in like the largest, as they successively rose from the bottom while the ice was freezing. 

It has been supposed that Walden ice does not keep so well because it has more air in it, there being no outlet or stream to carry it off. There may be some thing in this. Let me look at the fresh ice of a pond that has a stream, and see if there are fewer bubbles under it. Of course, large bubbles would be very obvious under transparent or black ice.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, January 8, 1853

Probably it is the expanding and shrinking of the air in them, as well as in the water, which cracks the ice and makes the whooping sound. See Walden ("The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. . . .The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering")

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

I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields.

January  1. 

Saturday. 

January 1, 2018

This morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. The whole earth, as last night, but much more, is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coat a quarter of an inch or more in thickness. 

About 9 o'clock a. m., I go to Lee's via Hubbard's Wood and Holden's Swamp and the riverside, for the middle is open. 

The stones and cow-dung, and the walls too, are all cased in ice on the north side. The latter look like alum rocks. This, not frozen mist or frost, but frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. Where yesterday was a plain, smooth field, appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. The stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged from ten to a hundred times. 

The addition is so universally on the north side that a traveller could not lose the points of compass to-day, though it should [be] never so dark, for every blade of grass would serve to guide him, telling from which side the storm came yesterday. 

These straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons or sceptres, and make conspicuous foreground to the landscape, from six inches to three feet high. C. thought that these fat, icy branches on the withered grass and herbs had no nucleus, but looking closer I showed him the fine black wiry threads on which they impinged, which made him laugh with surprise. 

The very cow-dung is incrusted, and the clover and sorrel send up a dull-green gleam through their icy coat, like strange plants. The pebbles in the plowed land are seen as through a transparent coating of gum. 

Some weeds bear the ice in masses, some, like the trumpet-weed and tansy, in balls for each dried flower. What a crash of jewels as you walk! The most careless walker, who never deigned to look at these humble weeds before, cannot help observing them now. This is why the herbage is left to stand dry in the fields all winter. 

Upon a solid foundation of ice stand out, pointing in all directions between northwest and northeast, or within the limits of ninety degrees, little spicula or crystallized points, half an inch or more in length. Upon the dark, glazed plowed ground, where a mere wiry stem rises, its north side is thickly clad with these snow-white spears, like some Indian's head-dress, as if it had attracted all the frost. 

I saw a prinos bush full of large berries by the wall in Hubbard's field. Standing on the west side, the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation or prolongation on the north was admirable. I thought I had never seen the berries so dazzlingly bright. The whole north side of the bush, berries and stock, was beautifully incrusted. And when I went round to the north side, the redness of the berries came softened through and tingeing the allied snow-white bush, like an evening sky beyond. These adjoined snow or ice berries being beset, within the limits of ninety degrees on the north, with those icy prickles or spicula, between which the red glow and sometimes the clear red itself appeared, gave it the appearance of a raspberry bush full of over-ripe fruit. 

Standing on the north side of a bush or tree, looking against the sky, you see only a white ghost of a tree, without a mote of earthiness, but as you go round it, the dark core comes into view. It makes all the odds imaginable whether you are travelling north or south. 

The drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. 

The weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which northern trees, like the firs, constantly wear, bending and twisting the branches; for the twigs and plumes of the pines, being frozen, remain as the wind held them, and new portions of the trunk are exposed. Seen from the north, there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. 

The willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. The sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, and these ghost-like trees make a scenery which reminds you of Spitzbergen. I see now the beauty of the causeway, by the bridge alders below swelling into the road, overtopped by willows and maples. The fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist, and between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, — toward spirit-land. 

The pines are as white as a counterpane, with raised embroidery and white tassels and fringes. Each fascicle of leaves or needles is held apart by an icy club surmounted by a little snowy or icy ball. Finer than the Saxon arch is this path running under the pines, roofed, not with crossing boughs, but drooping ice-covered twigs in irregular confusion. 

See in the midst of this stately pine, towering like the solemn ghost of a tree, the white ice-clad boughs of other trees appearing, of a different character; sometimes oaks with leaves incrusted, or fine-sprayed maples or walnuts. 

But finer than all, this red oak, its leaves incrusted like shields a quarter of an inch thick, and a thousand fine spicula, like long serrations at right angles with their planes, upon their edges. It has an indescribably rich effect, with color of the leaf coming softened through the ice, a delicate fawn-color of many shades. 

Where the plumes of the pitch pine are short and spreading close upon the trunk, sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed. Pitch pines present rough, massy grenadier plumes, with each a darker spot or cavity in the end, where you look in to the buds. 

I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. 

I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields. 

Being at Cambridge day before yesterday, Sibley told me that Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world, and gave him permission to repeat his remark. 

As I stood on the top of a ladder, he came along with his hand full of papers and inquired, "Do you value autographs ?" "No, I do not," I answered slowly and gravely. "Oh, I didn't know but you did. I had some of Governor Dunlap," said he, retreating. 

After talking with Uncle Charles the other night about the worthies of this country, Webster and the rest, as usual, considering who were geniuses and who not, I showed him up to bed, and when I had got into bed myself, I heard his chamber door opened, after eleven o'clock, and he called out, in an earnest, stentorian voice, loud enough to wake the whole house, 

"Henry! was John Quincy Adams a genius?"

      "No, I think not," was my reply.

     "Well, I didn't think he was," answered he.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 1, 1853

I listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a reasonable creature. See February 12, 1854 (“The pond does not thunder every night, and I do not know its law exactly. I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering”);  Walden (“Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should.”)

Agassiz told him that Harris was the greatest entomologist in the world. Harris ( the librarian of Harvard University, and one of Thoreau's professors).had commented that “Thoreau would be a splendid entomologist if he had not been spoiled by Emerson.” Clark A. Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris 1795-1856: Nature, Science, and Society in the Life of an American Naturalist 175. See e.g.July 26, 1852 ("Went to Cambridge and Boston to-day. Dr. Harris says that my great moth is the Attacus luna"); November 11, 1852 (" Did Harris call the water-bug Gyrinus to-day ?");    February 9, 1853 ("Dr. Harris thinks the Indians had no real hemp but their apocynum, and, he thinks, a kind of nettle, and an asclepias, etc.He doubts if the dog was indigenous among them."); April 11, 1853 ("Dr. Harris says that that early black-winged, buff-edged butterfly is the Vanessa Antiopa, and is introduced from Europe, and is sometimes found in this state alive in winter.”); January 19, 1854 ("[Dr, Harris] thinks that small beetle, slightly metallic, which I saw with grubs, etc., on the yellow lily roots last fall was a Donax or one of the Donasia (?)"); January 22, 1854 (“Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea. ”); May 9, 1854 ("That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera he [ Harris ] says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla. . . . Says the shad-flies (with streamers and erect wings ) are ephemeræ"); January 16, 1855 ([Harris] says the ant-lion is found at Burlington, Vermont, and may be at Concord"); October 19, 1857 ("Harris says the crickets produce their shrilling by shuffling their wing-covers together lengthwise.")

Uncle Chrarles. See March 28, 1856 ("Uncle Charles buried. He was born in February, 1780, the winter of the Great Snow, and he dies in the winter of another great snow,—a life bounded by great snows.")

That rocky shore which so reflects the light.

December 28. 

December 28,2018

P. M. — To Walden. 

The earth is bare. I walk about the pond looking at the shores, since I have not paddled about it much of late years. What a grand place for a promenade! 

Methinks it has not been so low for ten years, and many alders, etc., are left dead on its brink. The high blueberry appears to bear this position, alternate wet and dry, as well as any shrub or tree. I see winterberries still abundant in one place. 

That rocky shore under the pitch pines which so reflects the light, is only three feet wide by one foot high; yet there even to-day the ice is melted close to the edge, and just off this shore the pickerel are most abundant. This is the warm and sunny side to which any one — man, bird, or quadruped — would soonest resort in cool weather. 

I notice a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines, in the sun, lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another, with a reference to me, I think, — the cunning and innocent little birds. One a little further off utters the phoebe note. 

There is a foot more or less of clear open water at the edge here, and, seeing this, one of these birds hops down as if glad to find any open water at this season, and, after drinking, it stands in the water on a stone up to its belly and dips its head and flirts the water about vigorously, giving itself a good washing. I had not suspected this at this season. No fear that it will catch cold. 

The ice cracks suddenly with a shivering jar like crockery or the brittlest material, such as it is. And I notice, as I sit here at this open edge, that each time the ice cracks, though it may be a good distance off toward the middle, the water here is very much agitated. The ice is about six inches thick. 

Aunt Jane says that she was born on Christmas Day, and they called her a Christmas gift, and she remembers hearing that her Aunt Hannah Orrock was so disconcerted by the event that she threw all the spoons outdoors, when she had washed them, or with the dish water. 

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.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 28, 1858

That rocky shore under the pitch pines which so reflects the light. See December 25, 1858 (“[T]he rocky shore under the pitch pines at the northeast end.. . . reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct, as if the pond showed its teeth.”)

Chickadees lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another, with a reference to me, I think, — the cunning and innocent little birds. See November 9, 1850 (“The chickadees, if I stand long enough, hop nearer and nearer inquisitively, from pine bough to pine bough, till within four or five feet, occasionally lisping a note”); December 1, 1853 (“They are our most honest and innocent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of any of the walker.”); December 3, 1856 (“And they will flit after and close to you, and naively peck at the nearest twig to you, as if they were minding their own business all the while without any reference to you. ”)

The ice cracks suddenly with a shivering jar like crockery or the brittlest material, such as it is. See January 23, 1858 (“Walden, I think, begins to crack and boom first on the south side,. . . like the cracking of crockery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. . . . as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is probably nine or ten inches. ”); December 25, 1858 (“I stayed later to hear the pond crack, but it did not much. ”) Also Walden ("The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. . . .The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. . . . Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should . . . The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.”)

Father says that he and his sisters were born in Richmond Street, Boston, See December 27, 1855 ("Recalled this evening, with the aid of Mother, the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived and some events of my life.”); December 26, 1855 ("In a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made! For example, how difficult for a man to remember in what towns or houses he has lived, or when! Yet one of the first steps of his biographer will be to establish these facts, and he will thus give an undue importance to many of them.”)

It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.

January 23.

Saturday. The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues. 

The ground has been bare since the 11th. This morning was colder than before. I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time.

 P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook. 

A fine afternoon. There has been but little use for gloves this winter, though I have been surveying a great deal for three months. The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March. 

Standing on the bridge over the Mill Brook on the Turnpike, there being but little ice on the south side, I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring. 

lycopodium

I see the terminal shield fern very fresh, as an evergreen, at Saw Mill Brook, and (I think it is) the marginal fern and Lycopodium lucidulum. 

I go up the brook, walking on it most of the way, surprised to find that it will bear me. How it falls from rock to rock, as down a flight of stairs, all through that rocky wood, from the swamp which is its source to the Everett farm! The bays or more stagnant parts are thickest frozen, the channel oftenest open, and here and there the water has overflowed the ice and covered it with a thickening mass of glistening spiculae. The white markings on the under side are very rich and varied, – the currency of the brook, the impression of its fleeting bubbles even. It comes out of a meadow of about an acre.

I go near enough to Flint's Pond, about 4 P. M., to hear it thundering. In summer I should not have suspected its presence an eighth of a mile off through the woods, but in such a winter day as this it speaks and betrays itself. 

Returning through Britton's field, I notice the stumps of chestnuts cut a dozen years ago. This tree grows rapidly, and one layer seems not to adhere very firmly to another. I can easily count the concentric circles of growth on these old stumps as I stand over them, for they are worn into conspicuous furrows along the lines of the pores of the wood. One or more rings often gape an eighth of an inch or more, at about their twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, when the growth, in three or four cases that I examined, was most rapid. 

Looking toward the woods in the horizon, it is seen to be very hazy. 

At Ditch Pond I hear what I suppose to be a fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds so through the Wood, while I am in the hollow, that I cannot tell from which side it comes. I hear it bark forty or fifty times at least. It is a peculiar sound, quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know. 

Walden, I think, begins to crack and boom first on the south side, which is first in the shade, for I hear it cracking there, though it is still in the sun around me. It is not so sonorous and like the dumping of frogs as I have heard it, but more like the cracking of crockery. It suggests the very brittlest material, as if the globe you stood on were a hollow sphere of glass and might fall to pieces on the slightest touch. Most shivering, splintery, screeching cracks these are, as if the ice were no thicker than a tumbler, though it is probably nine or ten inches. Methinks my weight sinks it and helps to crack sometimes. 

Who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and unimagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mysterious auspicious circumstances? Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? Individuals accept their fate and live according to it, as the Indian does. Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully, — is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation. 

To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature. This it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. Unless Nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are barren and dreary. 

Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well, that he was taller than Father, and used to ride out to their house—she was a Stone and lived where she and her husband did afterward, now Darius Merriam’s —when they made cheeses, to drink the whey, being in consumption. She said that she remembered Grand mother too, Jennie Burns, how she came to the school room (in Middle Street (?), Boston) once, leading her little daughter Elizabeth, the latter so small that she could not tell her name distinctly, but spoke thick and lispingly, — “Elizabeth Orrock Thoreau.”  

The dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. The former has attained to more clearness in his bark;  it is more ringing and musical, more developed; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better; and beside he has made his place so good in the world that he can run without skulking in the open field.

What a smothered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox! It seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest it should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe.

I observe that the ice of Walden is heaved up more than a foot over that bar between the pond and Cyrus Hubbard’s basin. The gravelly bank or bar itself is also heaved up considerably where exposed. So that I am inclined to think that such a tilting is simply the result of a thawing beneath and not merely of a crowding or pressure on the two sides.

I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature. If I feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify? I do not think much of that chemistry that can extract corn and potatoes out of a barren [soil], but rather of that chemistry that can extract thoughts and sentiments out of the life of a man on any soil. 

It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 23, 1858

I see several small water-bugs (Gyrinus) swimming about, as in the spring. See January 24, 1858 ("At Nut Meadow Brook the small-sized water-bugs are as abundant and active as in summer. . . .This is something new to me. What must they think of this winter? It is like a child waked up and set to playing at midnight."); January 30, 1860 ("The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Water-bug (Gyrinus) and Skaters (Hydrometridae) 

I go up [Saw Mill Brook] walking on it most of the way. How it falls from rock to rock, as down a flight of stairs. See April 1, 1852 ("We love to see the water stand, or seem to stand, at many different levels within a short distance, while we sit in its midst, some above, some below us, and many successive falls in different directions, meandering in the course of the fall. . .I enjoy this little fall on Saw Mill Run more than many a large one on a river that I have seen.")

A fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but choked with fear, yet it is on a high key. It sounds quite unlike any other woodland sound that I know. See May 20, 1858 ("She uttered at very short intervals a prolonged, shrill, screeching kind of bark, beginning lower and rising to a very high key, lasting two seconds; a very broken and ragged sound, more like the scream of a large and angry bird than the bark of a dog, trilled like a piece of vibrating metal at the end.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Fox

I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any 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."); January 24, 1856 (" You may walk anywhere on the river now. Even the open space against Merrick’s, below the Rock, has been closed again, . . . I do not find a foot of open water, even, on this North Branch, as far as I go, . . .The river has been frozen unusually long and solidly.") 

I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature. See April 23, 1857 ("Does he chiefly own the land who coldly uses it and gets corn and potatoes out of it, or he who loves it and gets inspiration from it? . . . All nature is my bride."); August 23, 1853("Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health."); July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); June 30, 1852 ("Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man."); November 16, 1850 ("My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world,”)

If I feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify?   See January 1, 1852 ("Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer."); January 17, 1854 ("Human beings with whom I have no sympathy are far stranger to me than inanimate matter, — rocks or earth. Looking on the last, I feel comparatively as if I were with my kindred."); August 30, 1856 (“If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many remain to travel, — and the more, the better, — reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing.”); August 30 1856 (“ I believe almost in the personality of such planetary matter. . .”);  February 20, 1857 ("I am that rock by the pond-side.")

It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you. See October 26, 1857 ("The seasons and all their changes are in me. . . . My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike. The perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home in her! "); October 26, 1853 ("You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day's experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show."). See also August 19, 1851 ("How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!"); September 2, 1851 ("We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. . . . It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”)

The bark of the fox –

a smothered, ragged, feeble

unmusical sound! 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Have the seasons in you

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season, out-of-doors, in its own locality."

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