The invisible moon
gives light through the thickest of
a driving snow-storm.
All Nature braced by
the cold that gives tension to
both body and mind.
The bird-shaped scales of
the white birch are blown more than
twenty rods from trees.
It would not be worth
the while to die and leave all
this life behind one.
Tracing birch scales north
twenty rods to the nearest
and the only birch.
It is bitter cold
with a cutting northwest wind –
I come to myself.
January 7, 1857
The storm is over–
beautiful winter morning,
one of creation.
January 7, 1858
These true mornings of
creation – original
and poetic days.
January 7, 1858
January 7, 2022
This is one of those pleasant winter mornings when you find the river firmly frozen in the night, but still the air is serene and the sun feels gratefully warm an hour after sunrise. January 7, 1853
The storm is over, and it is one of those beautiful winter mornings when a vapor is seen hanging in the air between the village and the woods. January 7, 1858.
These are true mornings of creation, original and poetic days, not mere repetitions of the past. There is no lingering of yesterday's fogs, only such a mist as might have adorned the first morning. January 7, 1858.
The air is serene and the sun feels gratefully warm an hour after sunrise, — though so fair, a healthy whitish vapor fills the lower stratum of the air, concealing the mountains. January 7, 1853
The water has oozed out from the thinnest part of the black ice, and I see a vapor curling up from it. There is also much vapor in the air, looking toward the woods. January 7, 1856
It is a lichen day . . . How full of life and of eyes is the damp bark! January 7, 1855
By 10 o'clock I notice a very long level stratum of cloud not very high in the southeastern sky, — all the rest being clear, — which I suspect to be the vapor from the sea. January 7, 1858
At breakfast time the thermometer stood at -12°. Earlier it was probably much lower. Smith’s was at -24° early this morning. January 7, 1856
All nature is but braced by the cold. It gives tension to both body and mind. January 7, 1853
It is bitter cold, with a cutting northwest wind . . . All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather. January 7, 1857
I felt my spirits rise when I had got off the road into the open fields , and the sky had a new appearance . I stepped along more buoyantly. January 7, 1857
This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is . . . what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. January 7, 1857
The snow is sixteen inches deep at least, but [it] is a mild and genial afternoon, as if it were the beginning of a January thaw. Take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in the fall. January 7, 1851
The birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are more noisy, and the chickadees are oftener heard. January 7, 1851
Here comes a little flock of titmice, plainly to keep me company, with their black caps and throats making them look top-heavy, restlessly hopping along the alders, with a sharp, clear, lisping note. January 7, 1855
On opening the door I feel a very warm southwesterly wind, contrasting with the cooler air of the house, and find it unexpectedly wet in the street, and the manure is being washed off the ice into the gutter. It is, in fact, a January thaw. January 7, 1855
A thaw begins, with a southerly wind. From having been about 20° at midday, it is now (the thermometer) some 35° quite early, and at 2 p. m. 45°. January 7, 1860
The wind and thaw have brought down a fresh crop of dry pine and spruce needles. January 7, 1854
The snow is strewn with the seeds of the birch, the small winged seeds or samarae and the larger scales or bracts shaped like a bird in flight. January 7, 1853
The least touch or jar shakes them off, and it is difficult to bring the female catkins home in your pocket. They cover the snow like coarse bran. January 7, 1853
The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees. January 7, 1854
I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it. January 7, 1856
Going down path to the spring, I see where some fox (apparently) has passed down it. January 7, 1857
Though the rest of the broad path is else perfectly unspotted white, each track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted. January 7, 1857
In the wood-path [the snow] is all scored with the tracks of leaves that have scurried over it. Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious. January 7, 1857
It snowed so late last night, and so much has fallen from the trees, that I notice only one squirrel, and a fox, and perhaps partridge track, into which the snow has blown. January 7, 1858
The fox has been beating the bush along walls and fences. January 7, 1858
I saw yesterday the track of a fox, and in the course of it a place where he had apparently pawed to the ground, eight or ten inches, and on the just visible ground lay frozen a stale-looking mouse, probably rejected by him. A little further was a similar hole with some fur in it. January 7, 1860
The mice have not been forth since the snow, or perhaps in some places where they have, their tracks are obliterated. January 7, 1858
Though the snow is only some six inches deep, the yards appear full of those beautiful crystals (star or wheel shaped flakes), lying light, as a measure is full of grain. January 7, 1858
By 10.30 A.M. it begins to blow hard, the snow comes down from the trees in fine showers, finer far than ever falls direct from the sky, completely obscuring the view through the aisles of the wood, and in open fields it is rapidly drifting. It is too light to make good sleighing. January 7, 1858
The surface of the snow in the woods is thickly marked by the snow which has fallen from the trees on to it. January 7, 1858
The whole surface of the snow on fields and river is composed now of flat, rough little drifts, like the surface of some rough slaty rocks. January 7, 1856
The pond is now a plain snow-field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. It is too cold for them. The surface of the snow there is finely waved and grained, giving it a sort of slaty fracture, the appearance which hard, dry blown snow assumes. January 7, 1857
On breaking the male catkins, I am surprised to see the yellow anthers so distinct, promising spring. I did not suspect that there was so sure a promise or prophecy of spring. These are frozen in December or earlier, — the anthers of spring, filled with their fertilizing dust January 7, 1853
The channel of the river is quite open in many places, and I hear the pleasant sound of running water. A certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again. January 7, 1855
It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter, this surrounded by a broad border of yellowish spew. The water has oozed out from the thinnest part of the black ice, and I see a vapor curling up from it. 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 7, 1856
Saw a large flock of goldfinches running and feeding amid the weeds in a pasture, just like tree sparrows.
January 7, 1860
I see some tree sparrows feeding on the fine grass seed above the snow, near the road on the hillside below the Dutch house. They are flitting along one at a time, their feet commonly sunk in the snow, uttering occasionally a low sweet warble and seemingly as happy there, and with this wintry prospect before them for the night and several months to come, as any man by his fireside. January 7, 1858
One occasionally hops or flies toward another, and the latter suddenly jerks away from him. They are reaching or hopping up to the fine grass, or oftener picking the seeds from the snow. At length the whole ten have collected within a space a dozen feet square, but soon after, being alarmed, they utter a different and less musical chirp and flit away into an apple tree.
The snow is sixteen inches deep at least, but [it] is a mild and genial afternoon, as if it were the beginning of a January thaw . . . I do not remember to have seen fleas except when the weather was mild and the snow damp. January 7, 1851
A thaw begins, with a southerly wind . . . As soon as I reach the neighborhood of the woods I begin to see the snow-fleas, more than a dozen rods from woods, amid a little goldenrod, etc., where, methinks, they must have come up through the snow. Last night there was not one to be seen. January 7, 1860
This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is . . . what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. January 7, 1857
I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself. January 7, 1857
Returning, just before sunset, the few little patches of ice look green as I go from the sun (which is in clouds). 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. January 7, 1856
I perceive the increased length of the day on returning from my afternoon walk. Can it be? The sun sets only about five minutes later, and the day is about ten minutes longer. January 7, 1852
I went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not; but, now that I have left them nearly a mile behind, I hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo . . . It is a sound which the wood or horizon makes. January 7, 1854
In the western horizon . . . a bright coppery-yellow fair-weather cloud. January 7, 1852
There was a warm sunset over the wooded valleys, a yellowish tinge on the pines. Reddish dun-colored clouds like dusky flames stood over it. January 7, 1857
And then streaks of blue sky were seen here and there. The life, the joy, that is in blue sky after a storm! There is no account of the blue sky in history. January 7, 1857
We never tire of the drama of sunset. I go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. January 7, 1852
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. January 7, 1852
And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light. And then the damask curtains glow along the western window. January 7, 1852
And now the first star is lit, and I go home. January 7, 1852
January 7, 2019
December 6, 1859 ("No sooner has the snow fallen than, in the woods, it is seen to be dotted almost everywhere with the fine seeds and scales of birches and alders")
December 19, 1856 (“[it] is more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well.”)
December 31, 1850 ("The blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so communicate the alarm to other birds and to beasts.") January 5, 1854 ("Still thaws. This afternoon (as probably yesterday), it being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is covered with snow-fleas. Especially they are sprinkled like pepper for half a mile in the tracks of a woodchopper in deep snow. These are the first since the snow came.")
January 5, 1860 ("I see where a flock of goldfinches in the morning had settled on a hemlock's top, by the snow strewn with scales, literally blackened or darkened with them for a rod.")
A little flock of titmice
with their black caps and throats
restlessly hopping along
with sharp clear lisping notes.
Light of the setting
sun falling on the snow-banks
glow almost yellow.
January 8, 1856( "The surface of the snow on the pond is finely scored in many places by the oak leaves which have been blown across it. They have furrowed deeper than a mouses track and might puzzle a citizen.”)January 8. 1860 ("We discover a new world every time that we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. I see the jay and hear his scream oftener for the thaw. ")
January 9, 1858 ("Some chickadees come flitting close to me, and one utters its spring note, phe-be, for which I feel under obligations to him. ") January 9, 1854 ("Find many snow-fleas, apparently frozen, on the snow.")
January 10, 1854 ("I cannot thaw out to life the snow-fleas which yesterday covered the snow like pepper, in a frozen state.")
January 10, 1859 (" See, returning, amid the Roman wormwood in front of the Monroe place by the river, half a dozen goldfinches feeding just like the sparrows. How warm their yellow breasts look! They utter the goldfinches’ watery twitter still")
January 15, 1856 ("Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me.”)
January 21, 1857 (“It is remarkable how many tracks of foxes you will see quite near the village, where they have been in the night, and yet a regular walker will not glimpse one oftener than once in eight or ten years. ”) January 30, 1859 ("How peculiar the hooting of an owl! It is not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood.")
February 2, 1860 (“I have myself seen one place where a mouse came to the surface to-day in the snow. Probably [the fox] has smelt out many such galleries. Perhaps he seizes them through the snow.”)
February 2, 1860 (“And as we were kindling a fire on the pond by the side of the island , we saw the fox himself at the inlet of the river . He was busily examining along the sides of the pond by the button - bushes and willows , smelling in the snow . Not appearing to regard us much , he slowly explored along the shore of the pond thus , half - way round it ; at Pleasant Meadow , evidently looking for mice ( or moles ? ) in the grass of the bank , smelling in the shallow snow there amid the stubble , often retracing his steps and pausing at particular spots”)
March 7, 1852 ("The stillness is more impressive than any sound, - the moon, the stars, the trees, the snow.")
January 7, 2023
If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
you will have occasion to repeat it
with illustrations the next,
and the season and life itself is prolonged.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024
