Pretty good sleighing.

March 9.

About three inches more of snow fell last night, which, added to about five of the old, makes eight, or more than before since last spring. Pretty good sleighing. 

The State commonly grants a tract of forest to make an academy out of, for such is the material of which our institutions are made, though only the crudest part of it is used, but the groves of the academy are straight way cut down, and that institution is built of its lumber, its coarsest and least valuable part. Down go the groves of the academy and up goes its frame, — on some bare common far away. And as for the public domains, if anybody neglected his civil duties during the last war, he is privileged to cut and slash there, — he is let loose against one hundred and sixty acres of well-behaved trees, as if the liberty he had defended was derived from liber, bark, and meant the liberty to bark the trees.

H.  D. Thoreau, Journal, March 9, 1858

About three inches more of snow fell last night, which, added to about five of the old, makes eight, or more than before since last spring. See March 2, 1858 ("Snowed last night and this morning, about seven inches deep, much more than during the winter, the first truly wintry-looking day so far as snow is concerned,"); March 1, 1858 ("We have just had a winter with absolutely no sleighing, which I do not find that any one distinctly remembers the like of.") Compare March 9, 1856 ("[S]ixteen inches of snow on a level in open fields, hard and dry, ice in Flint’s Pond two feet thick, and the aspect of the earth is that of the middle of January in a severe winter.")

So many purposes left unaccomplished.

March 26.

March 26, 2016

To Cambridge. 

They are just beginning to use wheels in Concord, but only in the middle of the town, where the snow is at length worn and melted down to bare ground in the middle of the road, from two to ten feet wide. Sleighs are far the most common, even here. 

In Cambridge there is no sleighing. For the most part, the middle of the road from Porter’s to the College is bare and even dusty for twenty to thirty feet in width. The College Yard is one half bare. So, if they have had more snow than we, as some say: it has melted much faster.

There is also less in the towns between us and Cambridge than in Concord. The snow lies longer on the low, level plain surrounded by hills in which Concord is situated. I am struck by the more wintry aspect — almost entirely uninterrupted snow-fields — on coming into Concord in the cars. 

I am sometimes affected by the consideration that a man may spend the whole of his life after boyhood in accomplishing a particular design; as if he were put to a special and petty use, without taking time to look around him and appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. If so many purposes are thus necessarily left unaccomplished, perhaps unthought of, we are reminded of the transient interest we have in this life. 

Our interest in our country, in the spread of liberty, etc., strong and, as it were, innate as it is, cannot be as transient as our present existence here. It cannot be that all those patriots who die in the midst of their career have no further connection with the career of their country.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 26, 1856

They are just beginning to use wheels in Concord. See March 25, 1860 ("When March arrives, a tolerably calm, clear, sunny, spring like day, the snow is so far gone that sleighing ends and our compassion is excited by the sight of horses laboriously dragging wheeled vehicles through mud and water and slosh. We shall no longer hear the jingling of sleigh bells.")