Fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears.

December 26

After snow, rain, and hail yesterday and last night, we have this morning quite a glaze, there being at last an inch or two of crusted snow on the ground, the most we have had. 

The sun comes out at 9 A. M. and lights up the ice-incrusted trees, but it is pretty warm and the ice rapidly melts. 

I go to Walden 'via the almshouse and up the railroad. 

Trees seen in the West against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as frostwork, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, with recurved twigs. 

The walls and fences are encased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. 

Already the wind is rising and a brattling is heard overhead in the street. 

The sun, shining down a gorge over the woods at Brister’s Hill, reveals a wonderfully brilliant as well as seemingly solid and diversified region in the air. 

The ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine-needles, only half as thick commonly on one side. Their heads are bowed; their plumes and needles are stiff, as if preserved under glass for the inspection of posterity. 

Thus is our now especially slow-footed river laid up not merely on the meadows, but on the twigs and leaves of the trees, on the needles of the pines. 

The pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top and remind me of firs and even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. The crust is already strewn with bits of the green needles which have been broken ofl. Frequently the whole top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches are drooping and massed together, resting on one another. 

But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. 

Here are asters, savory-leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent icebutton, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx. These are very common. 

Each little blue-curls calyx has a spherical button like those brass ones on little boys’ jackets, — little sprigs on them, —and the pennyroyal has still smaller spheres, more regularly arranged about its stem, chandelier-wise, and still smells through the ice. 

The finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice and most branched on their minute threads. These weeds are spread and arched over into the snow again, — countless little arches a few inches high, each cased in ice, which you break with a tinkling crash at each step. 

The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all, for the scarlet is increased and multiplied by reflection through the bubbles and hemispherical surfaces of the crust, as if it covered some vermilion grain thickly strewn. 

And the brown cup lichens stand in their midst. The whole rough bark, too, is encased.

Already a squirrel has perforated the crust above the mouth of his burrow, here and there by the side of the path, and left some empty acorn shells on the snow. He has shovelled out this morning before the snow was frozen on his door-step. 

Now, at 10 A. M., there blows a very strong wind from the northwest, and it grows cold apace.

Particularly are we attracted in the winter by greenness and signs of growth, as the green and white shoots of grass and weeds, pulled or floating on the water, and also by color, as cockspur lichens and crimson birds, etc. 

Thorny bushes look more thorny than ever; each thorn is prolonged and exaggerated. 

Some boys have come out to a wood-side hill to coast. It must be sport to them, lying on their stomachs, to hear their sled crouching the crystalled weeds when they have reached the more weedy pasture below.

4 P. M. — Up railroad. 

Since the sun has risen higher and fairly triumphed over the clouds, the ice has glistened with all the prismatic hues. On the trees it is now considerably dissipated, but rather owing to the wind than the sun. 

The ice is chiefly on the upper and on the storm side of twigs, etc. The whole top of the pine forest, as seen miles off in the horizon, is of sharp points.  

It has grown cold, and the crust bears. The weeds and grasses, being so thickened by this coat of ice, appear much more numerous in the fields. It is surprising what a bristling crop they are. 

The sun is gone before five. 

Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none, only some small pink-dun (?) clouds. In the east still larger ones, which after sunset turned to pale slate.

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. 

I find in my Journal that the most important events in my life, if recorded at all, are not dated.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1855

But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. See December 26, 1853 ("All weeds, with their seeds, rising dark above the snow, are now remarkably conspicuous, which before were not observed against the dark earth.”); November 18, 1855 ("Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character.”); December 6, 1856  ("Not till the snow comes are the beauty and variety and richness of vegetation ever fully revealed. Some plants are now seen more simply and distinctly and to advantage.”); February 6, 1857 ("Insignificant weeds and stubble along the railroad causeway and elsewhere are now made very conspicuous, both by their increased size and bristling stiffness and their whiteness.”)

The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump. [British soldier lichen (Cladonia_cristatella).] See  December 6, 1859 ("It is somewhat of a lichen day . . .What surprising forms and colors! Designed on every natural surface of rock or tree."); December 31, 1851 ("Nature has a day for each of her creatures, her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall.”); February 7, 1859 ("To study lichens is to get a taste of earth and health, to go gnawing the rails and rocks. This product of the bark is the essence of all times. The lichenist extracts nutriment from the very crust of the earth. . . .  It fits a man to deal with the barrenest and rockiest experience.  A little moisture, a fog, or rain, or melted snow makes his wilderness to blossom like the rose.") See also  Jim Cornish, Lichens: Thoreau's Leaves of Winter and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst

The scarlet fruit of 

cockspur lichen seen glowing 

through the snowy crust.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A myriad of crystal spears

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-551226

The moon, the stars, the trees, the snow

March 7.

A very pleasant, spring-promising day. Yet I walk up the river on the ice to Fair Haven Pond. As I cross the snow (2 P.M.) where it lies deepest in hollows, its surface honeycombed by the sun, I hear it suddenly sink under and around me with a crash, and look about for a tree or roof from which it may have fallen. It has melted next the earth, and my weight makes it fall. In one instance, when I jump over a wall on to snow nearly three feet deep, I hear this loud and startling crash and look round in vain to discover the cause of it. I hear it settle over many rods. 

At 9 o'clock P.M to the woods by the full moon. 

It is rather mild to-night. I can walk without gloves. There is no snow on the trees. The ground is thinly covered with a crusted snow, through which the dead grass and weeds appear, telling the nearness of spring. 

Going through the high field beyond the lone graveyard, I see the track of a boy's sled before me, and his footsteps shining like silver between me and the moon.

Though the snow-crust between me and the moon reflects the moon at a distance, westward it is but a dusky white; only where it is heaped up into a drift, or a steep bank occurs, is the moonlight reflected to me as from a phosphorescent place. I distinguish thus large tracts an eighth of a mile distant in the west, where a steep bank sloping toward the moon occurs, that glow with a white, phosphorescent light, while all the surrounding snow is comparatively dark, as if shaded by the woods. I look to see if these white tracts in the distant fields correspond to openings in the woods, and find that they are places where the crystal mirrors are so disposed as to reflect the moon's light to me.

As I look down the railroad, standing on the west brink of the Deep Cut, I see a promise or sign of spring in the way the moon is reflected from the snow covered west slope,-- a sort of misty light as if a fine vapor were rising from it. The stillness is more impressive than any sound, - the moon, the stars, the trees, the snow, --a monumental stillness, whose void must be supplied by thought. 

The student of lichens has his objects of study brought to his study on his fuel without any extra expense. 

What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine. 


The moon appears to have waned a little, yet, with this snow on the ground, I can plainly see the words I write. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 7, 1852

The stillness is more impressive than any sound, - the moon, the stars, the trees, the snow. See January 7, 1857 ("The stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. ")

I look to see if these white tracts in the distant fields correspond to openings in the woods, and find that they are places where the crystal mirrors are so disposed as to reflect the moon's light to me. See February 3, 1852 (I can tell where there is wood and where open land for many miles in the horizon by the darkness of the former and whiteness of the latter.")