A distinct rosy light (or pink) reflected from the ice, half an hour before sunset.

January 23

January 23, 2019

The freshet is now frozen over, but not thick enough to bear without cracking, and that peculiar whitish ice like bread or mortar that has run over is seen four to six feet in width all along the shore and about trees, posts, rocks, etc. It is produced by the water, probably, still rising after the freezing in the night and flowing back over the ice in a semiliquid state, or like soft solder, —a rough or wrinkled or rippled dirty white surface, often stained with the bank, yellowish or brown. 

There is a cold northwest wind, and I notice that the snow-fleas which were so abundant on this water yesterday have hopped to some lee, i. e., are collected like powder under the southeast side of posts or trees or sticks or ridges in the ice. You are surprised to see that they manage to get out of the wind. On the southeast side of every such barrier along the shore there is a dark line or heap of them. 

I see one of those glow-worm like creatures frozen in, sticking up perpendicular, half above the ice.

Going over the Hosmer pasture this side Clamshell southwestward, I thought I saw much gossamer on the grass, but was surprised to find that it was the light reflected from the withered grass stems which had been bent or broken by the snow (now melted). It looked just like gossamer even within ten [?] feet,— most would have taken it for that, — also these fine gleaming lines (like those of the alders and birch twigs, etc.) were very distinctly parts of an arc of a large circle,— the lower side of it,—as you looked toward the sun, the light being necessarily so reflected. This is a remarkable instance of the November, or rather winter, light reflected from twigs and stubble. The grass stood just like an abundant gossamer. 

The earth being generally bare, I notice on the ice where it slopes up eastward a little, a distinct rosy light (or pink) reflected from it generally, half an hour before sunset. This is a colder evening than of late, and there is so much the more of it.

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

The snow-fleas which were so abundant on this water yesterday have hopped to some lee. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Snow Flea

I see one of those glow-worm like creatures frozen in. See January 22, 1859 ("It is about half an inch long by one eleventh of an inch wide, dusky reddish brown above, lighter beneath, with a small black flattish head and about four short antennae, six legs under the forward part of the body, which last consists of twelve ring-like segments. There is one row of minute light-colored dots down the middle of the back,")

A remarkable instance of the winter light reflected from twigs and stubble. See January 4, 1858 ("It is surprising how much sunny light a little straw that survives the winter will reflect. ")

Distinct rosy light (or pink) half an hour before sunset. This is a colder evening than of late, and there is so much the more of it. See 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. "); January 19, 1859 ("I see a rosy tinge like dust on the snow when I look directly toward the setting sun, but very little on the hills. Methinks this pink on snow (as well as blue shadows) requires a clear, cold evening."). Compare January 24, 1855 ("I was surprised to find the ice in the middle of the last  pond a beautiful delicate rose-color"); January 25, 1855 ("I have come with basket and hatchet to get a specimen of the rose-colored ice"); February 23, 1855 ("See at Walden . . .ice formed over the large square where ice has been taken out for Brown’s ice-house has a decided pink or rosaceous tinge."); March 4, 1855 ("Returning by the Andromeda Ponds, I am surprised to see the red ice visible still . . .It is melted down to the red bubbles, and I can tinge my finger with it there by rubbing it in the rotted ice.");

That bright and warm reflection of sunlight from the insignificant edging of stubble.

January 4.

P. M.—The weather still remarkably warm; the ice too soft for skating.

I go through by the Andromeda Ponds and down river from Fair Haven. I am encouraged by the sight of men fishing in Fair Haven Pond, for it reminds me that they have animal spirits for such adventures. I am glad to be reminded that any go a-fishing.

When I get down near to Cardinal Shore, the sun near setting, its light is wonderfully reflected from a narrow edging of yellowish stubble at the edge of the meadow ice and foot of the hill, an edging only two or three feet wide, and the stubble but a few inches high. (I am looking east.)

It is remarkable because the ice is but a dull lead-color (it is so soft and sodden), reflecting no light, and the hill beyond is a dark russet, here and there patched with snow, but this narrow intermediate line of stubble is all aglow.

I get its true color and brightness best when I do not look directly at it, but a little above it toward the hill, seeing it with the lower part of my eye more truly and abstractly. It is as if all the rays slid over the ice and lodged against and were reflected by the stubble. It is surprising how much sunny light a little straw that survives the winter will reflect.

The channel of the river is open part of the way.

The Cornus sericea and some quite young willow shoots are the red-barked twigs so conspicuous now along the riversides.

That bright and warm reflection of sunlight from the insignificant edging of stubble was remarkable. I was coming down-stream over the meadows, on the ice, within four or five rods of the eastern shore. The sun on my left was about a quarter of an hour above the horizon. The ice was soft and sodden, of a dull lead-color, quite dark and reflecting no light as I looked eastward, but my eyes caught by accident a singular sunny brightness reflected from the narrow border of stubble only three or four inches high (and as many feet wide perhaps) which rose along the edge of the ice at the foot of the hill. It was not a mere brightening of the bleached stubble, but the warm and yellow light of the sun, which, it appeared, it was peculiarly fitted to reflect. It was that amber light from the west which we sometimes witness after a storm, concentrated on this stubble, for the hill beyond was merely a dark russet spotted with snow. All the yellow rays seemed to be reflected by this insignificant stubble alone, and when I looked more generally a little above it, seeing it with the under part of my eye, it appeared yet more truly and more bright; the reflected light made its due impression on my eye, separated from the proper color of the stubble, and it glowed almost like a low, steady, and serene fire. It was precisely as if the sunlight had mechanically slid over the ice, and lodged against the stubble.

It will be enough to say of something warmly and sunnily bright that it glowed like lit stubble.

It was remarkable that, looking eastward, this was the only evidence of the light in the west.

Here and there in the meadow, etc., near springy places, you see where the thinner ice has been pushed up tentwise and cracked, either for want of room, two fields crowding together, or expanding with heat from below.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1858

The sun near setting, its light is wonderfully reflected from a narrow edging of yellowish stubble at the edge of the meadow ice. See February 12, 1851 ("Along the channel of the river I see at a distance thin cakes of ice forced upon their edges and reflecting the sun like so many mirrors, whole fleets of shining sails, giving a very lively appearance to the river."); October 28, 1857 ("All at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven’s west windows behind me fell on the bare gray maples, lighting them up with an incredibly intense and pure white light; then, going out there, it lit up some white birch stems south of the pond, then the gray rocks and the pale reddish young oaks of the lower cliffs, and then the very pale brown meadow-grass, and at last the brilliant white breasts of two ducks, tossing on the agitated surface far off on the pond, which I had not detected before."); December 25, 1858 ("Now that the sun is setting, all its light seems to glance over the snow-clad pond and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the northeast end. Though the bare rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high as I look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct"); August 28, 1860 ("[J]ust before setting, the sun comes out into a clear space in the horizon and a sudden blaze of light falls on east end of the pond and the hillside. . . . revealing the most vivid and varied shades of green. I never saw such a green glow before.")

The channel of the river is open part of the way. See January 7, 1855 ("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.")

Here is the soft air, but not yet the bluebird.

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

February 18

Another remarkably warm and pleasant day. The nights of late nearly as warm as the day. 

When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note. 

The snow is nearly all gone, and it is so warm and springlike that I walk over to the hill, listening for spring birds. 

The roads are beginning to be settled. I step excited over the moist mossy ground, dotted with the green stars of thistles, crowfoot, etc., the outsides of which are withered. 

Amid the pitch pines by the hemlocks I am surprised to find a great mildew on the ground, three or four feet long by two and a half wide and one fourth to one inch thick, investing the pine-needles and grass stubble and fallen hemlock twigs, like a thick cobweb or veil, through which the ground, etc., is seen dimly. It has a regular vegetable or lichen-like border, creeping out ward from a centre, and is more cottony and fibrous there. 

Like the ground generally thereabouts, it has an inspiring sweet, musty scent when I stoop close to it. I was surprised to find how sweet the whole ground smelled when I lay flat and applied my nose to it; more so than any cow; as it were the promise of the perfect man and new springs to eternity. 

The mildew apparently occupied the place where a mass of snow ice rested yesterday (it was not yet wholly gone on one side). It was the snow-bank's footprint, or rather its plantain. One of the first growths of the new year, surely. Further in the pines there was more of it whereever the snow had but just disappeared, a great many square rods of it all put together. 

But also there was, very similar to it, yet only a thin veil, the apparent gossamer of spring and fall, close to the edge of the melting snow, and I saw a spider or two. This had only the thickness of a cobweb and was covered with dew, yet was rather hard to distinguish from the mildew. Thin cobwebs were very widely dispersed in the meadows where the snow had just melted. [Vide Mar. 4, 1860.] 

I thought at one time that I heard a bluebird. 

Hear a fly buzz amid some willows. 

Thermometer at 1 p.m., 65. 

Sophia says that Mrs. Brooks's spiraeas have started considerably! 

I hear that geese went over Cambridge last night. 

I sit all this day and evening without a fire, and some even have windows open. 

P. M. — To Hubbard's Bath. 

The frost out of the ground and the ways settled in many places. 

I see much more of that gossamer (?) of the morning, — still regarding the large mildew as different. It abounds in all low grounds where there is a firm pasture sod, where a snow-bank has just melted or on the edge of one that is fast disappearing. I observe some remarkable ones on Hubbard's land just below the mountain sumachs. 

They are thin webs over the grass just laid bare close to the snow commonly and over the icy edge of the snow. They are not under the snow. I thought at first it had been formed on the surface of the snow and when it melted rested lightly on the stubble beneath, but I could detect none extending more than three or four inches over the icy edge of the snow, though every stubble half exposed amid the snow even was the source or point d'appui of some. 

Sometimes, to my surprise, it was an extremely thin, but close-woven (?), perhaps air-tight veil, of the same color but still thinner than the thinnest tissue paper or membrane, in patches one to three feet in diameter, resting lightly on the stubble, which supports it in the form of little tents. This is now dry and very brittle, yet I can get up pieces an inch across. 

It suggests even a scum on the edge of the melting snow, which has at last dried and hardened into a web. Here is one which, as commonly, springs from three or four inches within the melted snow, partly resting close and flat upon it, and extends thence several feet from its edge over the stubble. 

None of these have the thickness of mildew, and for cobwebs I see but two or three spiders about and cannot believe that they can have done all this in one night, nor do they make a close web. It lies lightly upon the stubble and the edge of the snow, as if it had settled in the night from the atmosphere. 

Can it be a scum formed on the melting snow, caught at last on the stubble like the pap of paper taken up in a sieve? 

Further off on every side I see the same now fretted away, like a coarse and worn-out sieve, where it was perfect perhaps yesterday. Thus it lasts all day, conspicuous many rods off. I think there must be a square mile of this, at least, in Concord. It is after a very warm, muggy, but fair night, the last snow going off and the thermometer at 50°. Thinnest, frailest, gossamer veils dropped from above on the stubble, as if the fairies had dropped their veils or handkerchiefs after a midnight revel, rejoicing at the melting of the snow. 

What can it be? 

Is it animal or vegetable? 

I suspect it is allied to mould; or is it a scum? or have the spiders anything to do with it? 

It suggests even a nebulous vegetable matter in the air, which, under these cir cumstances, in a muggy night, is condensed into this primitive vegetable form. 

Is it a sort of flowing of the earth, a waste fertility anticipating the more regular growths of spring?

Has not some slightly glutinous substance been deposited from the atmosphere on the snow, which is thus collected into a thin sort of paper, even like the brown-paper conferva? 

Is it a species of conferva? 

I am excited by this wonderful air and go listening for the note of the bluebird or other comer. The very grain of the air seems to have undergone a change and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble. Methinks if it were visible, or I could cast up some fine dust which would betray it, it would take a corresponding shape. The bluebird does not come till the air consents and his wedge will enter easily. 

The air over these fields is a foundry full of moulds for casting bluebirds' warbles. Any sound uttered now would take that form, not of the harsh, vibrating, rending scream of the jay, but a softer, flowing, curling warble, like a purling stream or the lobes of flowing sand and clay. Here is the soft air and the moist expectant apple trees, but not yet the bluebird. They do not quite attain to song. 

What a poem is this of spring, so often repeated! I am thrilled when I hear it spoken of, — as the spring of such a year, that fytte of the glorious epic. 

Picked up a mouse-nest in the stubble at Hubbard's mountain sumachs, left bare by the melting snow. It is about five inches wide and three or four high, with one, if not two, small round indistinct entrances on the side, not very obvious till you thrust your finger through them and press aside the fine grass that closes them, ready to yield to the pressure of the mouse's body. It is made very firmly and round, far more so than an oven-bird's nest, of the rye and grass stubble which was at hand under the snow, gnawed off to convenient lengths. A very snug and warm nest, where several might have lain very cosily under the snow in the hardest winter. 

Near by were collected many large green droppings of the usual form, as if for cleanliness, several feet off. Many galleries were visible close to the ground, in the withered grass under the snow. Is it not the nest of a different mouse from the Mus leucopus of the woods? 

Mr. Prichard says that when he first came to Concord wood was $2.50 per cord. Father says that good wood was $3.00 per cord, and he can remember the longest; white pine, $2.00; maple, sixteen shillings.

When I approached the bank of a ditch this after noon, I saw a frog diving to the bottom. The warmer water had already awaked him, and perhaps he had been sitting on the bank. 

The above-described gossamer often has small roundish spots on it, two or three inches in diameter, which are whiter and much thicker, even like the silvery scales under which some kinds of insects lurk, somewhat. I see none of this over sand or in the road, as I suppose would be the case if it were a mere scum on the snow, or a deposition from the atmosphere. 

Must it not be of the nature of mildew? It is as if it were a thin and tender membrane that envelops the infant earth in earliest spring, at once rent and dissipated.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1857

Thermometer at 1 p.m., 65°. See February 1, 1857 ("Thermometer at 42°."); February 7, 1857 ("Another warm day, . . . The thermometer was at 52° when I came out at 3 p.m.") ; February 12, 1857 ("The caterpillar, which I placed last night on the snow beneath the thermometer, is frozen stiff again, this time not being curled up, the temperature being -6° now."); February 14, 1857 ("Numerous caterpillars are now crawling about on the ice and snow, the thermometer in the shade north of house standing 42°"); February 16, 1857 (“A wonderfully warm day (the third one); about 2 p.m., thermometer in shade 58.”); February 24, 1857 ("By noon is between 50° and 60°); February 25, 1857 ("The thermometer is at 65° at noon.")

I hear that earliest spring note from some bird. . . the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note. See February 17, 1855 (The jays are uttering their unusual notes, and this makes me think of a woodpecker. It reminds me of the pine warbler, vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, except that it is much louder, and I should say has the sound of l rather than t, — veller, etc., perhaps. Can it be a jay? or a pigeon woodpecker? Is it not the earliest springward note of a bird? In the damp misty air.”); March 18, 1857 ("I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines. . .Then, at a distance, that whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all I suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker."); March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! . . .It is the spring note of the nuthatch"). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker)

I am excited by this wonderful air and go listening for the note of the bluebird . . . See February 9, 1854 ("It is such a warm, moist, or softened, sunlit air as we are wont to hear the first bluebird's warble in"); February 18, 1855 ("Now for the first time decidedly there is something spring-suggesting in the air and light. . . .I listen ever for something springlike in the notes of birds, some peculiar tinkling notes.”); February 22, 1855 ("Remarkably warm and pleasant weather, perfect spring. I even listen for the first bluebird.”); February 23,, 1859 (“[In Worcester] I first hear and then see eight or ten bluebirds going over. Perhaps they have not reached Concord yet. One boy tells me that he saw a bluebird in Concord on Sunday, the 20th.”); February 27, 1861 ("It occurs to me that I have just heard a bluebird"); March 7, 1854 ("Heard the first bluebird"); March 10, 1852 ("I see flocks of a dozen bluebirds together"); March 19, 1855 (“ I hear my first bluebird”).

. . the harsh, vibrating, rending scream of the jay, See February 2, 1854 ("The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter."); February 12, 1854 ("the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky.”)

What a poem is this of spring, so often repeated! I am thrilled when I hear it spoken of, — as the spring of such a year, that fytte of the glorious epic. See December 7, 1856 ("That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. . . .As fast as snowflakes, Summer was, now Winter is. Nature loves this rhyme.”)

Spring. What a poem

oft repeated. Fytte of the

glorious epic. 

The stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow.

November 18

About an inch of snow fell last night, but the ground was not at all frozen or prepared for it. A little greener grass and stubble here and there seems to burn its way through it this forenoon. 

As I sit in the house, I am struck with the brightness and heat of the sun reflected from this our first snow. There is an intenser light in the house, and I feel an uncommon heat from the sun’s rays on my back. 

It clears up at noon, and at 2 P. M. I go to Fair Haven Hill via Hubbard’s Grove. The air is very clear, and the sky heavenly, with a few floating downy clouds. 

I am prepared to hear sharp, screaming notes rending the air, from the winter birds. I do, in fact, hear many jays, and the tinkling, like rattling glass, from chickadees and tree sparrows. 

I do not detect any peculiar brightness whatever in the osiers on the Hubbard causeway; they are scarcely, if at all, brighter than the tops of the trees.

Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character. 

Yarrow

Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves. Its very color gives it a right to bloom above the snow, —as level as a snow-crust on the top white ruff. 

The snow is the great track-revealer. I come across the tracks of persons who, at a different hour from myself, have crossed, and perhaps often cross, some remote field on their errands, when I had not suspected a predecessor; and the track of the dog or staff are seen too. The cattle have tracked their whole pasture over, as if there had been a thousand. I have this silent but unerring evidence of any who have crossed the fields since last night. It is pleasant to see tracks leading towards the woods, - to be reminded that any have engagements there. 

Yet for the most part the snow is quite untrodden. Most fields have no track of man in them. I only see where a squirrel has leaped from the wall. 

The perfectly leafless alder thickets are much darker than the maples, now that the ground is whitened. The pasture directly under my face is white, but, seen aslant a few rods off, mostly russet. 

I was so warmed in spirit in getting my wood that the heat it finally yielded when burnt was coldness in comparison. That first is a warmth which you cannot buy. 

Gather a bagful of fair apples on Fair Haven, showing their red cheeks above the snow. These apples which I get nowadays —russets and Baldwins — are the ripest of all, being acted on by the frost and partly left because they were slightly over ripe for keeping. I come home with a heavy bagful and rob no one. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1855

The snow is the great track-revealer. See December 4, 1856 ("How many thousand acres are there now of pitchered blue-curls and ragged wormwood rising above the shallow snow? . . .the first snow comes and reveals them.") 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 12, 1859 ("The snow having come, we see where is the path of the partridge, — his comings and goings from copse to copse, — and now first, as it were, we have the fox for our nightly neighbor, and countless tiny deer mice."); December 22, 1852 ("The squirrel, rabbit, fox tracks, etc., attract the attention in the new-fallen snow . . . You cannot go out so early but you will find the track of some wild creature."): December 31, 1853 ("This animal probably I should never see the least trace of, were it not for the snow, the great revealer."); January 4, 1860 ("Again see what the snow reveals . . . that the woods are nightly thronged with little creatures which most have never seen"); January 5, 1860 ("How much the snow reveals!"); February 16, 1854 ("Snow is a great revealer not only of tracks made in itself, but even in the earth before it fell.")

I do not detect any peculiar brightness whatever in the osiers. See November 18, 1858 ("Notice the short bright-yellow willow twigs on Hubbard’s Causeway.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Osier in Winter and early Spring

Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. 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.”) See note to November 29, 1856 ("Begins to snow this morning and snows slowly and interruptedly with a little fine hail all day till it is several inches deep. This the first snow I have seen.")

Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste. See November 18, 1852 ("Yarrow and tansy still. These are cold, gray days.”); See also  November 3, 1853 ("To-day I see yarrow, very bright"); ; November 22, 1853 ("Yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yarrow and Tansy in Autumn

November 18. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 18

Rounded white petals 

of yarrow above the snow –

perfect, cold and chaste.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

The stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. 

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

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