Nature works by contraries

February 11. 

P. M. — To Ball’s Hill over ice. 

February 11, 2019

Among the common phenomena of the ice are those triangular points of thick ice heaved up a couple of feet where the ice has recently settled about a rock. The rock looks somewhat like a dark fruit within a gaping shell or bur. 

Also, now, as often after a freshet in cold weather, the ice which had formed around and frozen to the trees and bushes along the shore, settling, draws them down to the ground or water, often breaking them extensively. It reminds you of an alligator or other evil genius of the river pulling the trees and bushes which had come to drink into the water. 

If a maple or alder is unfortunate enough to dip its lower limbs into the freshet, dallying with it, their fate is sealed, for the water, freezing that night, takes fast hold on them like a vise, and when the water runs out from beneath, an irresistible weight brings them down to the ground and holds them there. Only the spring sun will soften the heart of this relentless monster, when, commonly, it is too late. How the ice far in the meadows, thus settling, spreads the clumps — of willows, etc., on every side! 

Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless. If in the summer you cast a twig into the stream it instantly moved along with the current, and nothing remained as it was. Now I see yonder a long row of black twigs standing erect in mid-channel where two months ago a fisherman set them and fastened his lines to them. They stand there motionless as guide-posts while snow and ice are piled up about them. 

Such is the cold skill of the artist. He carves a statue out of a material which is fluid as water to the ordinary workman. His sentiments are a quarry which he works. 

I see only the chain of sunken boats passing round a tree above the ice. 

The south side of Ball’s Hill, which is warm and half bare, is tracked up with partridges, and I start several there. So is it next Sunday with the Hill shore, east of Fair Haven Pond. These birds are sure to be found now on such slopes, where only the ground and dry leaves are exposed. 

The water lately went down, and the ice settled on the meadows, and now rain has come, and cold again, and this surface is alternate ice and snow. 

Looking from this hill toward the sun, they are seen to be handsomely watered all over with alternate waves of shining ice and white snow-crust, literally “watered” on the grandest scale, —this palace floor.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  February 11, 1859

The south side of Ball’s Hill, which is warm and half bare, is tracked up with partridges, and I start several there.See February 11, 1855 ("The dog scares up some partridges out of the soft snow under the apple trees in the Tommy Wheeler orchard."); February 11, 1856 ("See a partridge by the riverside, opposite Fair Haven Hill, which at first I mistake for the top of a fence-post above the snow, amid some alders. . . .Within three rods, I see it to be indeed a partridge, to my surprise, standing perfectly still, with its head erect and neck stretched upward. It is as complete a deception as if it had designedly placed itself on the line of the fence and in the proper place for a post. It finally steps off daintily with a teetering gait and head up, and takes to wing")


I see only the chain of sunken boats passing round a tree above the ice. See December 15, 1856 (“I observe B 's boat left out at the pond, as last winter. When I see that a man neglects his boat thus, I do not wonder that he fails in his business. It is not only shiftlessness or unthrift, but a sort of filthiness to let things go to wrack and ruin thus.”); January 5, 1856 ("Boats . . . half filled with ice and almost completely buried in snow, so neglected by their improvident owners . . ."); April 22, 1857 (“We pass a dozen boats sunk at their moorings, at least at one end, being moored too low.”).

Looking from this hill toward the sun . . . waves of shining ice and white snow-crust. See February 29, 1852 (" From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach . . . Where day before yesterday was half the ground bare, is this sheeny snow-crust to-day.")

Write while the heat is in you.

February 10

Now if there are any who think that I am vainglorious, that I set myself up above others and crow over their low estate, let me tell them that 

• I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them, if my spirits held out to do it; 
• I could encourage them with a sufficient list of failures, and could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves; 
• I could enumerate a list of as rank offenses as ever reached the nostrils of heaven;

that I think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. 

I put the best face on the matter I will tell them this secret, if they will not tell it to anybody else. 

February 10, 2019

Write while the heat is in you. 

When the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the hot iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is less effectual to penetrate (pierce) it. It must be used in stantly, or it is useless. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. 

We have none of those peculiar clear, vitreous, crystalline vistas in the western sky before sundown of late. There is perchance more moisture in the air. Perhaps that phenomenon does not belong to this part of the winter. 

I saw yesterday on the snow on the ice, on the south side of Fair Haven Pond, some hundreds of honey-bees, dead and sunk half an inch below the crust. They had evidently come forth from their hive (perhaps in a large hemlock on the bank close by), and had fallen on the snow chilled to death. Their bodies extended from the tree to about three rods from it toward the pond. 

Pratt says he would advise me to remove the dead bees, lest somebody else should be led to discover their retreat, and I may get five dollars for the swarm, and perhaps a good deal of honey.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 10, 1852


Write while the heat is in you. See September 2, 1851 ("We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. . . . Expression is the act of the whole man. . . A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.”); September 4-7, 1851 (“I feel that the juices of the fruits which I have eaten, the melons and apples, have ascended to my brain and are stimulating it. They give me a heady force. Now I can write.”); May 6, 1854 ("Every important worker will report what life there is in him.”). Compare July 23, 1851 (“Be impressed without making a minute of it. Put an interval between the impression and the expression, - wait till the seed germinates naturally.”); May 5, 1852 (“I succeed best when I recur to my experience not too late, but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness”); April 20, 1854 (“I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water.”); March 28, 1857 (“Often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. Indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and I may safely record all that I remember. ”); February 3, 1859 (“Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that [the writer] begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.”)


We have none of those peculiar clear, vitreous, crystalline vistas in the western sky before sundown of late. See December 9, 1859 (“I observe at mid-afternoon that peculiarly softened western sky, . . .giving it a slight greenish tinge.”); December 11, 1854 (" It is but mid-afternoon when I see the sun setting far through the woods, and there is that peculiar clear vitreous greenish sky in the west, as it were a molten gem”); December 14. 1851 ("There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset."); December 20, 1854 ("The sky in the eastern horizon has that same greenish-vitreous, gem-like appearance which it has at sundown, as if it were of perfectly clear glass, —with the green tint of a large mass of glass."); January 11, 1852 ("The glory of these afternoons, though the sky may be mostly overcast, is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset. The whole cope of heaven seen at once is never so elysian. Windows to heaven, the heavenward windows of the earth."); January 17, 1852 (“In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky sunset these winter days. . . .Those western vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds.”); January 24, 1852 (" Walden and White Ponds are a vitreous greenish blue, like patches of the winter sky seen in the west before sundown.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky

Pratt says he would advise me to remove the dead bees, lest somebody else should be led to discover their retreat, and I may get five dollars for the swarm, and perhaps a good deal of honey. See  February 13, 1852 (“Talking with Rice this afternoon about the bees which I discovered the other day, he told me something about his bee-hunting.”); March 4, 1852 (" I cut my initials on the bee tree”); September 30, 1852 ("Custom gives the first finder of the nest a right to the honey and to cut down the tree "); February 25, 1856 (“As I stand there, see that they have just felled my bee tree, the hemlock. The chopper even now stands at its foot.”)

February 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 10

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 © 2009-2022

A little moisture, a fog, or rain, or melted snow makes his wilderness to blossom like the rose.

February 7. 

Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter, and is not this connected with the blue in snow in similar days? 

Going along the Nut Meadow or Jimmy Miles road, when I see the sulphur lichens on the rails brightening with the moisture I feel like studying them again as a relisher or tonic, to make life go down and digest well, as we use pepper and vinegar and salads. They are a sort of winter greens which we gather and assimilate with our eyes. 

That’s the true use of the study of lichens. 

I expect that the lichenist will have the keenest relish for Nature in her every-day mood and dress. He will have the appetite of the worm that never dies, of the grub. 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. A taste for this study is an evidence of titanic health, a sane earthiness. It makes not so much blood as soil of life. 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. 

As some strong animal appetites, not satisfied with starch and muscle and fat, are fain to eat that which eats and digests, — the contents of the crop and the stomach and entrails themselves, — so the lichenist loves the tripe of the rock, — that which eats and digests the rocks. He eats the eater. 

“Eat-all” may be his name. 

A lichenist fats where others starve. His provender never fails. 

What is the barrenest waste to him, the barest rocks? A rail is the sleekest and fattest of coursers for him. He picks anew the bones which have been picked a generation since, for when their marrow is gone they are clothed with new flesh for him. What diet drink can be compared with a tea or soup made of the very crust of the earth? There is no such collyrium or salve for sore eyes as these brightening lichens in a moist day. 

Go and bathe and screen your eyes with them in the softened light of the woods.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 7, 1859

Going along the Nut Meadow or Jimmy Miles road, when I see the sulphur lichens on the rails brightening with the moisture. See February 6, 1852 ("Near the C. Miles house there are some remarkably yellow lichens (parmelias?) on the rails, -- ever as if the sun were about to shine forth clearly")

Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter, and is not this connected with the blue in snow in similar days? See  note to February 7, 1856 ("During the rain the air is thick, the distant woods bluish."); see also February 2, 1854; ("The shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue."); February 6, 1854 ("Crossing Walden where the snow has fallen quite level, I perceive that my shadow is a delicate or transparent blue .");  February 10, 1855 ("I go across Walden. My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow."); February 11, 1855 (“The atmosphere is very blue, tingeing the distant pine woods.”);  January 3, 1856 ("The snow turned to a fine mist or mizzling, through which I see a little blue in the snow, lurking in the ruts.") 

They are a sort of winter greens which we gather and assimilate with our eyes. See November 24, 1858 ("It is lichen day."); 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.”); January 7, 1855 (“It is a lichen day. . . . How full of life and of eyes is the damp bark!”); January 26, 1852 ("The lichens look rather bright to-day, . . .The beauty of lichens, with their scalloped leaves, the small attractive fields, the crinkled edge! I could study a single piece of bark for hour.”); January 26, 1858 (“This is a lichen day. The white lichens, partly encircling aspens and maples, look as if a painter had touched their trunks with his brush as he passed”); February 5, 1852 ("The stems of the white pines also are quite gray at this distance, with their lichens”); February 5, 1853 ("It is a lichen day. . . . All the world seems a great lichen and to grow like one to-day, - a sudden humid growth.”); March 5, 1852 ("Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk").

The notes of birds cease to affect us as they did.

February 5

When we have experienced many disappointments, such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did. 

February 5, 2012

I see another butcher-bird on the top of a young tree by the pond.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1859

The loss of friends. See February 3, 1859 ("I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live.") Compare  January 21, 1852 ("I never realized so distinctly as this moment that I am peacefully parting company with the best friend I ever had,"); June 11, 1855 ("What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me."); March 28, 1856 ("Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that."); February 8, 1857 ("And now another friendship is ended. I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded . . . I am perfectly sad at parting from you. I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind."); February 23, 1857 ('That aching of the breast, the grandest pain that man endures, which no ether can assuage . . . If the teeth ache they can be pulled. If the heart aches, what then? Shall we pluck it out?"); November 3, 1858 ("How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there.")

The notes of birds cease to effect us. See July 5, 1852 ("Some birds are poets and sing all summer . . . Any man can write verses during the love season. ")

Another butcher-bird. See February 3, 1856 ("See near the Island a shrike glide by . . . with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion"); March 1, 1855 ("Saw a butcher-bird, as usual on top of a tree, and distinguished from a jay by black wings and tail and streak side of head.") and note to December 24, 1858 ("See another shrike this afternoon, — the fourth this winter!") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Northern Shrike

The notes of birds cease 

to affect us as they did 

when we lose a friend.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  The loss of a friend

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-590205

Five minutes before 3 P. M.

February 3

Five minutes before 3 P. M., Father died.

After a sickness of some two years, going down-town in pleasant weather, doing a little business from time to time, hoeing a little in the garden, etc., Father took to his chamber January 13th, and did not come down again. Most of the time previously he had coughed and expectorated a great deal. Latterly he did not cough, but continued to raise. He continued to sit up in his chamber till within a week before he died. He sat up for a little while on the Sunday four days before he died. Generally he was very silent for many months. He was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy that we should not have been aware that he was dying, though we were sitting around his bed, if we had not watched very closely.

I have touched a body which was flexible and warm, yet tenantless, — warmed by what fire? When the spirit that animated some matter has left it, who else, what else, can animate it? 

How enduring are our bodies, after all! The forms of our brothers and sisters, our parents and children and wives, lie still in the hills and fields round about us, not to mention those of our remoter ancestors, and the matter which composed the body of our first human father still exists under another name.

When in sickness the body is emaciated, and the expression of the face in various ways is changed, you perceive unexpected resemblances to other members of the same family; as if within the same family there was a greater general similarity in the framework of the face than in its filling up and clothing. 

Father first came to this town to live with his father about the end of the last century, when he was about twelve years old. (His father died in 1801.) Afterward he went to the Lexington Academy (Parker’s ?) a short time, perhaps a year, then into Deacon White’s store as clerk; then learned the dry—goods business in a store in Salem. (Aunt J. shows me a letter from him directly after his going there, dated 1807.) Was with a Hathaway. When about twenty-one, opened a store for himself on the corner where the town house stands of late years, a yellow building, now moved and altered into John Keyes’s house. 

He did so well there-that Isaac Hurd went into partnership with him, to his injury. They soon dissolved, but could not settle without going to law, when my father gained the case, bringing his books into court. Then, I think, he went to Bangor and set up with Billings, selling to Indians (among others); married; lived in Boston; writes thence to aunts at Bangor in 1815 with John on his knee; moved to Concord (where I was born), then to Chelmsford, to Boston, to Concord again, and here remained. Mother first came to Concord about the same age that father did, but a little before him. 

As far as I know, Father, when he died, was not only one of the oldest men in the middle of Concord, but the one perhaps best acquainted with the inhabitants, and the local, social, and street history of the middle of the town, for the last fifty years. He belonged in a peculiar sense to the village street; loved to sit in the shops or at the post-office and read the daily papers. I think that he remembered more about the worthies (and unworthies) of Concord village forty years ago, both from dealing as a trader and from familiar intercourse with them, than any one else. 

Our other neighbors, now living or very recently dead, have either come to the town more recently than he, or have lived more aloof from the mass of the inhabitants. 

Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserved to be remembered,—using only the terms “miserable,” “wretched,” “pitiful,” and the like. In writing their histories of this country they have so hastily disposed of this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it) which littered and defiled the shore and the interior. But even the indigenous animals are inexhaustibly interesting to us. How much more, then, the indigenous man of America! 

If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in these woods, and they had their fancies and beliefs connected with the sea and the forest, which concern us quite as much as the fables of Oriental nations do. 

It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man, or gold-digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle. One tells you with more contempt than pity that the Indian had no religion, holding up both hands, and this to all the shallow-brained and bigoted seems to mean something important, but it is commonly a distinction without a difference. Pray how much more religion has the historian? If Henry Ward Beecher knows so much more about God than another, if he has made some discovery of truth in this direction, I would thank him to publish it in Silliman’s Journal, with as few flourishes as possible. 

It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. The thought of a so-called savage tribe is generally far more just than that of a single civilized man. 

I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. Each such experience is an assault on our vital force. It becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. After long watching around the sick-bed of a friend, we, too, partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be identified with this state of things. 

The writer must to some extent inspire himself. Most but when all are arranged, some life and color will be reflected on them from the mature and successful lines; they will appear to pulsate with fresh life, and he will be enabled to eke out their slumbering sense, and make them worthy of their neighborhood. In his first essay on a given theme, he produces scarcely more than a frame and groundwork for his sentiment and poetry. Each clear thought that he attains to draws in its train many divided thoughts or perceptions. 

The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation. 

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, February 3, 1859

Father first came to this town to live with his father about the end of the last century, when he was about twelve years old. See December 28, 1858 ("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.”)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 3

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

Cutting down a large red oak

February 2.

I see Peter Hutchinson cutting down a large red oak on A. Heywood’s hillside, west of the former’s house. 

He points out to me what he calls the “gray oak” there, with “a thicker bar” than the red. It is the scarlet oak.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1859

Cutting down a large red oak on . February 10, 1854 (“The sturdy white oak near the Derby railroad bridge has been cut down. It measures five feet and three inches over the stump, at eighteen inches from the ground.”); December 3, 1855 ("I see one or two more large oaks in E. Hubbard’s wood lying high on stumps, waiting for snow to be removed. I miss them as surely and with the same feeling that I do the old inhabitants out of the village street.")

It is the scarlet oak. See January 19, 1859 {"Our largest scarlet oak (by the Hollow), some three feet diameter at three feet from ground,")

An ice-belt adheres to the steep shores.

February 1

February 1, 2019

P. M.—Up Assabet. 

The river having suddenly gone down since the freshet, I see cakes of ice eight or ten feet across left two feet high or more above the banks, frozen to four or five maples or oaks. Indeed, each shore is lined with them, where wooded, a continuous row attached to alders, maples, swamp white oaks, etc., which grow through them or against their edges. 

They are somewhat like tables of a picnic party or a muster-field dinner. Rustic tables and seats. Sometimes a little inclined, having settled on one side. 

Also an ice-belt adheres to the steep shores, and the rain and melted snow, running down, has drifted over the edge of it, forming abundant and pretty icicles, and you see where this hard and thick ice has bent under its own weight. 

As for large oak leaves now, I think there is not much difference between the white and scarlet oaks; then come black, red, and swamp white, but the last one has scarcely any.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 1, 1859

An ice-belt adheres to the steep shores.  See January 1, 1857 ("I observe a shelf of ice . . . adhering to the walls and banks at various heights, the river having fallen nearly two feet since it first froze."); February 14, 1859 ("Some of the belt itself, where three inches thick, has bent downward eighteen inches at four or five feet from the bank")

An ice-belt adheres

to the steep shores – thick ice bent

under its own weight.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, An ice-belt adheres to the steep shores.

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