A Book of the Seasons: December 27

December 27.

More snow in the night.

The damp snow covers the panes,

darkening the room.

December 27, 1853

Summer or winter

the sky is always ready

to answer our moods.

Venus – very bright

now in the early twilight

right after sunset.

December 27, 1851

Hard mountain outline

now wonderfully distinct

dark blue -- very near.

Cloudless horizon

  clear cold and indigo-y.

True winter sunset.

The evening star seen

shining brightly before the

twilight has begun.

December 27, 1853

Not a particle

of ice in Walden to-day.

Paddled across it.

December 27, 1852

Walden is still open

in one place off the east cape

of long southern bay.

December 27, 1856

Walden is almost

entirely skimmed over.

Be frozen to-night.

December 27, 1857

The man of genius

knows what he is aiming at –

nobody else knows.

December 27, 1858

So cold this evening,

so cold our breaths condense and

freeze on the windows.

December 27, 1859

A TRUE WINTER SUNSET
December 27, 2017

Sunset from Fair Haven Hill . This evening there are many clouds in the west into which the sun goes down so that we have our visible or apparent sunset and red evening sky as much as fifteen minutes before the real sunset . You must be early on the hills to witness such a sunset , — by half past four at least . Then all the vales , even to the horizon , are full of a purple vapor , which half veils the distant mountains , and the windows of undiscoverable farmhouses shine like an early candle or a fire . After the sun has gone behind a cloud , there appears to be a gathering of clouds around his setting , and for a few moments his light in the amber sky seems more intense , brighter , and purer than at noonday . I think you never see such a brightness in the noon day heavens as in the western sky sometimes , just before the sun goes down in clouds , like the ecstasy which we [ are ) told sometimes lights up the face of a dying man . That is a serene or evening death , like the end of the day . Then , at last , through all the grossness which has accumulated in the atmosphere of day , is seen a patch of serene sky fairer by contrast with the surrounding dark than midday , and even the gross atmosphere of the day is gilded and made pure as amber by the setting sun , as if the day's sins were forgiven it . The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset , while revolutions vex the world . There is no winter necessarily in the sky , though the snow covers the earth . The sky is always ready to answer to our moods ; we can see summer there or winter . Snow and drifts on the earth ; it swiftly descends from the heavens and leaves them pure . The heavens present , perhaps , pretty much the same aspect summer and winter . It is remarkable that the sun rarely goes down with out a cloud . Venus - I suppose it is - is now the evening star , and very bright she is immediately after sunset in the early twilight . December 27 1851

Venus - I suppose it is - is now the evening star, and very bright she is immediately after sunset in the early twilight. December 27, 1851

It is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold indigo-y along the horizon. The evening star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun. A rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. December 27, 1853

The outline of the mountains is wonderfully distinct and hard, and they are a dark blue and very near. December 27, 1853

Grows cold in the evening, so that our breaths condense and freeze on the windows. December 27, 1859

High wind with more snow in the night. The snow is damp and covers the panes, darkening the room. December 27, 1853

A clear, pleasant day. Tree sparrows about the weeds in the yard. December 27, 1857

Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it. I took my new boat out. A black and white duck on it, Flint's and Fair Haven being frozen up. Ground bare. River open. December 27, 1852

Walden is still open in one place of considerable extent, just off the east cape of long southern bay. December 27, 1856

Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet. Near the north shore it cracks under the snow as I walk, and in many places water has oozed out and spread over the ice, mixing with the snow and making dark places. Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night. December 27, 1857

The snow blowing over the ice is like a vapor rising or curling from a roof. December 27, 1853

I think you never see such a brightness in the noon day heavens as in the western sky sometimes, just before the sun goes down in clouds, like the ecstasy which we are told sometimes lights up the face of a dying man. That is a serene or evening death, like the end of the day  . . . The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world. . . .The sky is always ready to answer to our moods. December 27, 1851  

The crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, apparently being put to it for 

The evening star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun. December 27, 1853

*****

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 © 2009-2016

Notes for my biographers

December 27. 

Recalled this evening, with the aid of Mother, the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived and some events of my life.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 27, 1855

See December 26, 1855 ("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.”)

the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived ... Henry's mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787–1872), was born in Keene, New Hampshire. Her mother was widowed, and married Captain Jonas Minott — who owned the farm where Thoreau was later born — in 1798. The Thoreau family moved several times, from Concord to Chelmsford, (in 1818), from Chelmsford back to Concord briefly (in 1821), then to Boston (in 1821), and finally back to Concord permanently (in 1823). After returning to Concord, John Thoreau rented a succession of houses before he could afford to build a home of his own (on Texas Street, now Belknap Street) in 1844. In 1849, John Thoreau bought and renovated a larger home on Main Street (the "Yellow House"), into which the family moved in 1850 and where Henry died in 1862. ~ CliffsNotes

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

A Book of the Seasons: December 26.

December 26



It has snowed for hours
and, as it ceases, I go out
to see the new snow.


Gently fallen snow
has formed an upright wall on
the slenderest twig.


And every twig
thus laden is as still as
the hillside itself.



All weeds with their seeds
rising dark above the snow

now conspicuous.


The branches and trees
bending with snowy burdens
o'er the trackless road.



This pure and trackless
road up Brister's Hill tempts us
to start life again.
December 26, 1853



Snows all day, — the first
snow of any consequence,
three or four inches.
December 26, 1857

It begins to snow
so gradually I thought
I imagined it.
December 26, 1859

I walk in the woods –

if I were home I would try

to write poetry.

December 26, 1854

December 25, 2017



December 26, 2013

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 © 2009-2019

Driving snow fast whitening the ground

December 25

Snow driving almost horizontally from the northeast and fast whitening the ground, and with it the first tree sparrows I have noticed in the yard. 

December  25, 2015

It turns partly to rain and hail at midday.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 25, 1855

Snow driving almost horizontally. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face."); December 23, 1851 ("This morning, when I woke, I found it snowing, the snow fine and driving almost horizontally, as if it had set in for a long storm."); December 29, 1853 ("Wind from the north blows the snow almost horizontally, and, beside freezing you, almost takes your breath away. The driving snow blinds you."); January 5, 1856 (" It is quite cold, and the driving storm is bitter to face. . . It comes almost horizontally from the north."); January 19, 1857 ("A snow-storm with very high wind all last night and to-day . . .  A fine dry snow, intolerable to face")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified

The first tree sparrows I have noticed in the yard. See December 27, 1857 ("A clear, pleasant day. Tree sparrows about the weeds in the yard."); December 28, 1853 ("I hear and see tree sparrows about the weeds in the garden. They seem to visit the gardens with the earliest snow."); December 29, 1853 ("All day a driving snow-storm. . . yet in midst of all I see a bird, probably a tree sparrow, partly blown, partly flying, over the house to alight in a field. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Tree Sparrow and January 16, 1860:

The tree sparrow comes

from the north in the winter

to get its dinner.

It turns partly to rain and hail.  See  December 26, 1855 ("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."); See also January 1, 1853 ("A fine snowy hail and rain is falling. . . I return at last in a rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields."); January 21, 1855  ("The snow is turning to rain through a fine hail."); January 25, 1860 ("I will call the weather fair, if it does not threaten rain or snow or hail; foul, if it rains or snows or hails, or is so overcast that we expect one or the other from hour to hour.")

December 25.  See  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 25

Snow fast whitening 

the ground turns partly to rain 

and hail at midday.

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Driving snow fast whitening the ground 

 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

tinyurl.com/hdt551225

A Book of the Seasons: December 25.

December 25

I standing twenty 

miles off see a crimson cloud 

in the horizon. 

December 25, 1851

Snow from the northeast

driving horizontally

fast whitens the ground.

December 25, 1855

Strong northwest wind forms

picturesque snow-drifts behind

loose open stone walls.

December 25, 1856

Full of soft pure light
western sky after sunset,
the outlines of pines.
December 25, 1858

Western sky full of
soft pure light after sunset,
the outlines of pines.
December 25, 1858

Outlines of the pines –

the light of the western sky

now after sunset.

December 6, 1858

Now after sunset

the light of the western sky –

the outlines of pines.

December 6, 1858

Here alone this cold

winter day on the shore of 

our frozen river. 

December 25, 1859

Seeking its food here
alone this cold winter day,
its note meant for me.
December 25, 1859

December 25, 2018

December 25, 2019

December 25.

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 © 2009-2016

A Book of the Seasons: December 24.

December 24.

Looking to the sun,

the blowing snow looks like steam

over a wet roof.

December 24, 1850

It always melts

and freezes at the same time

when icicles form.

December 24, 1850

My spruce tree 

one of the small ones in the swamp 

hardly a quarter the size of the largest 

looked double its size 

in the town hall this evening 

and its top had been cut off. 

It was lit with candles -- 

But the starlit sky 

is far more splendid to-night

than any saloon.   

December 24, 1853

Snow collects like down

in little columns about

every twig and stem.

Seen in perfection,

complete to the last flake, now

while it is snowing.

December 24, 1856

December 24, 2015

It is never so cold but it melts somewhere . . .  It is always melting and freezing at the same time when icicles form. December 24, 1850

Walking to-day across the Great Meadows on the snow-crust looking toward the sun, I notice that the fine, dry snow blown over the surface of the frozen fields looks like steam curling up, as from a wet roof when the sun comes out after a rain. December 24, 1850

like steam when seen in the sun December 24, 1851

Now and long since the birds' nests have been full of snow. December 24, 1851

In the town hall this evening, my spruce tree, one of the small ones in the swamp, hardly a quarter the size of the largest, looked double its size, and its top had been cut off for want of room. It was lit with candles, but the starlit sky is far more splendid to-night than any saloon. December 24, 1853

The snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowing, as now. December 24, 1856

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 © 2009-2020