29 December 1851 – 31 December 1851

‘The sun just risen. The ground is almost entirely bare. ‘The puddles are not skimmed over. It is warm as an April morning. There-is a sound as of bluebirds in the air, and the cocks crow as in the spring. The steam curls up from the roofs and the ground. You walk with open cloak. It is exciting [to] behold the smooth, glassy surface of water where the melted snow has formed large puddles and ponds, and to see it running in the sluices. In the clear atmosphere I saw, far in the eastern horizon, the steam from the steam- engine, like downy clouds above the woods, I think even beyond Weston. By school-time you see the boys in the streets playing with the sluices, and the whole population is inspired with new life. In the afternoon to Saw Mill Brook with W. E. C. Snow all gone from Minott’s hillside. The willow at the red house shines in the sun. ‘The boys have come out under the hill to pitch coppers. Watts sits on his door-step. It is like the first of April. The wind 1s west. At the turnpike bridge, water stands a foot or two deep over the ice. Water spiders have come out and are skating against the stream. How much they depend on January thaws! Now for the frozen-thawed apples! This is the first chance they have had to thaw this winter. It feels as warm as in summer; you sit on any fence- rail and vegetate in the sun, and realize that the earth may produce peas again. Yet they say that this open and mild weather is unhealthy; that 1s always the way with them. How admirable it is that we can never foresee the weather, — that that is always novel! Yes- terday nobody dreamed of to-day; nobody dreams of to- morrow. Hence the weather is ever the news. What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us thus, letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle. Now all creatures feel it, even the cattle chewing stalks in the barn-yards; and perchance it has penetrated even to the lurking-places of the crickets under the rocks. The artist is at work in the Deep Cut. The telegraph harp sounds.

Tuesday. Mem.: Go to the Deep Cut.! The flies now crawl forth from the crevices all covered with dust, dreaming of summer, without life or energy enough to clean their wings.

The third warm day; now overcast and be- ginning to drizzle. Stil it is inspiriting as the brightest weather. Though the sun surely is not a-going to shine, there is a latent light in the mist, as if there were more electricity than usual in the air. There are warm, foggy days in winter which excite us. It reminds me, this thick, spring-like weather, that I have not enough valued and attended to the pure clarity and brilliancy of the winter skies. Consider in what respects the winter sunsets differ from the sum- mer ones. Shall I ever in summer evenings see so ce- lestial a reach of blue sky contrasting with amber as I have seen a few days since. The day sky in winter cor- responds for clarity to the night sky, in which the stars shine and twinkle so brightly in this latitude. I am too late, perhaps, to see the sand foliage in the Deep Cut; should have been there day before yester- day; it is now too wet and soft. Yet in some places it is perfect. I see some perfect leopards’ paws.! These ' [Walden, pp. 336, 337; Riv. 470.] things suggest that there is motion in the earth as well as on the surface; it lives and grows. It is warmed and influenced by the sun, just as my blood by my thoughts. I seem to see some of the life that is in the spring bud and blossom more intimately, nearer its fountainhead, the fancy sketches and designs of the artist. It is more simple and primitive growth; as if for ages sand and clay might have thus flowed into the forms of foliage, before plants were produced to clothe the earth. The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me. She is not dead, but sleepeth. It is more cheering than the fertility and luxuriance of vineyards, this funda- mental fertility near to the principle of growth. To be sure it is somewhat foecal and stercoral. So the poet’s creative moment is when the frost is coming out in the spring, but, as in the case of some too easy poets, if the weather is too warm and rainy or long continued it becomes mere diarrhcea, mud and clay relaxed. The poet must not have something pass his bowels merely; that is women’s poetry. He must have something pass his brain and heart and bowels, too, it may be, all to- gether. So he gets delivered. There is no end to the fine bowels here exhibited, — heaps of liver, lights, and bowels. Have you no bowels? Nature has some bowels. And there again she is mother of humanity.? Concord is a worthier place to live in, the globe is a worthier place, for these creations, this slumbering life that may wake. Even the solid globe is permeated by the living law. It is the most living of creatures. No doubt all creatures that live on its surface are but parasites. I observed this afternoon the old Irishwoman at the shanty in the woods, sitting out on the hillside, bare- headed, in the rain and on the icy though thawing ground, knitting. She comes out, like the ground squirrel, at the least intimation of warmer weather. She will not have to go far to be buried, so close she lives to the earth, while I walk still in a greatcoat and under an umbrella. Such Irish as these are naturalizing themselves at a rapid rate, and threaten at last to displace the Yankees, as the latter have the Indians. The process of acclima- tion is rapid with them; they draw long breaths in the American sick-room. What must be the philosophy of life to that woman, ready to flow down the slope with the running sand! Ah, what would I not give for her point of view! She does not use any th’s in her style. Yet I fear that even she may have learned to le. There is a low mist in the woods. It is a good day to study lichens. The view so confined it compels your attention to near objects, and the white background re- veals the disks of the lichens distinctly. They appear more loose, flowing, expanded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. The round greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist (or are seen dimly) like shields whose devices you would fain read. The trees appear all at once covered with their crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds, — flat and tearful are some, distended by moisture. This is their solstice, and your eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. On every fallen twig, éven, that has lain under the snows, as well as on the trees, they appear erect and now first to have attained their full expansion. Nature has a day for each of her crea- tures, her creations. ‘To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall, the livid green of some, the fruit of others. They eclipse the trees they cover. And the red, club- pointed (baobab-tree-like) on the stumps, the erythrean stumps! Ah, beautiful is decay! ‘True, as Thales said, the world was made out of water. That is the principle of all things. I do not lay myself open to my friends!? ‘The owner of the casket locks it, and unlocks it. Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did, but what they intended. Be sure, as you know them you are known of them again. Last night I treated my dearest friend ill. Though I could find some excuse for myself, it is not such ex- cuse as under the circumstances could be pleaded in so many words. Instantly I blamed myself, and sought an opportunity to make atonement, but the friend avoided me, and, with kinder feelings even than before, I was obliged to depart. And now this morning I feel that it is too late to speak of the trifle, and, besides, I doubt now in the cool morning, if I have a right to suppose such intimate and serious relations as afford a basis for the apology I had conceived, for even magnanim- ity must ask this poor earth for a field. ‘The virtues even wait for invitation. Yet I am resolved to know that one centrally, through thick and thin, and though we should be cold to one another, though we should never speak to one another, I will know that inward and essential love may exist even under a superficial cold, and that the Jaw of attraction speaks louder than words. My true relation this instant shall be my apo- logy for my false relation the last instant. I made haste to cast off my injustice as scurf. I own it least of any- body, for I have absolutely done with it. Let the idle and wavering and apologizing friend appropriate it. Methinks our estrangement is only lke the divergence of the branches which unite in the stem. This night I heard Mrs. S—— lecture on womanhood. The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman said it, and in that respect it was suggestive. Went to see her afterward, but the interview added nothing to the previous impression, rather subtracted. She was a woman in the too common sense after all. You had to fire small charges: I did not have a finger in once, for fear of blowing away all her works and so ending the game. You had to substitute courtesy for sense and argument. It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady. I carried her lecture for her in my pocket wrapped in her handkerchief; my pocket exhales cologne to this moment. ‘The championess of woman’s rights still asks you to be a ladies’ man. I can’t fire a salute, even, for fear some of the guns may be shotted. I had to unshot all the guns in truth’s battery and fire powder and wad- ding only. Certainly the heart is only for rare occasions; the intellect affords the most unfailing entertainment. It would only do to let her feel the wind of the ball. I fear that to the last woman’s lectures will demand mainly courtesy from man. (To go on with walk, this written next morning.) How deceptive the size of a large pine! still, as you approach it, even within a rod or two, it looks only like a reasonable stick, fit for a string-piece, perchance, the average size of trees one foot in diameter, — big as a keg or a half-barrel, it may be, — fit for the sil] or the beams of an old-fashioned house. This you think is a generous appreciation and allowance. Not till you stand close to its foot, upon one of its swelling insteps, and compare its diameter with the diameter of your own eye- balls, do you begin to discover its width. Stand by its side, and see how it shuts out a hemisphere from you. Why, it is as wide as a front door. What a slender ar- row, a light shaft, now that you stand a rod or two off! What a ballista, a battering ram, a mighty vegetable monster, a cannon, near at hand! Now set a barrel, aye, a hogshead beside it. You apply your measures. The foot rule seems suddenly shrunk. Your umbrella is but half as long as it was. The pine I saw fall yesterday measured to-day one hundred and five feet, and was about ninety-four years old. There was one still larger lying beside it, one hun- dred and fifteen feet long, ninety-six years old, four feet diameter the longest way. The tears were streaming from the sap-wood — about twenty circles — of each, pure amber or pearly tears. Through the drizzling fog, now just before night- fall, I see from the Cliffs the dark cones of pine trees that rise above the level of the tree-tops, and can trace a few elm tree tops where a farmhouse hides beneath. Denuded pines stand in the clearings with no old cloak to wrap about them, only the apexes of their cones entire, telling a pathetic story of the companions that clothed them. So stands a man. It is clearing around him. He has no companions on: the hills. The . lonely traveller, looking up, wonders why he was left when his companions were taken.