1 March 1852 – 7 March 1852

Linnzeus, speaking of the necessity of pre- cise and adequate terms in any science, after naming some which he invented for botany, says, “Termini praeservarunt Anatomiam, Mathesin, Chemiam, ab idi- otis; Medicinam autem eorum defectus conculcavit.” (Terms (well defined) have preserved anatomy, mathe- matics, and chemistry from idiots; but the want of them has ruined medicine.) But I should say that men generally were not enough interested in the first-men- tioned sciences to meddle with and degrade them. There is no interested motive to induce them to listen to the quack in mathematics, as they have to attend to the quack in medicine; yet chemistry has been con- verted into alchemy, and astronomy into astrology. However, I can see that there is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses, for instance. No one masters them so as to use them in writing on the subject without being far better informed than the rabble about it. New books are not written on chemistry or cryptogamia of as little worth comparatively as are written on the spiritual phenomena of the day. No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say, but every one thinks himself competent to write on the relation of the soul to the body, as if that were a phenogamous subject.

Wednesday. Moore’s larch trees beyond Sleepy Hollow cut this winter. They were much de- cayed. The woodpeckers had stripped many of bark in pursuit of grubs. When the woodpeckers visit your woods in great numbers, you may suspect that it is time to cut them. The chopper does not complain of cutting the larch, but when he comes to the splitting there’s the rub. The grain runs almost round a four-foot stick sometimes. They make good posts.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensa- tions a kind fate (?) has provided. The humblest thinker who has been to the mines sees and says that gold- digging is of the character of a lottery, that the reward is not proportionate to the labor, that the gold has not the same look, is not the same thing, with the wages of honest toil; but he practically forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle. He looks out for “the main chance” still; he buys a ticket in another lottery, nevertheless, where the fact is not so obvious. It is remarkable that among all the teachers and preachers there are so few moral teachers. I find the prophets and preachers employed in excusing the ways of men. My most reverend seniors — doctors, deacons, and the illuminated —tell me with a reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be so tender about these things, — to lump all that, 7. e. make a lump of gold of it. I was never refreshed by any advice on this subject; the highest I have heard was grovelling. It is not worth the while for you to undertake to reform the world in this particular. They tell me not to ask how my bread is buttered, — it will make me sick if I do, — and the like.* It is discouraging to talk with men who will recog- nize no principles. How little use is made of reason in this world! You argue with a man for an hour, he * (Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, pp. 464, 465, 468; Dfzsc., Riv. 265, 269, 270.] agrees with you step by step, you are approaching a triumphant conclusion, you think that you have con- verted him; but ah, no, he has a habit, he takes a pinch of snuff, he remembers that he entertained a different opinion at the commencement of the controversy, and his reverence for the past compels him to reiterate it now. You began at the butt of the pole to curve it, you gradually bent it round according to rule, and planted the other end in the ground, and already in imagination saw the vine curling round this segment of an arbor, under which a new generation was to re- create itself; but when you had done, just when the twig was bent, it sprang back to its former stubborn and unhandsome position like a bit of whalebone. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! Iam awaked almost every night by the panting of the steam-engine. It interrupts my dreams. ‘There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.’ Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick, — “Fire! for God’s sake, fire!” — and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. I have no doubt it was a principle they fought for as much as our ancestors, and not a threepenny tax on their tea.’ 10 a. m.— Up river on ice to Fair Haven Pond. The steam of the steam-engine rises to heaven this clear morning. The other day, when the weather was thick, I observed that it hugged the earth. Was the air lighter then? Some refer the music of the telegraph harp to the electricity passing along the wire! others, to the air passing through the glasses. The air is fresher and the sky clearer in the morning. We have this morn- ing the clear, cold, continent sky of January. The river is frozen solidly, and I do not have to look out for open- ings. Now I can take that walk along the river highway and the meadow which leads me under the boughs of the maples and the swamp white oaks, etc., which in summer overhang the water. There I can now stand at my ease, and study their phenomena, amid the sweet- gale and button-bushes projecting above the snow and ice. I see the shore from the waterside. A liberal walk, so level and wide and smooth, without underbrush. I easily approach and study the boughs which usually overhang the water. In some places where the ice is exposed, I see a kind of crystallized, chaffy snow like little bundles of asbestos on its surface. I seek some sunny nook on the south side of a wood, which keeps off the cold wind, among the maples and the swamp white oaks which are frozen in, and there sit and an- ticipate the spring, and hear the chickadees and the belching of the ice. The sun has got a new power in his rays after all, cold as the weather is. He could not have warmed me so much a month ago, nor should I have heard such rumblings of the ice in December. I see where a maple has been wounded the sap is flow- ing out. Now, then, is the time to make sugar. If I were to paint the short days of winter, I should represent two towering icebergs, approaching each other like promontories, for morning and evening, with cav- ernous recesses, and a solitary traveller, wrapping his cloak about him and bent forward against a driving storm, just entering the narrow pass. I would paint the light of a taper at midday, seen through a cottage window half buried in snow and frost, and some pale stars in the sky, and the sound of the woodcutter’s axe. The icebergs with cavernous recesses. In the foreground should appear the harvest, and far in the background, through the pass, should be seen the sowers in the fields and other evidences of spring. The icebergs should gradually approach, and on the right and left the hea- vens should be shaded off from the light of midday to midnight with its stars. The sun low in the sky. T look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. Subverting the head, we refer things to the heavens; the sky becomes the ground of the picture, and where the river breaks through low hills which slope to meet each other a quarter of a mile off, appears a mountain pass, so much nearer is it to heaven. We are compelled to call it something which relates it to the heavens rather than the earth. But I think that the mirage is not so great in the morning. Perhaps there is some advantage in looking at the landscape thus at this season, since it is a plain white field hence to the horizon.

It is encouraging to know that, though every kernel of truth has been carefully swept out of our churches, there yet remains the dust of truth on their walls, so that 1f you should carry a light into them they would still, like some powder-mills, blow up at once. The only man in Concord who has interested him- self in the spiritual knockers, who has had them at his house, is Dr. Dillingham!! 3 p. M. — To the beeches. A misty afternoon, but warm, threatening rain. Stand- ing on Walden, whose eastern shore is laid waste, men walking on the hillside a quarter of a mile off are sin- gularly interesting objects, seen through this mist, which has the effect of a mirage. The persons of the walkers black on the snowy ground, and the horizon limited, makes them the more important in the scene. This kind of weather is very favorable to our landscape. I must not forget the lichen-painted boles of the beeches. So round even to the white bridge, where the red maple buds are already much expanded, foretelling summer, though our eyes see only winter as yet. As I sit under their boughs, looking into the sky, I sud- denly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing. The elm buds, too, I find are expanded, though on earth are no signs of spring. I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia spring- ing from a thallus, such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. That is merely the prospect which is afforded me. It is short commons and innu- tritious. Surely I might take wider views. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught ~* else in a walk. Would it not be noble to study the shield of the sun on the thallus of the sky, cerulean, which scatters its infinite sporules of light through the uni- verse? To the lichenist is not the shield (or rather the apothecium) of a lichen disproportionately large com- pared with the universe? The minute apothecium of the pertusaria, which the woodchopper never detected, occupies so large a space in my eye at present as to shut out a great part of the world.

La Hontan, hunting moose (orgnal) in Canada in 1686, says, facing a cruel north wind in winter, “One of my soldiers told me that it was neces- sary to have blood of eau-de-vie, body of brass, and eyes of glass, to resist a cold so sharp (apre).”’ 3 p. M. — To Harrington’s. Old Mr. Joe Hosmer chopping wood at his door. He is full of meat. Had a crack with him. I told him I was studying lichens, pointing to his wood. He thought I meant the wood itself. Well, he supposed he ’d had more to do with wood than Ihad. “ Now,” said he, “there are two kinds of white oak. Most people would n’t notice it. When I ’ve been chopping, say along in March, after the sap begins to start, I’ll sometimes come to an oak that will color my axe steel-blue like a sword- blade. Well, that oak is fine-grained and heavier than the common, and I call it blue white oak, for no other blues my axe so. Then there are two kinds of black oak, or yellow-bark. One is the mean black oak, or bas- tard. Then there’s a kind of red oak smells like urine three or four days old.’”’ It was really respectable in him that he avoided using the vulgar name of this oak. In an old man like him it was a true delicacy. Of this red oak he told me a story. There was old Mr. Joe Derby. He came after houses were built. He settled near the present Derby place. Well, his manteltree was very large, of red oak hewn square, — they used wood in those days, — and in course of time it had be- come charred with heat, and you could break coals off it. He could remember the house; it was more than a hundred years old. Well, when they pulled it down, old Mr. Derby told him that he split it up and put [The rest of the page (a half) cut out.] been the track of an otter near the Clamshell Hill, for it looks too large for a mink, — nearly an inch and a half in diameter and nearly round. Occasionally it looked as if a rail had been drawn along through the thin snow over the ice, with faint footprints at long intervals. I saw where he came out of a hole in the ice, and tracked him forty rods, to where he went into an- other. Saw where he appeared to have been sliding. Found three or four parmelias (caperata) in fruit on a white oak on the high river-bank between Tar- bell’s and Harrington’s. [The rest of the page (a half) cut out.] I remember a few words that I had with a young Englishman in the citadel, who politely undertook to do the honors of Quebec to me, whose clear, glowing Eng- lish complexion I can still see. Perhaps he was a chap- lain in the army. In answer to his information, I looked round with a half-suppressed smile at those prepara- tions for war, Quebec all primed and cocked for it, and at length expressed some of my surprise. ‘“ Per- haps you hold the opinions of the Quakers,” he replied. I thought, if there was any difference between us, it might be that I was born in modern times.

Sunday. A very pleasant, spring-promis- ing day. Yet I walked up the river on the ice to Fair Haven Pond. As I cross the snow (2 Pp. 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 jumped over a wall on to snow nearly three feet deep, I heard this loud and startling crash and looked 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.