15 March 1852 – 21 March 1852

This afternoon I throw off my outside coat. A mild spring day. I must hie to the Great Mead- ows. The air is full of bluebirds. The ground almost entirely bare. The villagers are out in the sun, and every man is happy whose work takes him outdoors. I go by Sleepy Hollow toward the Great Fields. I lean over a rail to hear what is in the air, liquid with the blue- birds’ warble. My life partakes of infinity. The air is as deep as our natures. Is the drawing in of this vital air attended with no more glorious results than I witness ? The air is a velvet cushion against which I press my ear. I go forth to make new demands on life. I wish to begin this summer well; to do something in it worthy of it and of me; to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen; to have my immortality now, that it be in the quality of my daily life; to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, of any man in Concord, and enjoy the most!! I will give all I am for my nobility. I will pay all my days for my success. I pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory. May I dare as I have never done! May I persevere as I have never done! May I purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body! May my melody not be wanting to the season! May I gird myself to be a hunter of the beautiful, that naught escape me! May I attain to a youth never attained! I am eager to re- port the glory of the universe; may I be worthy to do it; to have got through with regarding human values, so as not to be distracted from regarding divine values. It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning. Yesterday’s rain, in which I was glad to be drenched, has advanced the spring, settled the ways, and the old footpath and the brook and the plank bridge behind the hill are suddenly uncovered, which have [been] buried so long; as if we had returned to our earth after an absence, and took pleasure in finding things so nearly in the state in which we left them.

Before sunrise. With what infinite and unwearied expectation and proclamation the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before! And the dogs bark still, and the thallus of lichens springs, so tenacious of life is nature. Spent the day in Cambridge Library. Walden is not yet melted round the edge. It is, perhaps, more sud- denly warm this spring than usual. Mr. Bull thinks that the pine grosbeaks, which have been unusually numerous the past winter, have killed many branches of his elms by budding them, and that they will die and the wind bring them down, as heretofore. Saw a large flock of geese go over Cambridge and heard the robins in the College Yard. The Library a wilderness of books. Looking over books on Canada written within the last three hundred years, could see how one had been built upon another, each author consulting and referring to his predeces- sors. You could read most of them without changing your leg on the steps. It is necessary to find out exactly what books to read on a given subject. Though there . may be a thousand books written upon it, it is only im- portant to read three or four; they will contain all that is essential, and a few pages will show which they are. Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand. I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature’s primitive wilder- nesses. ‘The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were mak- ing haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes rever- berating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

I catch myself philosophizing most ab- stractly when first returning to consciousness in the night or morning. I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works hke a machine without friction. I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found ourselves on the con- fines of the latter. On awakening we resume our enter- prise, take up our bodies and become limited mind again. We meet and converse with those bodies which we have previously animated. There is a moment in the dawn, when the darkness of the night is dissipated and before the exhalations of the day commence to rise, when we see things more truly than at any other time. The light is more trustworthy, since our senses are purer and the atmosphere is less gross. By after- noon all objects are seen in mirage. - Frank Brown showed me the pintail duck ing before yesterday, which he had received from Duxbury. To-day the fox-colored sparrow on its way to Hudson’s Bay.

This morning the ground is again covered with snow, and the storm still continues. That is a pretty good story told of a London citizen just retired to country life on a fortune, who, wishing, among other novel rustic experiments, to establish a number of bee communities, would not listen to the advice of his under steward, but, asking fiercely “how he could be so thoughtless as to recommend a purchase of what might so easily be procured on the Downs, ordered him to hire ten women to go in quest of bees the next morning, and to prepare hives for the reception of the captives. Early the next day the detachment started for the Downs, each furnished with a tin can- ister to contain the spoil; and after running about for hours, stunning the bees with blows from their straw bonnets, and encountering stings without number, secured about thirty prisoners who were safely lodged in a hive. But, as has been the fate of many arduous campaigns, little advantage accrued from all this fatigue and danger. Next morning the Squire sallied forth to visit his new colony. As he approached, a loud hum- ming assured him that they were hard at work, when to his infinite disappointment, it was found that the bees had made their escape through a small hole in the hive, leaving behind them only an unfortunate humblebee, whose bulk prevented his squeezing himself through the aperture, and whose loud complaints had been mistaken for the busy hum of industry.” You must patiently study the method of nature, and take advice of the under steward, in the establishment of all communi- ties, both insect and human. This afternoon the woods and walls and the whole face of the country wear once more a wintry aspect, though there is more moisture in the snow and the trunks of the trees are whitened now on a more southerly or southeast side. These slight falls of snow which come and go again so soon when the ground is partly open in the spring, perhaps helping to open and crumble and prepare it for the seed, are called “the poor man’s manure.” ‘They are, no doubt, more serviceable still to those who are rich enough to have some manure spread on their grass ground, which the melting snow helps dissolve and soak in and carry to the roots of the grass. At any rate, it is all the poor man has got, whether it is good or bad. There is more rain than snow now falling, and the lichens, especially the Parmelia conspersa, appear to be full of fresh fruit, though they are nearly buried in snow. The Evernia jubata might now be called even a very dark olive-green. I feel a cer- tain sympathy with the pine or oak fringed with lichens in a wet day. They remind me of the dewy and ambro- sial vigor of nature and of man’s prime. The pond is still very little melted around the shore. As I go by a pile of red oak recently split in the woods and now wet with rain, I perceive its strong urine-like scent. I see within the trunks solid masses of worm or ant borings, turned to a black or very dark brown mould, purest of virgin mould, six inches in diameter and some feet long, within the tree, — the tree turned to mould again before its fall. But this snow has not driven back the birds. I hear the song sparrow’s simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring, and see flocks of chubby northern birds with the habit of snowbirds, passing north. A wise man will not go out of his way for informa- tion. He might as well go out of nature, or commit suicide. I am glad to hear that naked eyes are of any use, for I cannot afford to buy a Munich telescope. Probably the bees could not make industry attrac- tive under the circumstances described above.

Observed as I stood with Channing on the brink of the rill on Conantum, where, falling a few inches, it produced bubbles, our images, three quarters of an inch long and black as imps, appearing to lean toward each other on account of the convexity of the bubble. There was nothing but these two distinct black manikins and the branch of the elm over our heads to be seen. The bubbles rapidly burst and suc- ceeded one another.

As to the winter birds, — those which came here in the winter, — I saw first that rusty sparrow-like bird flying in flocks with the smaller sparrows early in the winter and sliding down the grass stems to their seeds, which clucked like a hen, and F. Brown thought to be the young of the purple finch; then I saw, about Thanksgiving time and later in the winter, the pine grosbeaks, large and carmine, a noble bird; then, in midwinter, the snow bunting, the white snowbird, sweeping low like snowflakes from field to field over the walls and fences. And now, within a day or two, I have noticed the chubby slate-colored snowbird (Frin- gilla hyemalis?), and I drive the flocks before me on the railroad causeway as I walk. It has two white feathers in its tail. It is cold as winter to-day, the ground still covered with snow, and the stars twinkle as in winter nights. The fox-colored sparrow is about now.

Railroad causeway at Heywood’s meadow. The ice no sooner melts than you see the now red and yellow pads of the yellow lily beginning to shoot up from the bottom of the pools and ditches, for there they yield to the first impulses of the heat and feel not the chilling blasts of March. This evening a little snow falls. The weather about these days is cold and wintry again.