12 April 1852 – 18 April 1852

Tuesday. A driving snow-storm in the night and still raging; five or six inches deep on a level at 7 A.M. All birds are turned into snowbirds. ‘Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter. ‘The traveller’s carriage wheels, the farmer’s wagon, are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house and read and write. We do not now go wander- ing all abroad and dissipated, but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts. I can hear the clock tick as not in pleasant weather. My life is enriched. I love to hear the wind how]. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper in some mean and apparently unfavorable place, in the kitchen, for instance, where the work is going on, rather a little cold than com- fortable. My thoughts are of more worth in such places than they would be in a well furnished and warmed studio. Windsor, according to Gilpin, is contracted from wind-shore, the Saxons not sounding the sh. The robin is the only bird as yet that makes a business of singing, steadily singing, — sings continuously out of pure joy and melody of soul, carols. The jingle of the song sparrow, simple and sweet as it is, is not of suffi- cient volume nor sufficiently continuous to command and hold attention, and the bluebird’s is but a tran- sient warble, from a throat overflowing with azure and serene hopes; but the song of the robin on the elms or oaks, loud and clear and heard afar through the streets of a village, makes a fit conclusion to a spring day. The larks are not yet in sufficient numbers or sufficiently musical. ‘The robin is the prime singer as yet. The blackbird’s conqueree, when first heard in the spring, is pleasant from the associations it awakens, and is best heard by one boating on the river. It be- longs to the stream. The robin is the only bird with whose song the groves can be said to be now vocal morning and evening, for, though many other notes are heard, none fill the air une this bird. As yet no other thrushes.

Going down the railroad at 9 a. m., I hear the lark singing from over the snow. This for steady singing comes next to the robin now. It will come up very sweet from the meadows ere long. I do not hear those peculiar tender die-away notes from the pewee yet. Is it another pewee, or a later note? The snow melts astonishingly fast. ‘The whole upper surface, when you take it up in your hand, is heavy and dark with water. The slate-colored snowbird’s (for they are still about) is a somewhat shrill jingle, hke the sound of ramrods when the order has been given to a regiment to “return ramrods” and they obey strag- glingly. It is oppressively hot in the Deep Cut, the sun is now so high and reflected from the snow on both sides. When I inquire again of Riordan where he gets his water now, seeing that the ditch by the railroad is full of rain-water and sand, he answers cheerfully as ever: “TI get it from the ditch, sir. It is good spr-ring water,’ —with a good deal of burr to the r. Certainly it will not poison him so soon for his contentedness. Walden is only melted two or three rods from the north shore yet. It is a good thermometer of the annual heats, because, having no outlet nor inlet on the surface, it has no stream to wear it away more or less rapidly or early as the water may be higher or lower, and also, being so deep, it is not warmed through by a transient change of temperature. Is that Cornus florida at the Howard’s Meadow dam? Many red oak leaves have fallen since yesterday, for now they lie on the surface of the snow, perchance loosened by the moisture. The white oak leaves are more bleached and thinner than the red. The squarish-leaved shrub oak appears to bear the winter still better. The leaves of the hornbeam are well withered. The snow in the sunshine is more white and dazzling now than in the winter; at least this is the effect on our eyes. Haynes told me of breams caught through the ice. The surface of the meadow is very attractive now, seen through a foot or more of calm water while the neighboring fields are covered with snow. The evenings have for a long time been grievously shortened. The pond-holes are filled with snow which looks like ice. With snow on the ground, the sky appears once more to wear the peculiar blue of winter, and contrasts in like manner with small whitish cumulus; but there is not yet in the air the vapor you would expect from the evaporation of so much snow. On the Cliffs. —If it were not for the snow it would be a remarkably pleasant, as well as warm, day. It is now perfectly calm. The different parts of Fair Haven Pond — the pond, the meadow beyond the button- bush and willow curve, the island, and the meadow between the island and mainland with its own defining lines — are all parted off like the parts of a mirror.

My face still burns with yesterday’s sun- ning. It rains this morning, as if the vapor from the melting snow were falling again. ‘There is so much sun and light reflected from the snow at this season that it is not only remarkably white and dazzling but tans in a few moments. It is fortunate, then, that the sun on the approach of the snows, the season of snow, takes his course so many degrees lower in the heavens; else he might burn us up, even at that season. The face comes from the house of winter, tender and white, to the house of summer, and these late snows convey the sun to it with sudden and scorching power. It was not the March winds or others. It was a still, warm, beautiful day. I was out but three hours. It was the sun suddenly and copiously applied to a face from winter quarters. The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney’s elm, | containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, . surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles, —these are + just expanding or blossoming now.. The flat imbricated buds, which open their scales both ways, have had a rich look for some weeks past. Why so few elms so advanced, so rich now? Are the staminiferous and pistilliferous flowers ever on different trees ? It is, according to Emerson, the dwarf cassandra (C. calyculata of D. Don) that is so common on the river meadows and in swamps and bogs; formerly called an andromeda, of the Ericacee, or Heath Family, with the uva-ursi (Arctostaphylos). Now well flower- budded. I had forgotten the aspen in my latest enu- meration of flowers. Vide if its flowers have not decid- edly appeared. I think that the largest early-catkined willow in large bushes in sand by water now blossoming — the fertile catkins with paler blossoms, the sterile covered with pollen, a pleasant lively bright yellow — [is] the bright- est flower I have seen thus far. Gilpin says of the stags in the New Forest, if one “be hunted by the king, and escape; or have his life given him for the sport he has afforded, he becomes from thence forward a hart-royal. —If he be hunted out of the forest, and there escape, the king hath sometimes honoured him with a royal proclamation; the purport of which is, to forbid any one to molest him, that he may have free liberty of returning to his forest. From that time he becomes a hart-royal pro- claimed.’ As is said of Richard the First, that, having pursued a hart a great distance, “the king in gratitude for the diversion he had received, ordered him immedi- ately to be proclaimed at Tickill, and at all the neigh- bouring towns.” ' (A hart is a stag in his fifth or sixth year and upward.) Think of having such a fellow as that for a king, causing his proclamation to be blown about your coun- try towns at the end of his day’s sport, at Tickill or elsewhere, that you hinds may not molest the hart that has afforded him such an ever-memorable day’s sport. Ts it not time that his subjects whom he has so sorely troubled and so long, be harts-royal proclaimed them- selves, — who have afforded him such famous sport? It will be a finer day’s-sport when the hinds shall turn and hunt the royal hart himself beyond the bounds of his forest and his kingdom, and in perpetual banish- ment alone he become a royal hart proclaimed. Such is the magnanimity of royal hearts that, through a whimsical prick of generosity, spares the game it could not kill, and fetters its equals with its arbitrary will. Kings love to say “shall” and “ will.”

‘That large early swamp (?) willow catkin (the sterile blossom) opens on one side like a tinge of golden sunlight, the yellow anthers bursting through the down that invests the scales. 2 p. M. — To Conantum. It clears up (the rain) at noon, with a rather cool wind from the northwest and flitting clouds. The ground about one third covered with snow still. What variety in the trunks of oaks! How expressive of strength are some! There is one behind Hubbard’s which expresses a sturdy strength, thus: ‘ with a protuberant ridge and seam toward the north. There is a still more remark- able one in a different style near Derby’s Bridge. The very em- blem of sturdy resistance to tempests. How many there are who advise you to print! How few who advise you to lead a more interior life! In the one case there is all the world to advise you, in the other there is none to advise you but yourself. Nobody ever advised me not to print but myself. The public persuade the author to print, as the meadow invites the brook to fall into it. Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations.

The ground is now generally bare of snow, though it lies along walls and on the north sides of valleys in the woods pretty deep. We have had a great deal of foul weather this season, scarcely two fair days together. Gray refers the cone-like excrescences on the ends of willow twigs to the punctures of insects. I think that both these and the galls of the oak, etc., are to be regarded as something more normal than this implies. Though it is impossible to draw the line between disease and health at last. Day before yesterday I brought home some twigs of that earliest large oval-catkined willow just over Hubbard’s Bridge on the right hand, a male tree. The anthers just beginning to show themselves; not quite so forward as those above the Deacon Hosmer house, which I have thought to be the same. They looked much the worse for the rain. Catkins about one inch long, not being much expanded yet, opening a little below the apex, two stamens to a scale. There are smaller female bushes further on, on the left, catkins about the same size, with greenish ovaries stalked and rather small and slightly reddish stigmas, four- divided. I thought this the other sex of the same tree. There is also the very gray hardwood-like willow at the bars just beyond Hubbard’s Brook, with long, cylindrical, caterpillar-like catkins, which do not yet show their yellow. And, thirdly, opposite the first- named, 2. e. the other side the way, a smaller-catkined willow not yet showing its yellow. Fourthly, near the Conantum Swamp, sterile catkins 7m blossom on a bush willow an inch and a quarter long, more forward than any, but the stamens one to a bract or scale and bifid or trifid or quatnfid toward the top!! Fifthly, what I should think the Salix humilis, 2. e. S. Muhlenber- giana, shows its small catkins now, but not yet blos- soms.