24 January 1853 – 30 January 1853

P. M.— To Flint’s Pond, down railroad. There is something springlike in this afternoon. In winter, after middle, we are interested in what is spring- like. The earth and sun appear to have approached some degrees. The banks seem to lie in the embrace * No doubt it was. Israel Rice tells of one shot within the year in a ditch near White Pond ; probably the same. He says I saw an otter track. of the sun. The ground is partly bare. The cress is fresh and green at the bottoms of the brooks. What is that long-leaved green plant in the brook in Hosmer’s meadow on the Turnpike? The buttercup leaves ap- pear everywhere when the ground is bare. There are temporary ponds in the fields made by the rain and melted snow, which hardly have time [to] freeze, they soak up so fast. AsI go up Bare Hill, there being only snow enough there to whiten the ground, the last year’s stems of the blueberry (vacillans) give a pink tinge to the hillside, reminding me of red snow, though they do not semble it. I am surprised to see Flint’s Pond a quarter part open, — the middle. Walden, which froze much later, is nowhere open. But Flint’s feels the wind and is shallow. I noticed on a small pitch pine, in the axils close to the main stem, little spherical bunches of buds, an inch and more in diameter, with short, apparently abortive leaves from some. The leaves were nearly all single, as in the plants of one or two ,y years’ growth, and were finely serrate or toothed, " pectinate (?). On the lot I surveyed for Weston " I found the chestnut oak (though the teeth are sharper than E.’s plate), a handsome leaf, still on the young trees. I had taken it for a chestnut before. It is hard to distinguish them by the trunk alone. I found some barberry sprouts where the bushes had been cut down not long since, and they were covered with small withered leaves be- set with stiff prickles on their edges, and you could see the thorns, as it were gradually passing into leaves, being, as one stage, the nerves of the leaf alone, — starlike and branched thorns, gradually, as you de- scended the stem, getting some pulp between them. I suppose it was owing to the shortening them in. I still pick chestnuts. Some larger ones proved to contain double meats, divided, as it were arbitrarily, as with a knife, each part having the common diyision without the brown skin transverse to this. The pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were a fabulous fish, they are so foreign to the streets, or even the woods; handsome as flowers and gems, golden and emerald, — a transcendent and daz- zling beauty which separates [them] by a wide inter- val from the cadaverous cod and haddock, at least a day old, which we see. They are as foreign as Arabia to our Concord life, as if the two ends of the earth had come together. These are not green like the pines, or gray like the stones, or blue like the sky; but they have, if possible, to my eye, yet rarer colors, like precious stones. It is surprising that these fishes are caught here. They are something tropical. That in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rat- "thing teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims! They are true topazes, inasmuch as you can only conjecture what place they came from. The pearls of Walden, some animalized Walden water. I never chanced to see this kind of fish in any market. With a few convulsive quirks they give up their diluted ghosts.* I have noticed that leaves are green and violets bloom later where a bank has been burnt over in the fall, as if the fire warmed it. I saw to-day, where a creeping jJuni- per had been burnt, radical leaves of johnswort, thistle, clover, dandelion, etc., as well as sorrel and veronica. Young white oaks retain their leaves, and large ones on their lower parts. Swamp white oak (?) Very young rock chestnut oaks The little chinquapin ( ?) The bear oak The scarlet oak (?) The red The black (?), young trees The witch-hazel, more or less Carpinus Americana Ostrya Virginica, somewhat Sweet-fern, more or less Andromeda Andromeda, panicled (?) Kalmia latifolia Kalmia angustifolia Cranberry The above are such as I think of which wear their leaves conspicuously now.

Up river on ice 9 A. M., above Pantry. A sharp, cutting air. This is a pretty good winter morning, however. Not one of the rarer. There are from time to time mornings, both in summer and win- ter, when especially the world seems to begin anew, beyond which memory need not go, for not behind them is yesterday and our past life; when, as in the morning of a hoar frost, there are visible the effects of a certain creative energy, the world has visibly been recreated in the night. Mornings of creation, I call them. In the midst of these marks of a creative en- ergy recently active, while the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, I look back,— I look back for the era of this creation, not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough. A morning which carries us back beyond the Mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. It is the poet’s hour. Mornings when men are new-born, men who have the seeds of lifein them. It should be a part of my religion to [be] abroad then. This is not one of those mornings, but a clear, cold, airy winter day. It is surprising how much room there is in nature,— if a man will follow his proper path. In these broad fields, in these extensive woods, on this stretching river, I never meet a walker. Passing behind the farmhouses, I see no man out. Perhaps I do not meet so many men as I should have met three centuries ago, when the Indian hunter roamed these woods. I enjoy the retire- ment and solitude of an early settler. Men have cleared some of the earth, which no doubt is an advantage to the walker. I see a man sometimes chopping in the woods, or planting or hoeing in a field, at a distance; and yet there may be a lyceum in the evening, and there is a book-shop and library in the village, and five times a day I can be whirled to Boston within an hour. There is a little thin ice on the meadows. I see the bubbles underneath, looking like coin. A slight, fine snow has fallen in the night and drifted before the wind. I observe that it is so distributed over the ice as [to] show equal spaces of bare ice and of snow at pretty regular distances. I have seen the same phenomenon on the surface of snow in fields, as if the surface of the snow disposed itself according to the same law that makes waves of water. There is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates. But why does it lodge at such regular intervals? I see this fine drifting snow in the air ten or twelve feet high at a distance. Perhaps it may have to do with the man- ner in, or the angle at, which the wind strikes the earth. Made a roaring fire on the edge of the meadow at Ware (?) Hillin Sudbury. A piece of paper, birch bark, and dry leaves started it, and then we depended on the dead maple twigs and limbs to kindle the large dead wood. Green wood will burn better than the damp and rotten wood that lies on the ground. We chose a place which afforded a prospect, but it turned out that we looked only at the fire. It made all places indiffer- ent. The color of the coals, in a glowing heap or seen through the white ashes on the brands, like rubies. The shadows, coming and going, of the flame passing over the white ashes of the brands. I burnt off my eye- lashes when the fire suddenly blazed up with the wind, without knowing that I had come very near it. Though our fuel was dead and rotten wood found in the snow, it made very little smoke, which may have been owing to the state of the atmosphere, clear and cold. The sound of the air or steam escaping from a brand, its sighing or dying shriek, fine and sharp as a cambric needle, is the music we hear. One half the pleasure is in making the fire. But then we should have some- thing to cook by it. Collecting fresh fuel from time to time is very pleasant. The smoke ever and anon com- pelled us to move round to the opposite side. The sap which flowed from some maple boughs which I cut froze in large drops at the end. How came sap there now ? It is remarkable that many men will go with eager- ness to Walden Pond in the winter to fish for pickerel and yet not seem to care for the landscape. Of course it cannot be merely for the pickerel they may catch; ‘there is some adventure in it; but any love of nature which they may feel is certainly very slight and indefinite. They call it going a-fishing, and so indeed it is, though, perchance, their natures know better. Now I go a-fish- ing and a-hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game, which are the least important part. I have learned to do without them. They were indispensable only as long as I was a boy. I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay all the stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught. When we got off at some distance from our fire, returning, we saw a light bluish smoke rising as high as the woods above it, though we had not per- ceived it before, and thought that no one could have detected us. 7 At the fall on Clematis Brook the forms of the ice were admirable. The coarse spray had frozen as it fell on the rocks, and formed shell-like crusts over them, with irregular but beautifully clear and sparkling surfaces like egg-shaped diamonds, each being the top of a club-shaped a oi and branched fungus icicle. This spray had improved the least core — as the dead and slender rushes droop- ing over the water—and formed larger icicles about them, shaped exactly like horns, with the skulls often attached, or roots of horns. On similar slight limbs there were built out from the shore and rocks all sorts of fantastic forms, with broader and flat- ter bases, from which hung stalactites of ice; and on logs in the water were perfect ice fungi = a of all sizes, under which the water gurgled, flat underneath and hemi- Ss spherical. A form like this would project over the water: six Inches deep by four or five in width and a foot long, held by the rocks, but with a slight weed for core. You could take off the incrustations on the rocks, reaps rE Na t u rn Looking down on it them up, SEED and they were perfect shells. é These are the horns: a foot or two high. In the rock a incrustations there were upright my club- shaped icicles, as I have h said, packed close together, three orfourinches long, thus: and so on, right and left, with a homogeneous or undi- vided base. ***“* They appeared like crystallizations, as quartz crystals with rounded instead of flattened summits, built from below and, as they grew, widen- ing or thickening to fill the space. The only birds I have seen to-day were some jays, — one whistled clearly, — some of my mewing red front- lets, and some familiar chickadees. ‘They are inquisi- tive, and fly along after the traveller to inspect him. In civilized nations there are those answering to the rain-makers and sorcerers of savages. Also this office is universal among savage tribes. Bitter, cutting, cold northwest wind on causeway, stiffening the face, freez- ing the ears.

Trench says a wild man is a willed man. Well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is willed, but far more the constant and persevering. The obstinate man, properly speak- ing, is one who will not. The perseverance of the saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. The fates are wild, for they will; and the Almighty is wild above all, as fate is. What are our fields but felds or felled woods. They 1853 | THE FARMER’S EXPLOITS 483 bear a more recent name than the woods, suggesting that previously the earth was covered with woods. Always in the new country a field is a clearing.

Saw three ducks sailing in the river behind Prichard’s this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed. Ob- served a new wall, of stones recently dug out of the earth, all yellow and easily detected at a distance, not yet gray with lichens. Though somewhat cool, it has been remarkably pleasant to-day, and the sun-sparkles where the river is open are very cheerful to behold. As I approached Bateman’s Pond, the ice looked blue. Is it indeed blue like Walden ice ? I saw an improvement, I suppose by William Brown, on the shore of the pond this afternoon, which really is something to tell of. The exploits of the farmer are not often reported even in the agricultural paper, nor are they handed down by tradition from father to son, praiseworthy and memorable as so many of them are; though if he ran away from hard work once in his youth and enlisted, and chanced to be present at one short battle, he will even in his old age love to dwell on this, ‘shoulder his crutch and show how fields are won, with cruel satire, as 1f he had not far better shown this with his axe and spade and plow. Here was an extensive swamp, level of course as a floor, which first had been cut, then ditched broadly, then burnt over; then the surface paved off, stumps and all, in great slices; then these piled up every six feet, three or four feet high, like countless larger muskrat-cabins, to dry; then fire put to them; and so the soil was tamed. We witnessed the different stages in different parts of the swamp. You can walk in the woods in no direction but you hear the sound of the axe. I tasted some black shrivelled pyrus berries in a spruce swamp; rather sweet.

To Walden. Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday shel- drakes; being small, then wood sheldrakes.’ He never shot any at this season. Saw a woodcock last month; never before. Killed a goshawk (which was eating a rabbit) and a cat owl lately. Says I hear the cat owl. Has got only three or four minks this year. Never saw an otter track. I saw a little grayish mouse frozen into Walden, three or four rods from the shore, its tail sticking out a hole. It had apparently run into this hole when full of water, as if on land, and been drowned and frozen. Headed downward, it was. The ice is eight inches thick. It is full of short, faint, flake-like perpendicular cleavages, an inch or two broad, or varying somewhat from the perpendicular. Melvin thinks that the “thun- dering ” of the pond scares the pickerel. Pickerel of at least three different forms and colors were lying on the ice of Walden this afternoon: first, a long and shallow kind most like those caught in the. + I judge from the plate they were velvet ducks, or white-winged coots. river, steel-colored with greenish or brownish lines, darker on the back and white beneath; second, a bright-golden fish with greenish reflections, remarkably deep, with a shorter head; both of these are mottled on the sides with an irregular network of dark-brown lines, often extending over the back, the meshes three fourths of an inch long, more or less, producing longi- tudinal stripes more or less distinct and continuous, very pure white beneath; third, shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark-brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. The specific name of reticula- tus would not describe this. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises. The perch also, and indeed all the fishes which in- habit this pond, are as much handsomer than ordinary, as the water is purer than that of other ponds. Prob- ably many ichthyologists would make new varieties, at least, of most of them.

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, straw- berry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc. On Cliffs. The westering sun is yet high above the horizon, but, concealed by clouds, shoots down to earth on every side vast misty rays like the frame of a tent, to which clouds perchance are the canvas, under which a whole country rests. The northern and southern rays appear very much slanted and long; those between us and the west, steeper and shorter. What I have called the Shrub Oak Plain contains comparatively few shrub oaks, — rather, young red and white and, it may be, some scarlet (?). The shrub oak leaf is the firmest and best preserved. The white oak is the most sere and curled and brittle, frequently with discolored, mould-like spots.