14 March 1853 – 20 March 1853

P. M. — Repairing my boat. High winds, growing colder and colder, ground stiffening again. My ears have not been colder the past winter. Lowell Fay tells me that he overtook with a boat and killed last July a woodchuck which was cross- ing the river at Hollowell Place. He also says that the blacksmith of Sudbury has two otter skins taken in that town. March is rightly famous for its winds.

‘There were few colder nights last winter than the last. The water in the flower-stand contain- ing my pet tortoise froze solid, — completely enveloping him, though I had a fire in my chamber all the evening, — also that in my pail pretty thick. But the tortoise, having been thawed out on the stove, leaving the impression of his back shell in the ice, was even more lively than ever. His efforts at first had been to get under his chip, as if to go into the mud. To-day the weather is severely and remarkably cold. It is not easy to keep warm in my chamber. [ have not taken a more blustering walk the past winter than this afternoon. C. says he has heard a striped squirrel and seen a water-bug (Gyrinus), — it must have been on Saturday (12th). Ice froze just hard enough to bear last night, — about an inch thick. In the woods beyond Peter’s we heard our dog, a large Newfoundland dog, barking at something, and, going forward, were amused to see him barking while he retreated with fear at that black oak with remarkable excrescence, which had been cut off just above it, leaving it like some misshapen idol about the height of a man. Though we set him on to it, he did not i858] | THE BERMUDAS a1 venture within three or four rods. I would not have be- lieved that he would notice any such strange thing. Organization, — how it prevails! After a little dis- cipline, we study with love and reverence the forms of disease as healthy organisms. ‘The fungi have a depart- ment in the science of botany. Who can doubt but that they too are fungi lower in the scale which he sees on the wick of his lamp! Notwithstanding this day is so cold that I keep my ears covered, the sidewalks melt in the sun, such is its altitude. The coldness of the air blown from the icy northwest prevails over the heat of the sun. The Bermudas are said to have been first discovered by a Spanish ship of that name, which was wrecked on them, — “which till then for six thousand years had been nameless,”’ says John Smith. “No place known hath better walls nor a broader ditch.” 'The English did not stumble upon them in their first voyages to Vir- ginia, and the first Englishman who was ever in them was wrecked on them in 1593; yet at the very first planting of them in 1612 with some sixty persons, the first Governor the same year “built and laid the foun- dations of eight or nine forts” (!!), to be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship company that should be next shipwrecked on to them. It would have been more sensible to have built as many charity houses. These are the vex’d Bermoothes.

Channing says he saw blackbirds yester- day; F. C. Brown, that they were getting ice out of Loring’s Pond yesterday.

The season is so far advanced that the sun, every now and then promising to shine out through this rather warm rain, lighting up transiently with a whiter light the dark day and my dark chamber, affects me as I have not been affected for a long time. I must go forth. P. M. — To Conantum. I find it unexpectedly mild. It appears to be clearing up but will be wet underfoot. Now, then, spring is beginning again in earnest after this short check. Is it not always thus? Is there not always an early promise of spring, something answer- ing to the Indian summer, which succeeds the summer, so an Indian or false spring preceding the true spring, — first false promise which merely excites our expecta- tions to disappoint them, followed by a short return of winter? Yet all things appear to have made progress, even during these wintry days, for I cannot believe that they have thus instantaneously taken a start. Ino sooner step out of the house than I hear the bluebirds in the air, and far and near, everywhere except in the woods, throughout the town you may hear them, — the blue curls of their warblings, — harbingers of serene and warm weather, little azure rills of melody trickling here and there from out the air, their short warble trilled in the air reminding of so many corkscrews assaulting and thawing the torpid mass of winter, assisting the ice and snow to melt and the streams to flow. Everywhere also, all over the town, within an hour or two have come out little black two-winged gnats with plumed or fuzzy shoulders. When I catch one in my hands, it looks like [a] bit of black silk ravelling. They have suddenly come forth everywhere. How eagerly the birds of passage penetrate the northern ice, watching for a crack by which to enter! Forthwith the swift ducks will be seen winging their way along the rivers and up the coast. They watch the weather more sedulously than the teamster. All nature is thus forward to move with the revolution of the sea- sons. Now for some days the birds have been ready by myriads, a flight or two south, to invade our latitudes and, with this mild and serener weather, resume their flight.

'This morning I hear the blackbird’s fine clear whistle and also his sprayey note, as he is swayed back and forth on the twigs of the elm or of the black willow over the [river]. His first note may be a chuck, but his second is a rich gurgle or warble. *Coelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.”’ (Marginal index in Benzo’s “ History of the West Indies.”’) Observed the leaves of a dock in the water, more forward than any vegetation I have noticed.

Sunday. 8 a. M.—Via Walden, Goose, Flint’s, and Beaver Ponds and the valley of Stony Brook to the south end of Lincoln. A rather cool and breezy morning, which was fol- lowed by milder day. We go listening for early birds, with bread and cheese for our dinners. (Yesterday I forgot to say I painted my boat. Spanish brown and raw oil were the ingredients. I found the painter had sold me the brown in hard lumps as big as peas, which I could not reduce with a stick; so I passed the whole when mixed through an old coffee-mill, which made a very good paint-mill, catching it in an old coffee- pot, whose holes I puttied up, there being a lack of vessels; and then I broke up the coffee-mill and nailed a part over the bows to protect them, the boat is made so flat. I had first filled the seams with some grafting- wax I had, melted.) It was a question whether we should not go to Fair Haven to see the gulls, etc. I notice the downy, swaddled plants now and in the fall, the fragrant life-everlasting and the ribwort, innocents born in a cloud. Those alge I saw the other day in John Hosmer’s ditch were the most like seaweed of anything I have seen in the county. They made me look at the whole earth as a seashore; reminded me of Nereids, sea nymphs, ‘Triton, Proteus, etc., etc.; made the ditches fabulate in an older than the arrow-headed character. Better learn this strange character which nature speaks to-day than the Sanscrit. Books in the brooks. Saw a large dead water-bug on Walden. I suspect he came out alive. Walden is melting apace. It has a canal two rods wide along the northerly side and the west end, wider at the east end, yet, after running round from west to east, it does not keep the south shore, but crosses in front of the deep cove in a broad crack to where it started, by the ice ground. It is glorious to behold the life and joy of this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun. The wind blows eastward over the opaque ice, unusually hard, owing to the recent severe though transient cold, all watered or waved like a tessellated floor, a figured car- pet; yet dead, yet in vain, till it slides on to the living water surface, where it raises a myriad brilliant sparkles on the bare face of the pond, an expression of glee, of youth, of spring, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it and of the sands on its shore, a silvery sheen like the scales of a leuciscus, as if it were all one active fish in the spring. Itis the contrast between hfe and death. There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy. How handsome the curves which the edge of the ice makes, answering some- what to those of the shore, but more regular, sweeping en- tirely round the pond, as if defined by a vast, bold sweep! It is evident that the English do not enjoy that con- trast between winter and summer that we do, — that there is too much greenness and spring in the winter. There is no such wonderful resurrection of the year. Birds kindred with our first spring ones remain with them all winter, and flowers answering to our earliest spring ones put forth there in January. In one sense they have no winter but such as our spring. Our April is their March; our March, their February; our Feb- ruary, January, and December are not theirs at all under any name or sign. Those alder catkins on the west side of Walden trem- ble and undulate in the wind, they are so relaxed and ready to bloom,—the most forward blossom-buds. Here and there, around the pond, within a rod of the water, is the fisherman’s stone fireplace, with its charred brands, where he cheered and warmed himself and ate his lunch.