2 January 1854 – 8 January 1854

The trees are white with a hoar frost this morning, small leafets, a tenth of an inch long, on every side of the twigs. They look like ghosts of trees. Took a walk on snow-shoes at 9 A. M. to Hubbard’s Grove. A flock of snow buntings flew over the fields with a rippling whistle, accompanied sometimes by a tender peep and a ricochet motion. P. M. — Up Union Turnpike. The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This even- ing, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crys- talline and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beau- tiful. I wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape. We go about these days as if we had fetters on our feet. We walk in the stocks, stepping into the holes made by our predecessors. I noticed yesterday that the damp snow, falling gently without wind on the top of front-yard posts, had quite changed the style of their architecture, — to the dome style of the East, a four-sided base becoming a dome at top. I observe other revelations made by the snow. The team and driver have long since gone by, but I see the marks of his whip-lash on the snow, — its re- coil, — but alas! these are not a complete tally of the strokes which fell upon the oxen’s back. The unmerci- ful driver thought perchance that no one saw him, but unwittingly he recorded each blow on the unspotted snow behind his back as in the book of life. ‘T’o more searching eyes the marks of his lash are in the air. I paced partly through the pitch pine wood and partly the open field from the Turnpike by the Lee place to the railroad, from north to south, more than a quarter of a mile, measuring at every tenth pace. The average of sixty-five measurements, up hill and down, was nine- teen inches; this after increasing those in the woods by one inch each (little enough) on account of the snow on the pines. So that, apparently, it has settled about as much as the two last snows amount to. I think there has been but little over two feet at any one time. I think that one would have to pace a mile on a north and south line, up and down hill, through woods and fields, to get a quite reliable result. The snow will drift sometimes the whole width of a field, and fill a road or valley beyond. So that it would be well that your measuring included several such driftings. There is very little reliance to [be] put on the usual estimates of the depth of snow. I have heard different men set this snow at six, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six, and forty-eight inches. My snow-shoes sank about four inches into the snow this morning, but more than twice as much the 29th. On north side the railroad, above the red house cross- ing, the cars have cut through a drift about a quarter of a mile long and seven to nine feet high, straight up and down. It reminds me of the Highlands, the Pic- tured Rocks, the side of an iceberg, etc. Now that the sun has just sunk below the horizon, it is wonderful what an amount of soft light [it] appears to be absorb- ing. There appears to be more day just here by its side than anywhere. I can almost see into [it] six inches. It is made translucent, it is so saturated with light. I have heard of one precious stone found in Concord, the cinnamon stone. A geologist has spoken of it as found in this town, and a farmer has described to me one which he once found, perhaps the same referred to by the other. He said it was as large as a brick, and as thick, and yet you could distinguish a pin through it, it was so transparent. If not a mountain of light, it was a brickbatful, at any rate.

Tuesday. It is now fairly winter. We have passed the line, have put the autumn behind us, have forgotten what these withered herbs that rise above the snow here and there are, what flowers they ever bore. They are fishing on Walden this ‘p.m. The fisherman gets fifteen or twenty pounds thus, when he has pretty good luck. Two to three pounds is a com- mon size there. From the Peak, I looked over the win- try landscape. First there is the white ground, then the dark, dulled green of evergreens, then the reddish (? ) brown or leather-color of the oaks, which generally re- tain their leaves, then the gray of maples and other trees, which are bare. They are modest Quaker colors that are seen above the snow. The twilight appears to linger in the snow. This it is makes the days seem sud- denly longer. The sun has set, shorn of its disk [szc] in dun, red clouds. The young moon and the evening star are seen. The partridge has come forth to bud on some wayside apple tree. The woodchopper’s task is done; he puts his axe under a log and sets out for home. For an hour the fisherman’s lines have been freezing in, and now he, too, has commenced his retreat. That large round track forming nearly a straight line Goodwin thinks a fox. A thaw appears to be commencing. We hear the eaves run in the evening.

It thaws all day; the eaves drip as ina rain; the road begins to be soft and a little sloshy.

Still thaws. This afternoon (as probably yesterday), it being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is covered with snow-fleas. Especially they are sprinkled like pepper for half a mile in the tracks of a woodchopper in deep snow. These are the first since the snow came. With the first thawing weather they are [sic]. There is also some blueness now in the snow, the heavens being now (toward night) overcast. The blueness is more distinct after sunset.

Walked Tappan’ in p.m. down railroad to Heywood Brook, Fair Haven, and Cliffs. At every post along the brook-side, and under almost every white pine, the snow strewn with the scales and seeds of white pine cones left by the squirrels. They have sat on every post and dropped them for a great distance, also acorn-shells. The surface of the snow was sometimes strewn with the small alder scales, 7. e. of catkins; also, here and there, the large glaucous lichens (cetrarias?). Showed Tappan a small shad- bush, which interested him and reminded him of a greyhound, rising so slender and graceful with its nar- row buds above the snow. To return to the squirrels, I saw where they had laid up a pitch pine cone in the fork of a rider in several places. Many marks of par- tridges, and disturbed them on evergreens. A winter (? ) gnat out on the bark of a pine. On Fair Haven we slumped nearly a foot to the old ice. The partridges were budding on the Fair Haven orchard, and flew for refuge to the wood, twenty minutes or more after sun- down. There was a low, narrow, clear segment of sky in the west at sunset, or just after (all the rest over- cast), of the coppery yellow, perhaps, of some of Gil- pin’s pictures, all spotted coarsely with clouds like a leopard’s skin. I took up snow in the tracks at dark, but could find no fleas in it then, though they were exceedingly abundant before. Do they go into the snow at night? Frequently see a spider apparently stiff and dead on snow. In Vimont’s Jesuit Relation for 1642, he describes the customs of the Iroquois. As in the case of the Hurons, everything is done by presents. The murderer and robber are restrained by the very defect of jus- tice, and because the community (his relations or tribe) whips itself for his fault. They must appease the in- jured with costly presents. They make that he shall involve his friends in ruin along with himself, and if he would injure any one, shall injure them too. By making it impossible for him to do an injury without doing a greater injury than he wishes, they restrain him.

Saturday. Thaw ended. Cold last night; rough walking; snow crusted. P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp. The bare larch trees there, so slender and tall, where they grow close together, all beaded or studded with buds, or rather stubs, which look like the dry sterile blossoms. How much fuller, or denser and more flour- ishing, in winter is the white spruce than the white pine! It has two hues, I believe, the glaucous or bluish and the green, melting into each other. It has not shed all its seeds yet. Now that the snow has lain more than a week, it begins to be spotted and darkened in the woods, with various dry leaves and scales from the trees. The wind and thaw have brought down a fresh crop of dry pine and spruce needles. The little round- ish and stemmed scales of the alder catkins spot it thickly. The bird-shaped scales of the white birch are blown more than twenty rods from the trees. I see also the wings of pine seeds, — the seed being gone, — which look exactly like the wings of ants. Also, in the pastures, the fine star-shaped fuzz of the gray golden- rod, somewhat like a spider with many legs. The snow is still very deep in the more open parts of the swamp, where it is light, being held up by the bushes; but in thick woods there is much less of it, beside that it has settled far more. There is also much more in sprout-lands than in woods. Is it that the ground not being frozen in the woods melts it so much faster, while in the swamp, even if the ground is equally warm, the snow, lying light, does not come in contact with it enough to melt it? The ice has all been snow ice of late, not interest- ing to study. However, there are now some little pools over the snow in hollows frozen, where the thin ice is yellow and full of white bubbles and like small coins. Is this the melted snow made into tea by running amid the dead leaves and grass? I see the muddy, dripping tracks of [a] muskrat or mink that has come out of a ditch on to the snow here in the swamp. Saw a fat pitch pine stump, whose sap, four inches thick, has long been gone, but the scales of the thick bark still form a circle level with the ground four inches from the (solid or fat) wood on every side. I see at Martial Miles’s house where many hundred bees lie dead on the snow close to their hives, plainly having come out during the late warmer days. I went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not; but, now that I have left them nearly a mile behind, I hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo. Strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, —and yet so rarely see the bird. Oftenest at twilight. It has a singular promi- nence as a sound; is louder than the voice of a dear friend. Yet we see the friend perhaps daily and the owl but few times in our lives. It is a sound which the wood or the horizon makes. I see the cars almost as often as I hear the whistle.

Sunday. Gilpin, in his essay on the “ Art of Sketching Landscape,” says: ‘‘ When you have finished your sketch therefore with Indian ink, as far as you propose, tinge the whole over with some light horizon ~ hue. It may be the rosy tint of morning; or the more ruddy one of evening; or it may incline more to a yellow- | ish, or a greyish cast. . . . By washing this tint over your whole drawing, you lay a foundation for harmony.”’ I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head. We love not so well the landscape repre- sented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day. Our mood may then possess the whole landscape, or be in harmony with it, as the hue of twilight prevails over the whole scene. Are we more than crepuscular in our intellectual and spiritual life? Have we awak- ened to broad noon? The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of the night. At sunset we look into the west. For centuries our thoughts fish those grand banks that lie before the newfoundland, before our spirits take up their abode in that Hesperian Continent to which these lie in the way. P. M.— To the Spruce Swamp in front of J. Farmer's. Can go across both rivers now. New routes are more practicable. Stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. How curious and exciting the blood- red spot on its hindhead! I ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. It is so close to the bark I do not see its feet. It looks be- hind as if it had on a black cassock open behind and showing a white undergarment between the shoulders and down the back. It is briskly and incessantly tap- ping all round the dead limbs, but rarely twice in a place, as if to sound the tree and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. How much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tap- ping and inspecting it! He it is that scatters those fragments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. What a lichenist he must be! Or rather, perhaps it is fungi makes his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. How briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now {flitting with a rippling sound of his wings to another tree! The lower two-thirds of the white spruce £ has its branches retraced or turned downward, AX and then curving upward at the extremities, as tN much as the white pine commonly slants up- Y\~ wards. Above it is so thick that you cannot see through it. All the black spruce that I know hereabouts stand on higher land than this. Saw two squirrel-nests in the thick top of a spruce. 1854) | +GILPIN/ON BEAUTY 55 It was a foot in diameter, of coarse grass and bark fibres, with very thick bottom and sides and a scarcely distinguishable entrance, lined with fine fibres of bark, probably inner bark of maple, very warm. Probably a red squirrel’s, for I heard one winding up his clock. Many white pine cones had been eaten in the neigh- borhood. Gilpin’s ‘‘ Essay on Picturesque Beauty ”’ is the key to all his writings. ‘He says in the outset that he does not mean to inquire “into the general sources of beauty,’ but the questions which he proposes to him- self depend on the result of such an inquiry. He asks, first, “ What is that quality in objects, which particu- larly marks them as picturesque?” and answers “ roughness,” assigning to that kind of beauty which he makes the opposite to the picturesque the quality of “ smoothness.” This last he styles, too generally or exclusively, “the beautiful.”” The beautiful, he says, cannot be painted; e.g., ‘A piece of Palladian archi- tecture may be elegant in the last degree. The propor- tion of its parts — the propriety of its ornaments — and the symmetry of the whole, may be highly pleasing. But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately be- comes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw its mutilated members around in heaps. In short from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin.”’! I do not believe that the “beautiful” is not equally beautiful * [William Gilpin, Five Essays on Picturesque Subjects. in picture, that the beautiful statue for instance, however smooth, may not appear beautiful when daguerreotyped or painted. In the case instanced he must use the mallet either because the building is not beautiful, or because he cannot catch and render the spirit of its beauty. If there is the same genius in the painter that there was in the architect, the painting will be beautiful too. ‘The smooth may be more diffi- cult, but is not impossible, to be represented by pic- ture. It isnot the mere roughness of the surface which makes the patriarchal head more interesting than that of a youth ever, nor is this the reason why we ‘“ admire the Laoco6n more than the Antinoiis,” for we do not admire it more than the Apollo Belvidere. True, there are many reasons why the painter should select the rough. It is easier to execute; he can do it more justice. In the case of the patriarchal head, those lines and wrinkles which man’s life has produced his hand can better represent than the fullness and promise of infancy; and then, on the whole, perhaps, we have more sympathy with performance than pro- mise. ‘The humble or sincere and true is more com- monly rough and weather-beaten, so that from associ- ation we prefer it. But will Mr. Gilpin assert that the Venus and Apollo are not fit objects for painting ? So we prefer the poor man’s irregular garden for its sincerity and truth to the rich man’s formal and pre- tending parterres, and the ‘worn-out cart-horse”’ to the pampered steed for similar reasons. Indeed “he does not recommend his art,’’ if he fails to fix the fleet- ing forms of the beautiful. The worn-out cart-horse is thought to be more picturesque and admits ‘‘ of being rendered with spirit,’ because we can far more easily enter into his spirit, whether as beholders or painters, —have more sympathy with it than with that of the free horse of the prairie. Beside, what has the pam- pered coach-horse done to deserve our respect and sym- pathy? He defends the painter, first, by saying that “a free, bold touch is in itself pleasing,” and assuming to too great an extent that the objects which he calls beauti- ful do not admit of being painted in this touch, — but God used a free and bold touch when he created them, and so may the creative painter do when he paints them, — secondly, by saying that ‘‘ the very essence of his art requires” that he select the Picturesque for the sake of composition, variety, light and shade, and color- ing. But he is superficial. He goes not below the surface to account for the effect of form and color, ete. For instance, he thus attempts to account for the fact that the pampered steed may be a picturesque object. ‘“‘ Though the horse, in a rough state, as we have just observed, or worn down with labor, is more adapted to the pencil than when his sides shine with brushing, and high feeding; yet in this latter state also he is certainly a picturesque object. But itis not his smooth, and shin- ing coat, that makes him so. It is the apparent inter- ruption of that smoothness by a variety of shades, and colors, which produces the effect. Such a play of mus- cles appears, everywhere, through the fineness of his skin, gently swelling, and sinking into each other — he is all over so lubricus aspici, the reflections of light are so continually shifting upon him, and playing into each other, that the eye never considers the smoothness of the surface; but is amused with gliding up, and down, among those endless transitions, which in some degree, supply the room of roughness.” And this is the reason why a pampered steed can be painted! Mark that there is not the slightest reference to the fact that this sur- face, with its lights and shades, belongs to a horse and not to a bag of wind. The same reasoning would ap- ply equally well to one of his hind quarters hung bot- tom upwards in a butcher’s stall. This comes of not inquiring “into the general sources of beauty.” So I should answer that “‘ the beauty of an old head ” is not “ greatly improved by the smoothness of the bald pate” (if bald pates were rough they would do just as well), but it may be improved by the associations which a bald pate suggests. He fails to show why roughness is essential to the pic- turesque, because he does not go beneath the surface. To return to the horse, I should say that no arrange- ment of light and shade without reference to the object, actual or suggested, so lit and shaded can interest us powerfully, any more than the paint itself can charm us. In the “ Essay on Picturesque Travel,” after speak- ing of the objects of such travel, he treats of the way in which “the mind is gratified by these objects.”” He says: “We might begin in moral] style, and consider the ob- jects of nature in a higher light than merely as amuse- ment. We might observe, that a search after beauty should naturally lead the mind to the great origin of all beauty,” ete. ‘“ But though in theory this seems a natural climax, we insist the less upon it, as in fact we have scarce ground to hope that every admirer of pic- turesque beauty is an admirer also of the beauty of vir- tue.” And he a clergyman, “ vicar of Boldre!”’ This is to give us the play of Hamlet with Hamlet’s part left out. But there is no half way in this case that is not at the same time half true. Again, as if that were true, which G. asserts in an- other essay, that ‘‘the eye, which has nothing to do with moral sentiments, and is conversant only with visz- ble forms, is disgusted,” etc., any more than a telescope is disgusted! As if taste resided in the eye! As if the eye, which itself cannot see at all, were conversant with surfaces! Yet he adds directly that “there is a still higher character in landscapes than what arises from the uniformity of objects — and that is the power of fur- nishing images analogous to the various feelings, and sensations of the mind.”’ Can good landscape have any lower aim? But he says, ‘“‘’To convey however ideas of this kind is the perfection of the art: it requires the splendor, and variety of colors; and is not to be at- tempted in such trivial sketches as these.’’? And this is not modesty merely, but a low estimate of his own art. I might have said some pages back that he allows that grandeur which is produced ‘“‘by uniformity of color, and a long continuation of line,” falls under the head of picturesque beauty, though he says that the idea of it is not easily caught. The elegant Gilpin. I like his style and manners bet- ter than anything he says.