27 February 1854 – 5 March 1854

Here is our first spring morning accord- ing to the almanac. It is remarkable that the spring of the almanac and of nature should correspond so closely. The morning of the 26th was good winter, but there came a plentiful rain in the afternoon, and yesterday and to-day are quite springlike. This morn- ing the air is still, and, though clear enough, a yel- lowish light is widely diffused throughout the east, now just after sunrise. The sunlight looks and feels warm, and a fine vapor fills the lower atmosphere. I hear the phcebe or spring note of the chickadee, and the scream of the jay is perfectly repeated by the echo from a neighboring wood. For some days past the surface of the earth, covered with water, or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring, me- thinks. And are not the frosts in the morning more like the early frosts in the fall, — common white frosts ? As for the birds of the past winter: I have seen but three hawks, — one early in the winter and two lately ; have heard the hooting owl pretty often late in the afternoon. Crows have not been numerous, but their cawing was heard chiefly in pleasanter mornings.

A Corner man tells me that Witherell has seen a bluebird, and Martial Miles thought that he heard one. I doubt it. It may have been given to With- erell to see the first bluebird, so much has been with- holden from him. What produces the peculiar softness of the air yes- terday and to-day, as if it were the air of the south suddenly pillowed amid our wintry hills? We have sud- denly a different sky, —a different atmosphere. It is as if the subtlest possible soft vapor were diffused through the atmosphere. Warm air has come to us from the south, but charged with moisture, which will yet distill in rain or congeal into snow and hail. The sand foliage is vital in its form, reminding me [of] what are called the vitals of the animal body. I am not sure that its arteries are ever hollow. They are rather meandering channels with remarkably dis- tinct sharp edges, formed instantaneously as by magic. How rapidly and perfectly it organizes itself! The ma- terial must be sufficiently cohesive. I suspect that a certain portion of clay is necessary. Mixed sand and clay being saturated with melted ice and snow, the most liquid portion flows downward through the mass, forming for itself instantly a perfect canal, using the best materials the mass affords for its banks. It digs and builds it in a twinkling. The less fluid portions clog the artery, change its course, and form thick stems and leaves. The lobe principle, —lobe of the ear (labor, lapsus ?). | On the outside all the life of the earth is expressed in the animal or vegetable, but make a deep cut in it and you find it vital; you find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder, then, that plants grow and spring in it. The atoms have al- ready learned the law. Let a vegetable sap convey it upwards and you have a vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea thus inwardly. The over- hanging leaf sees here its prototype. The earth is preg- nant with law. The various shades of this sand foliage are very agreeable to the eye, including all the different colors which iron assumes, — brown, gray, yellowish, red- dish, and clay-color. Perhaps it produces the greater effect by arranging the sands of the same color side by side, bringing them together.’

A dull, cloudy day. P. M. — To Walden via Hubbard’s Wood and foot of Cliff Hill. . The snow has melted very rapidly the past week. ' There is much bare ground. The checkerberries are revealed, — somewhat shrivelled many of them. I look along the ditches and brooks for tortoises and frogs, but the ditches are still full of dirty ice, and they are not yet seen in the brooks. In Hubbard’s maple swamp IT see the evergreen leaves of the gold-thread as well as the mitchella and large pyrola. I begin to sniff the air and smell the ground. In the meadow beyond I see some still fresh and perfect pitcher-plant leaves, and everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden senecio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. Who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still—or in midwinter—some green leaves which, bruised, yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in June? Nothing so realizes the summer to me now. This past winter the sphagnum (?) in swamps and meadows has been frost-bitten and blackened, but last winter it was fresh and handsome. I see nowadays, the ground being laid bare, great cracks in the earth revealed, a third of an inch wide, running with a crinkling line for twenty rods or more through the pastures and under the walls, — frost-cracks of the past winter. Sometimes they are revealed through ice four or five inches thick over them. I observed to-day where a crack had divided a piece of bark lying over it with the same irregular and finely meandering line, sometimes forking. Yester- day I saw a wasp slowly stretching himself and, I think, a fly, outside of Minott’s house in the sun, by his wood-shed. In the dry pasture under the Cliff Hill, the radical leaves of the johnswort are now re- vealed everywhere in pretty radiating wreaths flat on the ground, with leaves recurved, reddish above, green beneath, and covered with dewy drops. I can no longer get on to the river ice. I do not find any wil- low catkins started. A red maple which I cut bleeds somewhat, —only the upper side the cut however. Is not this the earliest distinct motion of the spring ? This stood in water. Other trees were dry. Found a geiropodium (?), its globe now transparent, with the vermilion-colored remnants of others (?) lying in jelly about. In dry pastures I see that fungus wi —is it P—split into ten or twelve rays like a star and curved backward around a white bag or inner membrane. Were they not the seeds of rose-hips which I saw abundantly in some creature’s dung? The va- rious cladonias are now very plump and erect, not only exposed to view, the ground being bare, but flour- ishing on account of the abundant moisture, — some light, some dark green, and various more dusky shades. 1854) THE MELTING OF THE ICE 151 In one or two places on the snow under the Cliffs I noticed more than a half-pint of partridge-droppings within a diameter of six inches. Were these all dropped in one night by one bird, or in the course of several nights, or by many birds? I saw that they had eaten the buds of the small blueberry vacillans. In their manure was what looked like woody fibres; may have been fibres of leaves. I am surprised to see how fresh and tender is the wintergreen bud, almost pure white. Was it so two months ago? It looks as if it had started under the snow. What is that gray beetle of which I found many under the bark of a large dead white pine, five eighths of an inch long, within an elliptical sort of log fort seven eighths of an inch or more in diameter piled around, of fibres of the sap-wood, perhaps one eighth or one tenth of an inch high, with some red bark chankings? Sometimes a curious chrysalis instead, like a very narrow and long bandbox with flat and parallel top and bottom, but highest at one end like a coffin. Also some white grubs stretch themselves, and some earwig-shaped creatures under the bark. I find that the ice of Walden has melted or softened so much that I sink an inch or more at every step, and hardly anywhere can I cut out a small cake, the water collects so fast in [the] hole. But at last, in a harder and drier place, I succeeded. It was now fifteen and a half inches thick, having lost about an inch and a half. ‘Though the upper side was white and rotten and saturated with water for four or five inches, the under surface was still perfectly smooth and so far unchanged, yet ready to flake off, and did so readily in my hand, in flakes a half-inch to an inch thick, leaving the irregular, undulating surface with which I am familiar. But this side was comparatively unchanged and hard, though for two and three quarters inches, measuring upwards, it was whitish, then for two and a half inches remarka- bly clear (free from air-bubbles) and hard. Then by successive layers it grew more white and soft till you reached the upper surface. I think that that slight white ice beneath the clear and dark may have been produced by the recent warmth of the water, though this is doubtful. At any rate this year the ice has melted much more above than beneath. Least of all between two and three quarters and five inches from the under side.

Sunday. Channing, talking with Minott the other day about his health, said, “I suppose you’d like to die now.” “No,” said Minott, “I’ve toughed it through the winter, and I want to stay and hear the bluebirds once more.” The patches of bare ground grow larger and larger, of snow less and less; even after a night you see a difference. It is a clear morning with some wind be- ginning to rise, and for the first time I see the water looking blue on the meadows. Has not the johnswort two lives, in winter sending out radical shoots which creep flat on the ground under the snow, in the summer shooting upward and blossoming ? P. M. — To Upper Nut Meadow. The river is breaking up. The meadows are already partly bare, for it has only been cold enough to form a thin ice on them since this last freshet, and the old ice still lies concealed on the bottom. Great fields of thick ice from the channel, or between the channel and meadows, are driven by the wind against the thick ice on the channel. Hence the meadow ice appears to break up first. The waves dash against the edge of the ice and eat into it fast. As I go along on the snow under Clamshell Hill I hear it sing around me, being melted next the ground. This is a spring sound. I cannot yet see the mar- chantia (?) in the ditches, for they are yet filled with ice or flooded. I see no horse-tail (unless one) nor flags, etc., yet started in Nut Meadow, nor any min- nows out. This brook has run clear of ice a long time. Near Jenny’s its sides are strewn with the wreck of an- gelica stems and asters. I go along looking at its deep, sometimes yellow, shelving bottom, sprinkled with red pebbles. In the upper meadow the sweet-gale grows rankly along its edges, slanted over the water almost horizontally, so as frequently to meet and conceal it altogether. It is here a dark and sluggish water, com- paratively shallow, with a muddy bottom. This sweet-. gale is now full of fruit. This and the water andro- meda are wild plants, as it were driven to the water’s edge by the white man. Saw a wood tortoise at the bottom. A reptile out of the mud before any bird, | and probably quadruped. Not yet a frog, I think. The down of some willow catkins by this brook may have started forward this spring, though it is doubt- ful. Those which look most forward now will not be so a fortnight hence. It grew colder before I left. I saw some crystals beginning to shoot on the pools between the tussocks, shaped like feathers or fan- coral, — the most delicate I ever saw. Thus even ice begins with crystal leaves, and birds’ feathers and wings are leaves, and trees and rivers with intervening earth are vast leaves. Saw a small blackish caterpillar on the snow. Where do they come from? And crows, as I think, migrating northeasterly. They came in loose, straggling flocks, about twenty to each, commonly silent, a quarter to a half a mile apart, till four flocks had passed, and perhaps there were more. Methinks I see them going southwest in the fall.