8 January 1855 – 14 January 1855

7.80 a. M. — To river. Still warm and cloudy, but with a great crescent of clear sky increasing in the north by west. ‘The streets are washed bare down to the ice. It is plea- sant to see the sky reflected in the open river-reach, now perfectly smooth. 10 a. mM. — To Easterbrooks place via old mill site. It is now a clear warm and sunny day. The willow osiers by the Red Bridge decidedly are not bright now.’ There is a healthy earthy sound of cock-crowing. I hear a few chickadees near at hand, and hear and see jays further off, and, as yesterday, a crow sitting sentinel on an apple tree. Soon he gives the alarm, and several more take their places near him. Then off they flap with their caw of various hoarseness. I see various caterpillars and grubs on the snow and in one place a reddish ant about a third of an inch long walking off. In the swamps you see the mouths of .squirrels’ holes in the snow, with dirt and leaves and perhaps pine scales about them. ‘The fever-bush is betrayed by its little spherical buds.

P. M. — To Conantum. A cloudy day, threatening snow; wet under foot. How pretty the evergreen radical shoots of the 5t. John’s-wort now exposed, partly red or lake, various species of it. Have they not grown since fall? I puta stone at the end of one to try it. A little wreath of green and red lying along on the muddy ground amid the melting snows. I am attracted at this season by the fine bright-red buds of the privet andromeda, sleeping couchant along the slender light-brown twigs. They look brightest against a dark ground. I notice the pink shoots of low blueberries where they are thick. How handsome now the fertile fronds of the sensitive fern standing up a foot or more on the sides of cause- ways, the neat pale-brown stipe clothed with rich dark-brown fruit at top,—the pinnz on one side and slightly curved, — “a one sided spike or raceme,” — still full of seed! ‘They look quite fresh though dry and rigid. Walked up on the river a piece above the Holden Swamp, though there were very few places where I could get on to it, it has so melted along the shore and on the meadows. The ice over the channel looks dangerously dark and rotten in spots. The oak leaves are of the various leather-colors. ‘The white oak, which is least so and most curled and withered, has to my eye a tinge of salmon-color or pink in it. The black shrub oak is particularly dark-reddish and firm. It is the black whose leaves are such a pale brown verging on yellowish, — sometimes reddish, — but well preserved. , This winter I hear the axe in almost every wood of any consequence left standing in the township. Made a splendid discovery this afternoon. As I was walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I saw peeping above the snow-crust some slender deli- cate evergreen shoots very much like the Andromeda Polifolia, amid sphagnum, lambkill, Andromeda caly- culata, blueberry bushes, etc., though there was very little to be seen above the snow. It is, I have little doubt, the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia (?), with very delicate evergreen opposite linear leaves, strongly revolute, somewhat reddish-green above, slightly wea- ther-beaten, — imbrowned or ripened by the winter, as it were, its cheeks made ruddy by the cold, — white glaucous beneath, with a yellow midrib (not veined nor mucronated nor alternate like the Andromeda Polifolia), on the ends of the twigs, which are sharply two-edged. The blossom-buds quite conspicuous. The whole aspect more tender and yellowish than the Andromeda Polwfolia.1 ‘The pretty little blossom-buds arranged crosswise in the axils of the leaves as you look down on them. What a strong and hearty but reckless, hit-or-miss style had some of the early writers of New England, like Josselyn and William Wood and others elsewhere in those days; as if they spoke with a relish, smacking their lips like a coach-whip, caring more to speak heartily than scientifically true. They are not to be caught napping by the wonders of Nature in a new country, and perhaps are often more ready to ap- preciate them than she is to exhibit them. They give you one piece of nature, at any rate, and that is them- selves.1 (Cotton Mather, too, has a rich phrase.) They use a strong, coarse, homely speech which cannot always be found in the dictionary, nor sometimes be heard in polite society, but which brings you very near to the thing itself described. The strong new soil speaks through them. I have just been reading some in Wood’s ‘‘ New England’s Prospect.” He speaks a good word for New England, indeed will come very near lying for her, and when he doubts the justness of his praise, he brings it out not the less roundly; as who cares if it is not so? we love her not the less for all that. Certainly that generation stood nearer to nature, nearer to the facts, than this, and hence their books have more life in them. (Sometimes a lost man will be so beside himself that he will not have sense enough to trace back his own tracks in the snow.) Expressions he uses which you now hear only in kitchens and barrooms, which therefore sound par- ticularly fresh and telling, not book-worn. They speak like men who have backs and stomachs and bowels, with all the advantages and disadvantages that attach to them. Ready to find lions here, some having “heard such terrible roarings,”’ ‘‘ which must be either Devils or Lions; there being no other creatures which use to roar.” What a gormandizing faith (or belief) he has, ready to swallow all kinds of portents and pro- digies!' Says the wolves have no joints from head to tail. Most admirable when they most outrage common taste and the rules of composition. Of mosquitoes he says those “that swell with their biting the first year, never swell the second.” ?

P. M. — To Beck Stow’s. The swamp is suddenly frozen up again, and they are carting home the mud which was dug out last fall, in great frozen masses. The twigs of the Andromeda Poltfolia, with its rich leaves turned to a mulberry-color above by the winter, with a bluish bloom and a delicate bluish white, as in summer, beneath, project above the ice, the tallest twigs recurved at top, with the leaves standing up on the upper side like teeth of a rake. The intermingling shades of mulberry brown (?) and bluish bloom and glaucous white make it peculiarly rich, as it lies along the ice frozen in. The leaves uninjured by insects. Then there is the Andromeda calyculata, its leaves (now (?)) appressed to the twigs, pale-brown beneath, reddish above, with minute whitish dots. As I go toward the sun now at 4 p. Mo., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown. The leaves of the lambkill, now recurved, are more or less reddish. ‘The great buds of the swamp-pink, on the central twig, clustered together, are more or less imbrowned and reddened. At European Cranberry Swamp, I saw great quan- tities of the seeds of that low three-celled rush or sedge, about the edge of the pool on the ice, black and elliptical, looking like the droppings of mice, this size: ©C)© , so thick in many places that by absorb- ing the sun’s heat they had melted an inch or more into the ice.1 No doubt they are the food of some creatures. Saw a thorn with long thorns and its pecu- hiarly shining varnished twigs. Cold and blustering as it is, the crows are flapping and sailing about and buffeting one another as usual. It is hard to tell what they would be at.

P. M.—Skated to Lee’s Bridge and Farrar’s Swamp — call it Otter Swamp. A fine snow had just begun to fall, so we made haste to improve the skating before it was too late. Our skates made tracks often nearly an inch broad in the slight snow which soon covered the ice. All along the shores and about the islets the water had broadly over- flowed the ice of the meadows, and frequently we had to skate through it, making it fly. The snow soon showed where the water was. It was a pleasant time to skate, so still, and the air so thick with snowflakes that the outline of near hills was seen against it and not against the more distant and higher hills. Single pines stood out distinctly against it in the near horizon. The ground, which was two thirds bare before, began to gray about Fair Haven Pond, as if it were all rocks. There were many of those grubs and caterpillars on the ice half a dozen rods from shore, some sunk deep into it. This air, thick with snowflakes, making a back- ground, enabled me to detect a very picturesque clump of trees on an islet at Pole Brook, —a red (?) oak in midst, with birches on each side.

P. M.—To Flint’s Pond wa ’Minott’s meadow. After a spitting of snow in the forenoon, I see the blue sky here and there, and the sun is coming out. It is still and warm. The earth is two thirds bare. I walk along the Mill Brook below Emerson’s, looking into it for some life. Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. How we leap by the side of the open brooks! What beauty in the running brooks! What life! What society! The cold is merely superficial; it is summer still at the core, far, far within. It is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen wood-side, as if deadened by the springlike vapor which the sun is drawing from the ground. It mingles with the slight murmur of the vil- lage, the sound of children at play, as one stream empties gently into another, and the wild and tame are one. What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him; if he has voice, I have ears.! I can hear when he calls, and have engaged not to shoot nor stone him if he will caw to me each spring. On the one hand, it may be, is the sound of children at school saying their a, b, ab’s, on the other, far in the wood-fringed horizon, the cawing of crows from their blessed eternal vacation, out at their long recess, children who have got dismissed! While the vaporous incense goes up from all the fields of the spring — if it were spring. Ah, bless the Lord, O my soul! bless him for wildness, for crows that will not alight within gunshot! and bless him for hens, too, that croak and cackle in the yard! Where are the shiners now, and the trout? I see none in the brook. Have the former descended to the deep water of the river? Ah, may I be there to see when they go down! Why can they not tell me? Or gone into the mud? ‘There are few or no insects for them now. The strong scent of this red oak, just split and corded, is a slight compensation for the loss of the tree. How cheering the sight of the evergreens now, on the forest floor, the various pyrolas, etc., fresh as in summer! What is that mint whose seed-vessels rubbed are so spicy to smell — minty —at the further end of the pond by the Gourgas wood-lot ? ? On Flint’s Pond I find Nat Rice fishing. He has not caught one. I asked him what he thought the best time to fish. He said, “ When the wind first comes south after a cold spell, on a bright morning.” Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. The summer is all packed in them. Observed this afternoon the following oak leaves: — Ist, the white oak, the most withered and faded and curled; many spotted with black dot lichens. 2d, the bear scrub, the most firm and fresh-colored and flat. 3d, the black, moderately firm, the darkest above, much curled. 4th, scarlet, firmest after the bear scrub, with much freshness and life; some conspicuously red still (un- withered); lobes remarkably distorted. 5th, red, considerably withered and lifeless and worn, thin and faded; some reddish slightly and not inclined to curl. 6th, swamp white, pretty firm and bright, but con- siderably curled. 7th, I suspect that the small chinquapin is decidu- ous, for I could not find one leaf in all my walk January Ist, though I looked along the Lupine Wall. Those on the ground are considerably withered, faded, and curled, yet pretty firm. For color, perhaps all may be called brown, and vary into each other more or less. The Ist, as both sides are seen, pale-brown with a salmon tinge beneath. 2d, clear reddish-brown, leather-like, above, often paler, whitish or very light beneath, silveryish. 3d, dusky-brown above (not always), clear tawny(? )- brown beneath. 4th, clear pale-brown (except the unfaded red ones), leather-like, very generally reddish, nearly the same both sides. 5th, quite pale brown or slightly reddish, nearly the same both sides; some, prematurely dead, are yellowish. 6th, deep rusty-colored brown, often bright leather- red, silveryish-white beneath. 7th, leaves on ground pale-brown, much like a withered red, but whitish beneath dike bear shrub. The oak leaves now resemble the different kinds of calf, sheep, Russia leather, and Morocco (a few scarlet oaks), of different ages.

Warm and wet, with rain-threatening clouds drifting from southwest. Muddy, wet, and slippery. Surprised to see oak balls on a red oak. Picked up a pitch pine cone which had evidently been cut off by a squirrel. The successive grooves made by his teeth while probably he bent it down were quite distinct. The woody stem was a quarter of an inch thick, and I counted eight strokes of his chisel.

Skated to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall, — the water having settled in the suddenly cold night, —which I had not time to see. Saw the intestines of (apparently) a rabbit, — betrayed by a morsel of fur, — left on the ice, probably the prey of a fox. A man feels like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate. He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. ‘There was I, and there, and there, as Mercury went down the Idean Mountains. I judged that in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion, — @ la volaille.