18 March 1861 – 24 March 1861

‘Tree sparrows have warbled faintly for a week. When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slen- derest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or in midwinter above the snow, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert. The very name “sallow” (salix, from the Celtic sal-lis, near water) suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. It is a divining wand that has not failed, but stands with its root in the fountain. The fertile willow catkins are those green caterpillar- like ones, commonly an inch or more in length, which develop themselves rapidly after the sterile yellow ones which we had so admired are fallen or effete. Arranged around the bare twigs, they often form green wands eight to eighteen inches long. A single catkin consists of from twenty-five to a hundred little pods, more or less ovate and beaked, each of which is closely packed with cotton, in which are numerous seeds so small that they are scarcely discernible by ordinary eyes. I do not know what they mean who call this the em- blem of despairing love! “'The willow, worn by forlorn paramour!” It is rather the emblem of love and sym- pathy with all nature. It may droop, — it is so lithe, supple, and pliant, — but it never weeps. ‘The willow of Babylon blooms not the less hopefully with us, though its other half is not in the New World at all, and never has been. It droops, not to represent David's tears, but rather to snatch the crown from Alexander’s head. (Nor were poplars ever the weeping sisters of Phaéton, for nothing rejoices them more than the sight of the Sun’s chariot, and little reck they who drives it) Ah, willow! willow! Would that I always possessed thy good spirits. No wonder its wood was anciently in demand for bucklers, for, take the whole tree, it is not only soft and pliant but tough and resilient (as Pliny says ?), not splitting at the first blow, but closing its wounds at once and refusing to transmit its hurts. I know of one foreign species which introduced itself into Concord as [a] withe used to tie up a bundle of trees. A gardener stuck it in the ground, and it lived, and has its descendants. Herodotus says that the Scythians divined by the help of willow rods. I do not know any better twigs for this purpose. How various are the habits of men! Mother says that her father-in-law, Captain Minott, not only used to roast and eat a long row of little wild apples, reaching in a semicircle from jamb to jamb under the andirons on the reddened hearth (I used to buy many a pound of Spanish brown at the stores for mother to redden the jambs and hearth with), but he had a quart of new milk regularly placed at the head of his bed, which he drank at many draughts in the course of the night. It was so the night he died, and my grandmother dis- covered that he was dying, by his not turning over to reach his milk. I asked what he died of, and mother answered apoplexy! at which I did not wonder. Still this habit may not have caused it. I have a cousin, also, who regularly eats his bowl of bread and milk just before going to bed, however late. He is a very stirrmg man. You can’t read any genuine history —as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede — without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, —on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius — a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the world. Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether that is interesting or not. You are simply a witness on the stand to tell what you know about your neighbors and neighborhood. Your account of foreign parts which you have never seen should by good rights be less interesting.

A driving northeast snow-storm yesterday and last night, and to-day the drifts are high over the fences and the trains stopped. The Boston train due at 8.30 a. M. did not reach here till five this afternoon. One side of all the houses this morning was one color, — 2. €. White with the moist snow plastered over them, — so that you could not tell whether they had blinds or not. When we consider how soon some plants which spread rapidly, by seeds or roots, would cover an area equal to the surface of the globe, how soon some species of trees, as the white willow, for instance, would equal : in mass the earth itself, if all their seeds became full- grown trees, how soon some fishes would fill the ocean if all their ova became full-grown fishes, we are tempted to say that every organism, whether animal or vege- table, is contending for the possession of the planet, and, if any one were sufficiently favored, supposing it still possible to grow, as at first, it would at length convert the entire mass of the globe into its own substance.’ Nature opposes to this many obstacles, as climate, myriads of brute and also human foes, and of com- petitors which may preoccupy the ground. Each sug- gests an immense and wonderful greediness and te- nacity of life (I speak of the species, not individual), as if bent on taking entire possession of the globe wherever the climate and soil will permit. And each prevails as much as it does, because of the ample pre- parations it has made for the contest, — it has secured a myriad chances, — because it never depends on spon- taneous generation to save it.