8 December 1851 – 14 December 1851

In regard to my friends, I feel that I know and have communion with a finer and subtler part of themselves which does not put me off when they put me off, which is not cold to me when they are cold, not till I am cold. I hold by a deeper and stronger tie than ab- sence can sunder. Ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread. I have been surveying for twenty or thirty days, liv- ing coarsely, even as respects my diet, — for I find that that will always alter to suit my employment, — indeed, leading a quite trivial life; and to-night, for the first time, had made a fire in my chamber and endeavored to return to myself. I wished to ally myself to the powers that rule the universe. I wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful and devoted life, which meandered through retired and fertile meadows far from towns. I wished to do again, or for once, things quite congenial to my highest inmost and most sacred nature, to lurk in crystalline thought like the trout under verdurous banks, where stray mankind should only see my bubble come to the surface. I wished to live, ah! as far away as a man can think. I wished for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days, might establish daily prayer and thanksgiving in my family; might do my own work and not the work of Concord and Carlisle, which would yield me better than money. (How much forbear- ance, aye, sacrifice and loss, goes to every accomplish- ment! I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.) I bethought myself, while my fire was kindling, to open one of Emer- son’s books, which it happens that I rarely look at, to try what a chance sentence out of that could do for me; thinking, at the same time, of a conversation I had with him the other night, I finding fault with him for the stress he had laid on some of Margaret Fuller’s whims and superstitions, but he declaring gravely that she was one of those persons whose experience warranted her attach- ing importance to such things, — as the Sortes Virgil- vanae, for instance, of which her numerous friends could tell remarkable instances. At any rate, I saw that he was disposed [to] regard such things more seriously than I. The first sentence which I opened upon in his book was this: “If, with a high trust, he can thus sub- mit himself, he will find that ample returns are poured into his bosom out of what seemed hours of obstruction and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account of unfit associates. . . . In a society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record, would be. He will learn that it is not much matter what he reads, what he does. Bea scholar, and he shall have the scholar’s part of every- thing,”’ etc., etc.! * [Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Centenary Ed., p. 184; Riv. 177, 178.] Most of this responded well enough to my mood, and this would be as good an instance of the Sortes Virgil- danae as most to quote. But what makes this coincidence very little if at all remarkable to me is the fact of the obviousness of the moral, so that I had, perhaps, thought the same thing myself twenty times during the day, and yet had not been contented with that account of it, leaving me thus to be amused by the coincidence, rather than impressed as by an intimation out of the deeps. The Irishman (MacCarty) who helped me survey day before yesterday would not sit on a rock with me to eat his dinner (there being snow on the ground), from a no- tion that there was nothing so deadly as sitting on a rock, — sure to give you a cold in the back. He would rather stand. So the doctors said, down in the Province of New Brunswick. But I warranted him that he would not get a ‘cold in his back, which was half as broad again as mine, and so he minded me as a new doctor. A gray-headed boy, good for nothing but to eat his dinner. ‘These Irish- men have no heads. Let me inquire strictly into a man’s descent, and if his remotest ancestors were Erse, let me not have him to help me survey. One or two I have seen, handy men, but I learned that their fathers, who came from Ireland, were of the Scotch-Irish. 'This fellow was sure to do the wrong thing from the best motives, and the only time he was spry was when he was running to correct his own blunders out of his own head — and make them worse than before, but I could not stop him; then I saw-the broad red soles of his new cow- hide boots alternately rising and falling like the buck- ets of a dasher or water-wheel. When he had lost his plumb and went to get it, then he showed the red soles of his boots. Nothing is so sure to make itself known as the truth, for what else waits to be known?

Saturday. While surveying to-day, saw much mountain laurel for this neighborhood in Mason’s pas- ture, just over the line in Carlisle. Its bright yellowish- green shoots are agreeable to my eye. We had one hour of almost Indian summer weather in the middle of the day. I felt the influence of the sun. It melted my stoni- ness a little. ‘The pines looked like old friends again. Cutting a path through a swamp where was much brittle dogwood, etc., etc., I wanted to know the name of every shrub. ‘This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time. If it makes me forget some things which I ought | to remember, it no doubt enables me to forget many things which it is well to forget. By stepping aside from my chosen path so often, I see myself better and am en- abled to criticise myself. Of this nature is the only true lapse of time. It seems an age since I took walks and wrote in my journal, and when shall I revisit the glimpses of the moon? To be able to see ourselves, not merely as others see us, but as we are, that service a variety of absorbing employments does us. I would not be rude to the fine intimations of the gods for fear of incurring the reproach of superstition. When I think of the Carlisle man whom I saw to-day and the filthiness of his house, I am reminded that there are all degrees of barbarism, even in this so-called civil- ized community. Carlisle, too, belongs to the Nineteenth Century. Saw Perez Blood in his frock, —a stuttering, sure, unpretending man, who does not speak without think- ing, does not guess. When I reflected how different he was from his neighbors, Conant, Mason, Hodgman, I - saw that it was not so much outwardly, but that I saw an inner form. We do, indeed, see through and through each other, through the veil of the body, and see the real form and character in spite of the garment. Any coarseness or tenderness is seen and felt under whatever garb. How nakedly men appear to us! for the spiritual assists the natural eye.

'The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business. As for the weather, all seasons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. I should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days and as many cold ones in the course of a year, but the rest are all alike in respect to temperature. This is my answer to my acquaintances who ask me if I have not found it very cold being out all day. McKean tells me of hardy horses left to multiply on the Isle of Sable. His father had one (for the ship- wrecked to eat). Can they be descendants of those beasts Champlain or Lescarbot refers to? I hear the small woodpecker whistle as he flies to- ward the leafless wood on Fair Haven, doomed to be cut this winter. The chickadees remind me of Hudson’s Bay for some reason. I look on them as natives of a more northern latitude. The now dry and empty but clean-washed cups of the blue-curls spot the half snow-covered grain-fields. Where lately was a delicate blue flower, now all the | winter are held up these dry chalices. What mementos to stand above the snow! ; The fresh young spruces in the swamp are free from moss, but it adheres especially to the bare and dead masts of spruce trees oftentimes half destitute of bark. They look like slanting may-poles with drooping or withered garlands and festoons hanging to them. For an emblem of stillness, a spruce swamp with hanging moss now or at any season. I notice that hornets’ nests are hardly deserted by the insects than they look as if a truant boy had fired a charge of shot through them, —all ragged and full of holes. It is the work either of the insects themselves or else of other insects or birds. It is the andromeda (panicled?) that has the fine- barked stem and the green wood, in the swamps. Why not live out more yet, and have my friends and relations altogether in nature, only my acquaintances among the villagers? That way diverges from this I fol- low, not at a sharp but a very wide angle. Ah, nature is serene and immortal! Am I not one of the Zincali? There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset. I hear the ice along the edge of the river cracking as the water settles. It has settled about two feet, leaving ice for the most part without water on the meadows, all uneven and cracked over the hummocks, so that you cannot run straight for sliding. ‘The ice takes the least hint of a core to eke out a perfect plant; the wrecks of bulrushes and meadow grass are expanded into palm leaves and other luxuriant foliage. I see delicate-look- ing green pads frozen into the ice, and, here and there, where some tender and still green weeds from the warm bottom of the river have lately been cast up on to the ice. There are certain places where the river will always be open, where perchance warmer springs come in. ‘There are such places in every character, genial and open in the coldest seasons. I come from contact with certain acquaintances, whom even I am disposed to look toward as possible friends. It oftenest happens that I come from them wounded. Only they can wound me seriously, and that perhaps without their knowing it.