5 January 1852 – 11 January 1852

Oak-apples are a winter fruit. The leaves being gone, they are now conspicuous and shine in the sun. Some trees are quite full of them. Do they not suggest that all vegetable fruit is but the albumen about ~ young animal life ? The ground has been bare for some days, and the weather warm. The river has risen, and now the mead- ows are frozen so as to bear, — a dark, thin, but rather opaque ice, as if covered with steam, — and I see now travelling, sweeping, coursing over it, in long winrows, fine pellets of snow, lke cotton, fine, round, and dry, which I do not detect in the air before they fall. They lodge against a rail and make a small drift. So once more the skating will be spoiled. A spirit sweeps the string of the telegraph harp, and strains of music are drawn out endlessly like the wire itself. We have no need to refer music and poetry to Greece for an origin now. What becomes of the story of a tortoise-shell on the seashore now? The world is young, and music is its infant voice. I do not despair of such a world where you have only to stretch an ordi- nary wire from tree to tree to hear such strains drawn from it by New England breezes as make Greece and all antiquity seem poor in melody. Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire? Are not inspiration and ecstasy a more rapid vibration of the nerves swept by the in- rushing excited spirit, whether zephyral or boreal in its character.

I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow — perhaps ten inches deep — has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around. Even as early as 3 o’clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like — like the sound of a twilight labor. Reading from my manuscripts to Miss Emerson this evening and using the word “god,” in one instance, in perchance a merely heathenish sense, she inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety, “Is that god spelt with a little g?” Fortunately it was. (I had brought in the word “god” without any solemnity of voice or connection.) So I went on as if nothing had hap- pened. a I perceive that the livid lettuce-leaved lichen which I gathered the other day has dried almost an ash or satin, with no green about [it], — has bleached.

The sky shut out by snow-clouds. It spits a little snow and then holds up. Where a path has been shovelled through drifts in the road, and the cakes of snow piled up, I see little azures, little heavens, in the crannies and crevices. The deeper they are, and the larger masses they are surrounded by, the darker-blue they are. Some are a very light blue with a tinge of green. Methinks I oftenest see this when it is snowing. At any rate the atmosphere must be in a peculiar state. Apparently the snow absorbs the other rays and reflects the blue. It has strained the air, and only the blue rays have passed through the sieve. Is, then, the blue water of Walden snow-water? I see the heaven hiding in nooks and crevices in the snow. Into every track which the teamster makes, this elysian, empyrean atmosphere rushes. The blue of my eye sympathizes with this blue in the snow. The great pine woods have a peculiar appearance this afternoon. This rather fine snow has lodged in their limbs and given them a grayish look, but as it lies thicker along the core of the limb, it has the appear- ance, at a distance, of dim white lines lying at various angles like a vast network over the woods, or, rather, like cobwebs seen on the grass in summer mornings. A kind of film over them. I never saw the pitch pines better snowed up. They look like Chinese pagodas. “The majestic prerogative which Linnzus was pos- sessed of,’ says Stoever, “to confer titles in the vege- table kingdom,” did not escape the criticism of Haller, who says: “We would reserve all those garlands for those alone who are real and experienced botanists. Nor would we ever assign such a denomination to the mere hopes conceived of men who have not passed the ordeal of merit.”

What need to travel? There are no sierras equal to the clouds in the sunset sky. And are not these substantial enough? In a low orlevel country, perchance, the forms of the clouds supply the place of mountains and precipices to the eye, the grosser atmosphere makes a mountainous country in the sky. The glory of these afternoons, though the sky may be mostly overcast, is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset. The whole cope of heaven seen at once is never so elysian. Windows to heaven, the heaven- ward windows of the earth. The end of the day is truly Hesperian. R. W. E. showed me yesterday a letter from H. Green- ough, the sculptor, on architecture, which he liked very much. Greenough’s idea was to make architectural or- naments have a core of truth, a necessity and hence a beauty. All very well, as I told R. W. E., from Green- ough’s point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism.' I was afraid I should say hard things if I said more. ) 1 (Walden, p. 51; Riv. 75.] We sometimes find ourselves living fast, — unprofit- ably and coarsely even, — as we catch ourselves eating our meals in unaccountable haste. But in one sense we cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to enter- tain every thought that comes to you. Let your life be a leisurely progress through the realms of nature, even in guest-quarters. This reminds me that the old Northman kings did in fact board round a good part of the time, as school- masters sometimes with us. But as for Greenough, I felt as if it was dilettantism, and he was such a reformer in architecture as Channing in social matters. He began at the cornice. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar-plum might in fact have an almond or car- roway seed in it, and not how the inhabitant, the in- dweller, might be true and let the ornaments take care of themselves. He seemed to me to lean over the cor- nice and timidly whisper this half truth to the rude indwellers, who really knew it more interiorly than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has grad- ually grown from within outward, out of the character and necessities of the indweller and builder, without even a thought for mere ornament, but an unconscious nobleness and truthfulness of character and life; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded and accompanied, aye, created, by a like unconscious beauty of life. One of the most beautiful buildings in this country is a logger’s 5 hut in the woods, and equally beautiful will be the citizen’s suburban box, when the life of the indweller shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted under him or over him, what colors are daubed upon his box! One man says, in his despair, “Take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color!” What an abundance of leisure he must have on his hands! An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! Grow your own house, I say. Build it after an Orphean fashion. When R. W. E. and Greenough have got a few blocks finished and advertised, I will look at them. When they have got my ornaments ready I will wear them. What do you take up a handful of dirt for? Why don’t you paint your house with your blood? with your sweat? Thin not the paint with spirits of turpentine. There’s a deal of nonsense abroad.!