1 January 1853 – 2 January 1853

9 a. M. — Down railroad to Cliffs. A clear day; a pure sky with cirrhi. In this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-covered trees have a new beauty, especially the birches along under the edge of Warren’s wood on each side of the railroad, bent quite to the ground Ze in every kind of curve. At a distance, as "NB you are approaching them endwise, they look like white tents of Indians under the edge of the wood. The birch is thus remarkable, per- haps, because from the feathery form of the tree, whose numerous smal] branches sustain so great a weight, bending it to the ground, and moreover because, from the color of the bark, the core is less observable. The oaks not only are less pliant in the trunk, but have fewer and stiffer twigs and branches. The birches droop over in all directions, like ostrich-feathers. Most wood-paths are impassable now to a carriage, almost toa foot traveller, from the number of saplings and boughs bent over even to the ground in them. Both sides of the Deep Cut now shine in the sun, as if silver-plated, and the fine spray of a myriad bushes on the edge of the bank sparkle like silver. The telegraph-wire is coated to ten times its size, and looks like a slight fence scalloping along at a distance. Is merged in nature. When we climb the bank at Stow’s wood-lot and come upon the piles of freshly split white pine wood (for he is ruthlessly laying it waste), the transparent ice, like a thick varnish, beautifully exhibits the color of the clear, tender, yellowish wood (pumpkin pine ?), and its grain, and we pick our way over a bed of pine boughs and twigs a foot or two deep, covering the ground, each twig and needle thickly incrusted with ice into one vast gelid mass, which our feet cronch as if we were walking through the cellar of some confectioner to the gods. The invigorating scent of the recently cut pines re- freshes us, if that is any atonement for this devastation. The beauty of the oak-tops all silvered o’er. Espe- cially now do [I notice the hips, barberries, and winter- berries, for their red. The red or purplish catkins of the alders are interesting as a winter fruit, and also of the birch. But few birds about. Apparently their gran- aries are locked up in ice, with which the grasses and buds are coated. Even far in the horizon the pine-tops are turned to firs or spruce by the weight of the ice bending them down, so that they look like a spruce swamp. No two trees wear the ice alike. The short plumes and needles of the spruce make a very pretty and peculiar figure. I see some oaks in the distance which, by their branches being curved or arched down- ward and massed, are turned into perfect elms, which suggests that that is the peculiarity of the elm. Few if any other trees are thus wisp-like, the branches grace- fully drooping. I mean some slender red and white oaks which have recently been left in a clearing. Just apply a weight to the ends of the boughs, which will cause them to droop on all sides, and to each particular twig, which will mass them together, and you have per- fect elms. Seen at the right angle, each ice-incrusted stubble shines like a prism with some color of the rain- bow, — intense blue, or violet, and red. The smooth field, clad the other day with a low, wiry grass, is now converted into rough stubble-land, where you walk with cronching feet. It is remarkable that the trees ever re- cover from this burden which bends them to the ground. I should like to weigh a limb of this pitch pine. The character of the tree is changed. I have now passed the bars and am approaching the Cliffs. The forms and variety of the ice are particularly rich here, there are so many low bushes and weeds be- fore me as I ascend toward the sun, especially very small white pines almost merged in the ice-incrusted ground. All objects, even the apple trees and rails, are to the eye polished silver. It is a perfect land of faery. As if the world were a great frosted cake with its ornaments. The boughs gleam like silver candle- sticks. Le Jeune describes the same in Canada, in 1636, as “nos grands bois ne parorssoient qu'une forest de cris- tal.”” The silvery ice stands out an inch by three fourths [of] an inch in width on the north side of every twig of these apple trees, with rich irregularities of its own in its edge. When I stoop and examine some fat icy stub- ble in my path, I find for all core a ridiculous wiry russet thread, scarce visible, not a hundredth part its size, which breaks with the ice under my feet; yet where this has a minute stub of a branch only a fortieth of an inch in length, there is a corresponding clumsy icy protuberance on the surface an eighth of an inch off. Nature works with such luxuriance and fury that she follows the least hint. And on the twigs of bushes, for each bud there is a corresponding icy swelling. The bells are particularly sweet this morning. I hear more, methinks, than ever before. How much more religion in their sound, than they ever call men together to! Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush to-day, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old. We build a fire on the Cliffs. When kicking to pieces a pine stump for the fat knots which alone would burn in this icy day, at the risk of spoiling my boots, having looked in vain for a stone, I thought how convenient would be an Indian stone axe to batter it with. The bark of white birch, though covered with ice, burned well. We soon had a roaring fire of fat pine on a shelf of rock, from which we overlooked the icy landscape. The sun, too, was melting the ice on the rocks, and the water was bubbling and pulsing downward in dark bubbles, exactly like pollywogs. What a good word is “flame,” expressing the form and soul of fire, lambent with forked tongue! We lit a fire to see it rather than to feel it, it is so rare a sight these days. To have our eyes ache once more with smoke! What a peculiar, perhaps indescribable color has this flame !— a reddish or lurid yellow, not so splendid or full of light as of life and heat. These fat roots made much flame, and a very black smoke, commencing where the flame left off, which cast fine flickering shadows on the rocks. There was some bluish-white smoke from the rotten part of the wood. Then there was the fine white ashes, which farmers’ wives sometimes use for pearlash. Fire is the most tolerable third party. I hear the wiry phabe note of the chickadee, as if the spring were coming in. Brown thinks my ruby wren may be the lesser redpoll linnet. Walden begins to freeze in the coves or shallower water on the north ' side, where it was slightly skimmed over several weeks ago.