3 January 1853 – 9 January 1853

Down railroad to Lincoln Bridge. The evergreens appear to relieve themselves soonest of the ice, perhaps because of the reflection from their leaves. Those trees, like the maples and hickories, which have most spray and branches make the finest show of ice. This afternoon it snows, the snow lodg- ing on the ice, which still adheres to the trees. The more completely the trees are changed to ice trees, to spirits of trees, the finer. Instead of the minute frost- work on a window, you have whole forests of silver boughs. I refer to the last two days. The “ brattling ”’ of the ice. Is not that the word? Along some cause- way or fence in the meadow, the trees are changed into ' [Queried in pencil.] silvery wisps. Nothing dark met the eye, but a silvery sheen, precisely as if the whole tree — trunk, boughs, and twigs — were converted into burnished silver. You exclaimed at every hedgerow. Sometimes a clump of birches fell over every way in graceful Dads ostrich-plumes, all raying from ne cen- FEES = tre. You clambered over them like an ant in the grass. Then the beautifully checkered ice in the ruts, where the water had been soaked up, surpassing the richest tracery of watch-crystals! Suddenly all is converted to crystal. The world is a crystal palace. The trees, stiff and drooping and encased in ice, looked as if they were sculptured in marble, especially the evergreens. I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. None of the joys she sup- plies is subject to his rules and definitions. What he touches he taints. In thought he moralizes. One would think that no free, joyful labor was possible to him. How infinite and pure the least pleasure of which Nature is basis, compared with the congratulation of mankind! The joy which Nature yields is like [that] afforded by the frank words of one we love. Man, man is the devil, The source of all evil. Methinks that these prosers, with their saws and their laws, do not know how glad a man can be. What wis- dom, what warning, can prevail against gladness ? There is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. I have a room all to myself; it is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human govern- ments. Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down. There is a prairie beyond your laws. Nature is a prairie for outlaws. There are two worlds, the post-office and nature. I know them both. I continually forget man- kind and their institutions, as I do a bank. Well, now this afternoon the snow is lodging on all this ice. Is this the winter gnat I find on the snow, with six legs, a long, narrow, cylindrical body about one sixth of an inch, and the two narrow wings one third longer? Two feelers. Walden not yet frozen. The red-crowns here still. They appear to frequent one clump of birches a long time, for here the snow beneath is covered with the seeds they have loosened, while elsewhere there are none. They hang by the twigs while they peck the catkins, and others are busy on the snow beneath, picking up what drops. They are continually in motion, with a jingling twitter,and occasional mew, and suddenly, when disturbed, go off with a loud jingle like the motion of a whole. bag of nuts. * The air is thick and darkened with falling snow, and the woods are being draped with it in white wreaths. This is winter. They are putting on their white great- coats. ‘The woodland road is spotless white. The color of the pond depends on the light. It is now dark, in the storm. True to its nature, between earth and air, it is both green and blue. Let clear, serene weather come and illustrate its depth, and it is green; let the air descend on it and toss up its surface in waves, and it is blue like the sky.!

To what I will call Yellow Birch Swamp, E. Hubbard’s, in north part of town. \ Still ice is left on the trees, but to-day is a windy and blustering day. The quantity of ice on the birches being reduced, they are still more wand- or faery-like. Tall ones, with no limbs for half their height, are grace- fully bent over, and are now swaying from side to side in the wind, exactly like waving ostrich-plumes, as delicate as the spray on frosted windows. The color of these ice-clad trees at a distance is not white, but rather slightly grayish or hoary, which the better merges them in the landscape. This is the fourth day of the ice. The landscape is white, not only from the ice on the ground and trees, but from the snow which fell yester- day, though it is not an inch deep. In respect to snow, the winter appears to be just beginning. I must call that swamp of E. Hubbard’s west of the Hunt Pasture, Yellow Birch Swamp. ‘There are more of those trees than anywhere else in town that I know. How pleasing to stand beside a new or rare tree! And few are so handsome as this. Singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed and tasselled bark. ‘The top is brush-like as the black birch; the bark an exquisite fine or delicate gold-color, curled off partly from the trunk, with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than Cal- ifornia gold. [measured one five feet and two inches in circumference at six feet from the ground. We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair, flaxen- haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil, and braces itself! And here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the sombre swamp,— swampy wine. In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these? Blond nymphs. Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs. At Pratt’s, the stupendous, boughy, branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky; heaven-defying, sending back dark vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the (E lightning. The white oaks have a \ acca few leaves about the crown of the trunk in the lowest part of the tree, Ri ‘Sure like a tree within a tree. The tree is thus less racked by the wind and ice. In the Pee I went through the swamp, and yellow birches sent forth a dull-yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster. Occasionally you come to a dead and leaning white birch, beset with large fungi like ears or little shelves, with a rounded edge above. I walked with the yellow birch. The prinos is green within. If there were Druids whose temples were the oak groves, my temple is the swamp. Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off. The animals do not use fire; man does. At first there was a pile of cold fat pine roots on the icy rock. A match was rubbed, fire elicited, and now this fire is the most emphatic and significant fact hereabouts. Fire slumbers never far off, and the friction of a match can awaken it.

To Kibbe Place Swamp. I see where probably a red squirrel had scratched along over the snow, and in one place a very perfect and delicate print of his feet. His five toes 4 in separate sharp triangles distinetly ray- \ \ I ing off, or often only four visible. In one ©: OG place I find a beaten track from a hole in the ground to [a] walnut a rod distant up which they have gone for nuts, which still hang on it. The whole print of the foot, etc., is about an inch and three quarters long, a part of the leg being impressed. Two of the tracks, when they are running, apparently, the two foremost, are wider apart; . o and perhaps with one pair they often make five ae marks, with the other four. Where there is a deep fur- row in a chestnut tree between two swelling muscles, in two instances the squirrels, knowing it to be hollow, have gnawed a hole, enlarging the crack between two cheeks, and so made themselves a retreat. In one in- stance they have commenced to gnaw between the / cheeks, though no cavity appears, but ! Uf 4f Thave no doubt the tree is hollow. } i YY 4, A large yellow birch — or black — { ) / ff has the main stem very short and NX | branches very long, nearly from one centre. i There was a fine rosy sky in the - west after sunset; and later an amber- colored horizon, in which a single tree-top showed finely.

Walden apparently froze over last night. It is but little more than an inch thick, and"two or three square rods by Hubbard’s shore are still open. ‘A dark, transparent ice. It would not have frozen entirely over, as it were in one night, or maybe a little more, and yet have been so thin next the shore as well as in the middle, if it had not been so late in the winter, and so ready to freeze. It is a dark, transparent ice, but will not bear me without much cracking. As I walked along the edge, I started out three little pickerel no longer than my finger from close to the shore, which went wiggling into deeper water like bloodsuckers or pollywogs. When I lie down on it and examine it closely, I find that the greater part of the bubbles which I had thought were within its own substance are against its under surface, and that they are continually rising up from the bottom, — perfect spheres, apparently, and very beautiful and clear, in which I see my face through this thin ice (perhaps an is Tr remains NC CORY 1 ah v A? . > olf, a , nf a os inch and an eighth), from one eightieth of an inch in diameter, or a mere point, up to one eighth of an inch. There are thirty or forty of these, at least, to every square inch. These, probably, when heated by the sun, make it crack and whoop. There are, also, within the substance of the ice, oblong perpendicular bubbles half an inch long, more or less, by about one thirtieth of an inch, and these are commonly widest at the bottom (?), or, oftener, separate minute spherical bub- bles of equal or smaller diameter, one directly above another, like a string of beads, perhaps the first stage of the former. But these internal bubbles are not nearly so numerous as those in the water beneath. It may be twenty-four hours since the ice began to form decidedly. I see, on the sandy bottom a few inches beneath, the white cases of caddis-worms made of the white quartz sand or pebbles. And the bottom is very much creased or furrowed where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks, — perhaps the caddis- worm, for I find one or two of the same in the fur- rows, though the latter are deep and broad for them to make.} This morning the weeds and twigs and fences were covered with what I may call a leaf frost, the leaves a third of an inch long, ~ shaped somewhat like this, with triangular . £> points, but very thin. Another morning * there will be no frost. I forgot to say yesterday that I picked up four pig- nuts by the squirrel’s hole, from which he had picked the meat, having gnawed a hole about half the diame- ter of the nut in width on each side. After I got home I observed that in each case the holes were on the sides of the nut and not on the edges, and I cut into a couple with my knife in order to see certainly which was the best way to get at the meat. Cutting into the edge, I came upon the thick partition which runs the whole length of the nut, and then came upon the edges of the meats, and finally was obliged to cut away a good part of the nut on both edges before I could extract the meat, because it was held by the neck in the middle. But when I cut holes on the sides, not only the parti- tions I met with were thin and partial, but I struck the meats broadside and extracted them with less trouble. It may be that it is most convenient for the squirrel to hold the nut thus, but I think there is a deeper reason than that. I observe that, out of six whole pignuts which I picked from a tree, three are so cracked transversely to the division of the meat that I can easily pry them open with my knife. They hang on as food for animals.

To Nawshawtuct. This is one of those pleasant winter mornings when you find the river firmly frozen in the night, but still the air is serene and the sun feels gratefully warm an hour after sunrise, — though so fair, a healthy whitish vapor fills the lower stratum of the air, concealing the mountains, — the smokes go up from the village, you hear the cocks with immortal vigor, and the children shout on their way to school, and the sound made by the railroad men hammering a rail is uncommonly musical. This promises a perfect winter day. In the heavens, except the altitude of the sun, you have, as it were, the conditions of summer. Perfect serenity and clarity and sonorousness in the earth. All nature is but braced by the cold. It gives tension to both body and mind. Sull the snow is strewn with the seeds of the birch, the small winged seeds or samare and the larger scales or bracts shaped like a bird in flight, — «<a a hawk or dove. The least touch or jar shakes them off, and it is difficult to bring the female catkins home in your pocket. They cover the snow like coarse bran. On breaking the male catkins, I am surprised to see the yellow anthers so distinct, promis- ing spring. I did not suspect that there was so sure a promise or prophecy of spring. These are frozen in December or earlier,—the anthers of spring, filled with their fertilizing dust. About ten minutes before 10 a. m., I heard a very loud sound, and felt a violent jar, which made the house rock and the loose articles on my table rattle, which I knew must be either a powder-mill blown up or an earthquake. Not knowing but another and more violent might take place, I immediately ran down-stairs, but I saw from the door a vast expand- ing column of whitish smoke rising in the west directly over the powder-mills four miles distant. It was un- folding its volumes above, which made it widest there. In three or four minutes it had all risen and spread itself into a lengthening, somewhat copper-colored cloud parallel with the horizon from north to south, and about ten minutes after the explosion it passed over my head, being several miles long from north to south and distinctly dark and smoky toward the north, not nearly so high as the few cirrhi in the sky. I jumped into a man’s wagon and rode toward the mills. In a few minutes more, I saw behind me, far in the east, a faint salmon-colored cloud carrying the news of the explosion to the sea, and perchance over [the] head of the absent proprietor. Arrived probably before half past ten. There were perhaps thirty or forty wagons there. The kernel-mill had blown up first, and killed three men who were in it, said to be turning a roller with a chisel. In three seconds after, one of the mixing-houses exploded. The kernel-house was swept away, and fragments, . mostly but a foot or two in length, were strewn over the hills and meadows, as if sown, for thirty rods, and the slight snow then on the ground was for the most part melted around. The mixing-house, about ten rods west, was not so completely dispersed, for most of the machinery remained, a total wreck. The press-house, about twelve rods east, had two thirds [of] its boards off, and a mix- ing-house next westward from that which blew up had lost some boards on the east side. The boards fell out (2. e. of those buildings which did not blow up), the air within apparently rushing out to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the explosions, and so, the powder being bared to the fiery particles in the air, another building explodes. The powder on the floor of the bared press- house was six inches deep in some places, and the crowd were thoughtlessly going into it. A few windows were broken thirty or forty rods off. Timber six inches square and eighteen feet long was thrown over a hill eighty feet high at least,—a dozen rods; thirty rods was about the limit of fragments. The drying-house, in which was a fire, was perhaps twenty-five rods dis- tant and escaped. Every timber and piece of wood which was blown up was as black as if it had been dyed, except where it had broken on falling; other breakages were completely concealed by the color. I mistook what had been iron hoops in the woods for leather straps. Some of the clothes of the men were in the tops of the trees, where undoubtedly their bodies had been and left them. The bodies were naked and black, some limbs and bowels here and there, and a head at a distance from its trunk. The feet were bare; the hair singed to a crisp. I smelt the powder half a mile before I got there. Put the different buildings thirty rods apart, and then but one will blow up at a time. Brown thinks my red-headed bird of the winter the lesser redpoll. He has that fall snowbird, he thinks the young of the purple finch. What is my pine knot of the sea? Knot, or ash-colored sandpiper? or phala- rope? Brown’s pine knot looks too large and clumsy. He shows me the spirit duck of the Indians, of which Peabody says the Indians call it by a word meaning spirit, ‘‘ because of the wonderful quickness with which it disappears at the twang of a bow.” I perceive (?) the increased length of the day on re- turning from my afternoon walk. Can it be? The sun sets only about five minutes later, and the day is about ten minutes longer. Le Jeune thus describes the trees covered with ice in Canada in the winter of ’35 and ’36 (he appears to be at Quebec): ‘“ There was a great wind from the north- east, accompanied by a rain which lasted a very long time, and by a cold great enough to freeze these waters as soon as they touched anything, so that, as this rain fell on the trees from the summit (cime) to the foot, there was formed (i s’y fit) a crystal of ice, which en- chased both trunk (fge) and branches, so that for a very long time all our great woods appeared only a for- est of crystal; for in truth the ice which clothed them universally everywhere (partout) was thicker than a testoon (épaisse de plus d’un teston) ; in a word all the bushes and all that was above the snow was environed on all sides and enchased in (avec) ice; the savages have told me that it does not happen often so (de méme).”

I see what are probably the anther cells dis- tinctly in the large buds of the poplar, which for a long time have shown their wool one sixth of an inch long. Also similar cells in the alder catkins, but greener and less springlike. ‘The birch ones are the yellowest. At Walden. — The bubbles which I made under the ice by casting on stones here night before last, or forty- eight hours ago, nearly half a foot in diameter, still remain. The last two days have been very warm, like an Indian summer or very early spring, yet about an inch more of ice has formed, making about two inches in all, and you can see the line of juncture distinctly. The ice is not now transparent, revealing the bottom distinctly, and the dark-green color of the water, but whitish or gray, and, though twice as thick, is hardly stronger than before. The air-bubbles within it have greatly expanded in the heat, and run together and lost their regularity. I do not see that they are regu- larly superimposed , 2. e. perpendicularly, but they have expanded off and run together at different angles, like silver coins poured from a bag and overlapping each other, and even form thin but wide flakes occasionally. It is too late to study the bottom. The beauty of the ice is gone. With a stone I broke the ice above one of my bubbles and let the air out, and water took its place. I then took out a cake of ice including two old bubbles, each about four inches in diameter, and was surprised to find that they were included between the two ices. I actually took the bubbles out between the ices and turned them bottom-upwards. ‘These bubbles were a quarter of an inch thick and shaped like this: ===> rounded on the edge. They ap- peared. to be wholly within the new or lower ice, though the under surface of the upper was made rough; and I was surprised to find beneath them, on the under surface of the lower ice, which, like the upper, was, as I have said, about one inch thick, regular cir- cular, saucer-like depressions, in this case five eighths of an inch deep, leaving the lower ice little more than an eighth of an inch thick directly above their middle. Thus: And this thin part of the — Ss " lower ice was almost perforated by large bubbles almost a quarter of an inch in diameter, which had burst out below. Probably there was no ice directly under my largest bubbles. I inferred, therefore, that all those infinite minute bub- bles I had seen first on the under side of the ice were now frozen in with it, and that each, in its proportion or degree, like the large ones, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath it to rot it. And prob- ably it is the expanding and shrinking of the air in them, as well as in the water, which cracks the ice and makes the whooping sound.’ Perhaps those minute bubbles that are seen one above another in the freshest ice have been frozen in like the largest, as they suc- cessively rose from the bottom while the ice was freez- ing. It has been supposed that Walden ice does not keep so well because it has more air in it, there being* no outlet or stream to carry it off. There may be some- thing in this. Let me look at the fresh ice of a pond that has a stream, and see if there are fewer bubbles under it. Of course, large bubbles would be very obvi- ous under transparent or black ice.

3 p.m.— To Walden and Cliffs. The telegraph harp again. Always the same unre- memberable revelation it is to me. It is something as enduring as the worm that never dies. Before the [sc] it was, and will be after. I never hear it without thinking of Greece. How the Greeks harped upon the words immortal, ambrosial! They are what it says. It stings my ear with everlasting truth. It allies Con- cord to Athens, and both to Elysium. It always intoxi- cates me, makes me sane, reverses my views of things. I am pledged to it. I get down the railroad till I hear that which makes all the world a lie. When the zephyr, or west wind, sweeps this wire, I rise to the height of my being. A period —a semicolon, at least —is put to my previous and habitual ways of viewing things. This wire is my redeemer. It always brings a special and a general message to me from the Highest. Day before yesterday I looked at the mangled and black- ened bodies of men which had been blown up by pow- der, and felt that the lives of men were not innocent, and that there was an avenging power in nature. To- day I hear this immortal melody, while the west wind is blowing balmily on my cheek, and methinks a rose- ate sunset is preparing. Are there not two powers ? Where the brickmakers got their sand I measured the tap-root of a pitch pine, five inches in diameter at the surface, which extended straight downward into pure sand —excepting the usual thickness of soil — nine feet visibly, and undoubtedly three feet further than I could see. This is the third warm day, the warmest of all. The Andromeda Ponds methinks look redder. I walked through one. The lowest growth is sphagnum, fresh, large, and handsome, some green, some red, into which occasionally I slumped nearly a foot. Some lambkill is mixed with the andromeda. A few islands of gray high blueberry bushes, with round red buds, rise here and there mixed with the panicled andromeda, large cot- ton-grass, now prostrate, ete. The pitcher-plant leaves are still for the most part green and uninjured here, though full of ice. Many have holes in their sides, through which insects appear to have eaten out. How- ever, the external ear or handle 1s also eaten. through, so the agent may have been without. I see a dogbane sickle-shaped seed-vessel which has not discounted. I open it and let the seeds fly. As I walked the railroad this springlike day, I heard from time to time the sound of stones and earth falling and rolling down the bank in the cuts. The earth is almost entirely bare. We have not yet had snow more than one inch deep! !! As I climbed the Cliff, I paused in the sun and sat on a dry rock, dreaming. I thought of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity, — runs into it and becomes of one stuff with it. How much — how, perhaps, all— that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth! I re- member how I expanded. If the genius visits me now I am not quite taken off my feet, but I remember how this experience is like, but less than, that I had long since. Pulling up the johnswort on the face of the Cliff, I am surprised to see the signs of unceasing growth about the roots, — fresh shoots two inches long, white with red leafets, and all the radical part quite green. The leaves of the crowfoot, also, are quite green, and carry me forward to spring. I dig one up with a stick, and, pulling it to pieces, I find deep in the centre of the plant, just beneath the ground, surrounded by all the tender leaves that are to precede it, the blossom- bud, about half as big as the head of a pin, perfectly white.t There it patiently sits, or slumbers, how full of faith, informed of a spring which the world has never seen, the promise and prophecy of it shaped somewhat like some Eastern temples, in which a bud-shaped dome o’ertops the whole. It affected me, this tender dome-like bud, within the bosom of the earth, like a temple upon the earth, resounding with the worship of votaries. Methought I saw the flamens in yellow robes within it. The crowfoot buds —and how many beside! —lie unexpanded just beneath the surface. May I lead my life the following year as innocently as they! May it be as fair and smell as sweet! I antici- pate nature. Destined to become a fair yellow flower above the surface to delight the eyes of children and its Maker. It offered to my mind a little temple mto which to enter and worship. It will go forth in April, this vestal now cherishing her fire, to be married to the sun. How innocent are Nature’s purposes! How un- ambitious! Her elections are not Presidential. The springing and blossoming of this flower do not depend on the votes of men. That first day of ice, when my coat and cap were glazed with a thick coat, the fine rain freezing as it fell, was not a cold day. I am pretty sure I have known it rain without freezing when colder. Had the fine- ness of the rain anything to do with it ? I saw to-day the reflected sunset sky in the river, but the colors in the reflection were different from those in the sky. The sky was dark clouds with coppery or dun-colored under sides. In the water were dun-colored clouds with bluish-green patches or bars.