17 January 1853 – 23 January 1853

A drifting snow-storm last night and to- day, the first of consequence; and the first sleighing this winter.

P. M.—'To Walden. I see where snowbirds in troops have visited each withered chenopodium that rises above the snow in the yard — and some are large and bushlike — for its seeds, their well-filled granary now. There are a few tracks reaching from weed to weed, where some have run, but under the larger plants the snow is entirely trodden and blackened, proving that a large flock has been there and flown. Ah, our indescribable winter sky, pure and continent and clear, between emerald (?) and amber (?), such as summer never sees! What more beautiful or sooth- ing to the eye than those finely divided or minced clouds, like down or loose-spread cotton-batting, now reaching up from the west above my head! Beneath this a different stratum, all whose ends are curved like spray or wisps, All kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint. No sooner has Walden frozen thick enough to bear than the fishermen have got out their reels and min- nows, for he who fishes a pond first in the season ex- pects to succeed best. * Bailey, I find, has it: “ Rival (Rivalis L. q. d. qui juxta eundem rivum pascit).” My friends my rivals are.

A fine, still, warm moonlight evening. We have had one or two already. Moon not yet full. To the woods by the Deep Cut at 9 o’clock. The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day —is an everlasting surprise to me, suggesting the constant presence and prevalence of light in the firmament, that we see through the veil of night to the constant blue, as by day. The night is not black when the air is clear, but blue still. The great ocean of light and ether is unaffected by our partial night. Night is not universal. At midnight I see into the universal day. Walking at that hour, unless it is cloudy, still the blue sky o’erarches me. I am somewhat oppressed and saddened by the sameness and apparent poverty of the heavens, — that these irregular and few geometrical figures which the constellations make are no other than those seen by the Chaldean shepherds. The same simplicity and unchangeableness which commonly impresses me by wealth sometimes affects me as barrenness. I pine for a new world in the heavens as well as on the earth, and though it is some consolation to hear of the wilder- ness of stars and systems invisible to the naked eye, yet the sky does not make that impression of variety and wildness that even the forest does, as it ought. It makes an impression, rather, of simplicity and un- changeableness, as of eternal laws; this being the same constellation which the shepherds saw, and obedient still to the same law. It does not affect me as that unhand- selled wilderness which the forest 1s. I seem to see it pierced with visual rays from a thousand observatories. It is more the domain of science than of poetry. But it is the stars as not known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveller knows. The Chaldean shepherds saw not the same stars which I see, and if I am elevated in the least toward the heavens, I do not accept their classification of them. I am not to be distracted by the names which they have imposed. The sun which I know is not Apollo, nor is the evening star Venus. The heavens should be as new, at least, as the world is new. This classifica- tion of the stars is old and musty; it is as if a mildew had taken place in the heavens, as if the stars so closely packed had heated and moulded there. If they appear fixed, it is because that hitherto men have been thus necessitated to see them. I see not merely old but new testaments in the skies. Do not I stand as near the stars as the Chaldean shepherds ? The heavens commonly look as dry and meagre as our astronomies are,—mere troops, as the latter are catalogues, of stars. The Milky Way yields no milk. A few good anecdotes is our science, with a few im- posing statements respecting distance and size, and little or nothing about the stars as they concern man; teaching how he may survey a country or sail a ship, and not how he may steer his life. Astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this. It may happen that the stars are more significant and truly celestial to the teamster than to the astronomer. Nobody sees the stars now. They study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety-five millions [of miles] distant, and the like,—a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe. But the sun shines nevertheless. Though observatories are multiplied, the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. It depends on who looks through it. No superior tele- scope to this has been invented. In those big ones the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge. The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling ranges from earth to heaven, but this the astronomer’s does not often do. It does not see far beyond the dome of the observatory. Compared with the visible phenomena of the heavens, the anecdotes of science affect me as trivial and petty. Man’s eye is the true star-finder, the comet-seeker. As I sat looking out the window the other evening just after dark, I saw the lamp of a freight-train, and, near by, just over the train, a bright star, which looked exactly like the former, as if it belonged to a different part of the same train. It was difficult to realize that the one was a feeble oil lamp, the other a world. As I walk the railroad causeway I am, as the last two months, disturbed by the sound of my steps on the frozen ground. I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard. I cannot walk with my ears covered. I must stand still and listen with open ears, far from the noises of the village, that the night may make its impression on me. A fertile and eloquent silence. Sometimes the silence is merely negative, an arid and barren waste in which I shudder, where no ambrosia grows. I must hear the whispering of a myriad voices. Silence alone is worthy to be heard. Silence is of va- rious depth and fertility, like soil. Now it is a mere Sahara, where men perish of hunger and thirst, now a fertile bottom, or prairie, of the West. As I leave the village, drawing nearer to the woods, I listen from time to time to hear the hounds of Silence baying the Moon, — to know if they are on the track of any game. If there ’s no Diana in the night, what is it worth? I hark the goddess Diana. The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible. I hear the unspeakable. I easily read the moral of my dreams. Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared full of death and decay, and offended the nostrils. In the night I dreamed of delving amid the graves of the dead, and soiled my fingers with their rank mould. It was sanitarily, morally, and physically true. If. night is the mere negation of day, I hear nothing but my own steps in it. Death is with me, and life far away. If the elements are not human, if the winds do not sing or sigh, as the stars twinkle, my life runs shallow. I measure the depth of my own being. I walk with vast alliances. I am the allied powers, the holy alliance, absorbing the European potentates. Ido not get much from the blue sky, these twinkling stars, and bright snow-fields reflecting an almost rosaceous light. But when I enter the woods I am fed by the va- riety, — the forms of the trees above against the blue, with the stars seen through the pines like the lamps hung on them in an illumination, the somewhat in- distinct and misty fineness of the pine-tops, and the finely divided spray of the oaks, etc., and the shadows of all these on the snow. The first shadow I came to I thought was a black place where the woodchoppers had had a fire. These myriad shadows checker the white ground and enhance the brightness of the en- lightened portions. See the shadows of these young oaks which have lost half their leaves, more beautiful than themselves, like the shadow of a chandelier, and motionless as if they were fallen leaves on the snow, — but shake the tree, and all is in motion. In this stillness and at this distance, I hear the nine- o’clock bell in Bedford five miles off, which I might never hear in the village, but here its music sur- mounts the village din and has something very sweet and noble and inspiring in it, associated, in fact, with the hooting of owls. Returning, I thought I heard the creaking of a wagon just starting from Hubbard’s door, and rarely musical it sounded. It was the telegraph harp. It began to sound but at one spot only. It is very fitful, and only sounds when it is in the mood. You may go by twenty times, both when the wind is high and when it is low and let it blow which way it will, and yet hear no strain from it, but another time, at a particular spot, you may hear a strain rising and swelling on the string, which may at last ripen to something glorious. The wire will perhaps labor long with it before it attains to melody. Even the creaking of a wagon in a frosty night has music in it which allies it to the highest and purest strain of the muse. I think it was January 20th that I saw that which I think an otter track ' in path under the Cliffs, — a deep trail in the snow, six or seven inches wide and two or three deep in the middle, as if a log had been drawn along, similar to a muskrat’s only much larger, and the legs evidently short and the steps short, sinking three or four inches deeper still, ———————, as if it had waddled along. It finally -——~———"" turned into my old tracks and went toward the river and Fair Haven Pond. One was killed there last spring. Minott says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house, where I. Moore’s now is, and cross the road and the meadow in front; thinks it may have been eighty years ago. Otter are very rare here now. I have not heard of any killed here- abouts for twenty or thirty years till, within two years, two or three of them. In Sudbury and at Fair Haven Pond.

Sunday. Rain, carrying off the snow and making slosh of the lower half of it. It is perhaps the wettest walking we ever have.