30 January 1854 – 5 February 1854

Another cold morning. Mercury down to 13° below zero. Frank showed me last night a white hare he had killed. It was frozen stiff, weighed four pounds, and was nearly three feet long. Its hind feet made soft brushes, which painters use in graining doors, etc. The plumage of partridges is most perfect nowadays. The white hare is a dirty white in winter, grayish (?) or brownish in summer; has peculiar puss-like expression in profile. This was frozen in the attitude of running, careering with elastic bound over the snow and amid the bushes. Now, dead, it is the symbol of that speed it was capable of. Frozen as it was, it nearly spanned one breadth of the carpet, or three feet.1. This morn- ing, though not.so cold by a degree or two as yester- day morning, the cold has got more into the house, and the frost visits nooks never known to be visited before. The sheets are frozen about the sleeper’s face; the teamster’s beard is white with ice. Last night I felt it stinging cold as I came up the street at 9 o’clock; it bit my ears and face, but the stars shone all the brighter. The windows are all closed up with frost, as if they were ground glass. The greater part of last week there was no melting in the roads nor on roofs. No more yesterday and to-day. ‘The snow is dry and squeaks under the feet, and the teams creak as if they needed greasing, — sounds associated with extremely cold weather. P. M.— Up river on ice and snow to Fair Haven Pond. There is a few inches of snow, perfectly level, which now for nearly a week has covered the ice. Going to- ward the sun, you are snow-blinded. At each clump of willows on the meadow, it looks as if there were a hillock, out of which they grow. This appearance is produced by the willow twigs holding up the ice to [the] height at which it was frozen after the last thaw, about two feet above the present level. It forms a regularly rounded hillock. We look at every track in the snow. Every little while there is the track of a fox — maybe the same one — across the river, turning aside some- times to a muskrat’s cabin or a point of ice, where he has left some traces, and frequently the larger track of a hound, which has followed his trail. It is much easier and pleasanter to walk thus on the river, the snow being shallow and level, and there is no such loud squeaking or cronching of the snow as in the road, and this road is so wide that you do not feel confined in it, and you never meet travellers with whom you have no sympathy. The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise these winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. It is true it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is none to wake us up. Some desert the field and go into winter quarters in the city. They attend the oratorios, while the only music that we countrymen hear is the squeaking of the snow under our boots. But the winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genial- ness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit, no doubt, is the more concentrated and nutty. It took the cold and bleakness of November to ripen the walnut, but the human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures. Not till then does its shell come off. The seasons were not made in vain. Because the fruits of the earth are already ripe, we are not to sup- pose that there is no fruit left for winter to ripen. It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was made to concentrate and harden and ma- ture the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. ‘Then is the great har- vest of the year, the harvest of thought. All previous harvests are stubble to this, mere fodder and green crop. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars; our oil is winter-strained. We are islanded in Atlantic and Pacific and Indian Oceans of thought, Bermudas, or Friendly or Spice Islands. Shall we take refuge in cities in November? Shall the nut fall green from the tree? Let not the year be disappointed of its crop. I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked: ‘‘ We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.” So I say, ‘‘ Let us sing winter.” What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season? As we walked up the river, a little flock of chicka- dees (apparently) flew to us from a wood-side fifteen rods off, and uttered their lively day day day, and fol- lowed us along a considerable distance, flitting by our side on the button-bushes and willows. It is the most, if not the only, sociable bird we have. Now is the time to fill ice-houses, for fear they may not have another chance for solid ice. Brown filled his last week. I will be a countryman. I will not go to the city, even in winter, any more than the sallows and sweet- gale by the river do. I see their yellow osiers and freckled, handsomely imbricated buds,’ still rising above the ice and snow there, to cheer me. The white rabbit is a large fellow, well furred. What does he get to eat, being a vegetable liver? He must be hardy and cunning in his way. His race have learned by long practice to find their food where a newcomer would inevitably starve. How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him, — as long as a boy. Sometimes one of those great cakes of green ice from Walden or Sam Barreti’s Pond slips from the ice-man’s sled in the street and lies there like a great emerald, an object of interest to all travellers.’ The hips of the late rose are still abundant and per- fect, amid the button-bushes.

P. M.— To Great Meadows and Beck Stow’s. The wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails, and is felt on the back. The snow softens and melts. It is a beautiful clear and mild winter day. Our washwoman says she is proud of it. Any clear day, methinks, the sun is ready to do his part, and let the wind be right, and it will be warm and pleasant-like, at least now that the sun runs so high a course. But I do not melt; there is no thaw in me; I am bound out still. I see the tree sparrows, one or two at a time, now and then, all winter, uttering a faint note, with their bright-chestnut crown and spot on breast and barred wings. They represent the sparrows in the winter. Went to the Great Meadows by the Oak Island. The maples along the edge of the meadow, which all winter have been perfectly leafless, have an agreeable mixed, slightly pepper-and-salt look, spotted or barred with white lichens. It is an agreeable maze to the eye, so thick their bare and clean gray limbs. Many tracks of partridges there along the meadow- side in the maples, and their droppings where they ap- pear to have spent the night about the roots and be- tween the stems of trees. I think they eat the buds of the azalea. And now, with a mew, preluding a whir, they go off before me. Coming up, I follow her tracks to where she eased herself for lightness, and immedi- ately after are five or six parallel cuts in the snow, 4 where her wing struck when she lifted herself J from the ground, but no trace more. I pass the woodchoppers, busily felling trees or cutting up those which they have felled. One is meas- uring his lengths with his axe-helve and does not see me. The pitch pines are yellowish, the white incline to bluish. In the winter, when there are no flowers and leaves are rare, even large buds are interesting and somewhat exciting. I go a-budding like a partridge. I am always attracted at this season by the buds of the swamp-pink, the poplars, and the sweet-gale. A hundred years ago, as I learned from Ephraim Jones’s ledger, they sold bark in our street. He gives credit for a load. Methinks my genius is coeval with that time. That is no great wildness or selvaggia that cannot furnish a load of bark, when the forest has lost its shagginess. This is an attempt to import this wildness into the cities in a thousand shapes. Bark is carried thither by ship and by cartloads. Bark con- tains the principle of tannin, by which not only the fibre of skins but of men’s thoughts is hardened and consolidated. It was then that a voice was given to the dog, and a manly tone to the human voice. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of the village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness. Varro thinks that when man reached the pastoral or second stage and domesticated animals (pecus), ‘ pri- mum non sine causa putant oves assumptas, et propter utilitatem, et propter placiditatem ” (they think not with- out reason that sheep were first taken, both on account of their usefulness and on account of their gentleness) ; for, as he says, they furnish milk, cheese, their fleece, and skin. It looks to me as if the sheep had been supplied with a superfluity of clothing that it might share it with man, and, as Varro suggests, did not this fleece, on account.of its value, come to be called golden? was not this the origin of the fable ? We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. Thought that was frozen up under stern experi- ence gushes forth in feeling and expression. There is a freshet which carries away dams of accumulated ice. Our thoughts hide unexpressed, like the buds under their downy or resinous scales; they would hardly keep a partridge from starving. If you would know what are my winter thoughts look for them in the partridge’s crop. They are like the laurel buds, — some leaf, some blossom buds, — which, though food for such indige- nous creatures, will not expand into leaves and flowers until summer comes.

Up river on ice to Clematis Brook. Another warm, melting day, like yesterday. You can see some softening and relenting in the sky. Ap- parently the vapor in the air makes a grosser atmo- sphere, more like that of a summer eve. We go up the Corner road and take the ice at Potter’s Meadow. The Cliff Hill is nearly bare on the west side, and you hear the rush of melted snow down its side in one place. Here and there are regular round holes in the ice over the meadow, two or three feet in diameter, where the water appears to be warmer, — perchance there is a spring there, —and therein, in shallow water, is seen the cress and one or two other plants, still quite fresh. The shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue. We stopped awhile under Bittern Cliff, the south side, where it is very warm. ‘There are a few greenish radical leaves to be seen, — primrose and johnswort, strawberry, etc., and spleenwort still green in the clefts. These sunny old gray rocks, completely covered with white and gray lichens and overrun with ivy, are avery cosy place. You hardly detect the melted snow swiftly trickling down them until you feel the drops on your cheek. The winter gnat is seen in the warm air before the rock. In the clefts of these rocks are the latebre of many insects, spiders, etc. Were they not sowbugs I found under the Marchantia polymorpha (?)? The ice is about eighteen inches thick on Fair Haven. Saw some pickerel just caught there, with a fine lustre to them. Went to the pond in the woods which has an old ditch dug from it near Clematis Brook. The red twigs of the cornels and the yellow ones of the sallows sur- rounding it are interesting at this season. We prize the least color now. As it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow-fleas, even twenty rods from the woods, on the pond and meadows. The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter. I stole up within five or six feet of a pitch pine behind which a downy woodpecker was pecking. From time to time he hopped round to the side and observed me without fear. They are very confident birds, not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of the bough to you, perhaps. Already we begin to anticipate spring, and this is an important difference between this time and a month ago. We begin to say that the day is springlike. Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulf- stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.

A driving snow-storm again. The attractions of the Hollowell Farm were: its complete retirement, being at least two miles from the village, half a mile from any neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river; the pleasing ruin of the house and barn; the hol- low and lichen-covered apple trees gnawed by rabbits; above all the recollection I had of it from my earliest voy- ages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, which then stood between it and the river, through which I once heard the house- dog bark; and in general the slight improvements that had been made upon it. These were the motives that swayed, though I did not mention them to the propri- etor. To enjoy these things I was ready to carry it on and do all those things which I now see had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; though I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could only afford to let it alone. Though it afforded no western prospect, the dilapidated fences were picturesque. I was in some haste to buy, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down some hollow apple trees, and erubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, all which in my eyes very much en- hanced its value.* Varro speaks of two kinds of pigeons, one of which was wont to alight ‘on the (colwminibus villae) col- umns of a villa (a quo appellatae columbae), from which they were called columbae, which on account of their natural timidity (swmma loca in tectis captant) de- light in the highest places on the roofs (?) (or under cover ?).””

F. Brown showed me this afternoon his game killed day before yesterday, — a gray hare, a gray squir- rel, and a red squirrel. The red squirrel was peeping out of his nest in a tree. The gray was a fine large fel- low in good condition; weighed one pound and a quar- ter, more than half as heavy as the hare, and his tail still perfectly and beautifully curved over his back. It recovered its place when you stroked it, as if it were full of electricity. /A]l were frozen, the hare, as usual, in the attitude of running. The gray squirrel’s ears were white above, edged with tawny brown. He thought that my marsh peep of the fall might [be] the ash-col- ored sandpiper. John Moore and Company got about fifty weight of fish at Flint’s Pond the same day. Two pickerel weighed nine pounds. I went over to the Hemlocks on the Assabet this morning. Saw the tracks, I think of a mink, in the shallow snow along the edge of the river, looking for a hole in the ice. A clear, cold morning. The smokes from the village chimneys are quickly purified and dis- sipated, like vapor, in the air. They do not stream high. Varro says Africanae bestiae for savage or ferocious beasts. Is this a difference of climate merely? Are not some quarters of the globe thus better fitted for the habitation of man for other reasons ? We have not much that is poetic in the accompani- - ments of the farmer’s life. Varro speaks of the swine- herd accustoming the swine or boars to come at the sound of a horn when he fed them with acorns. I re- member that my grandmother used to call her cow home at evening from a near pasture to be milked by thumping on the mortar which held her salt. The tinkling cow-bell cannot be spared. Ever what most attracts us in the farmer’s life is not its profitableness. We love to go after the cow, not for the sake of her milk or her beef, or the money they yield, but perchance to hear the tinkling of the cow-bell; and we would fain keep a herd of pigs, not because of the profit there is in bacon, but because we have dreamed of hearing the swineherd’s horn. We would keep hens, not for eggs, but to hear the cocks crow and the hens cackle. As for the locality of beehives, Varro says that they must be placed near the villa, “‘ potissimum ubi non resonent imagines, hic enim sonus harum fugae causa existimatur esse ’’ (especially where there are no echoes, for this sound is thought to be the cause of their flight).

Have two more old account-books of Ephraim Jones, running from 1741 to 1750 and further, — what are called ledgers, I think. Some of the items of the waste-book are here collected, each man’s pur- chases and credit brought together. I think he must have kept in the store which Good- now & How first kept in. Some remember when an Ephraim Jones, probably his grandson, kept there. There appears to have been an Ephraim Jones keeping the jail then (probably a son of the first), in the Revo- lution. There is said to have been a public house with the sign of a black horse where Mr. Brooks’s house stands, and hence the society that worshipped there were called the Black Horse Church. a / Ah He sold a few religious books as well as almanacs and primers. In 1745, ‘to Inchwoods Glimpse of Glory and Mr. (or Wm.)Row’s Meditation well Bound,” so much. In another place, ‘ to Glimpse of Glory and sundry.” Sometimes ‘a sermon book.” Whitefield was here first in 1741, and there were exciting revivals under Mr. Bliss at this time, says the ‘History. Yet it is a dreary and ghastly life suggested, when you come upon a man’s bill for a lock to the Burying Gate, and that is so nearly all that has come down. I picture to myself a rude, straggling village with a wide-open burying-ground gate. : Hezekiah Stratton has credit in 1743, “Feb. 7 by 4 a Catt skin 0-1-44,” — of course a wildcat. Gingerbread is bought several times, flour once or twice, and credit given for butter once or twice. Several times one nutmeg is bought. Credit given for weaving; also for a load of bark and tar and turpen- tine from Groton. The lime-kiln and iron mine are frequently named. Credit given for so much “ mine,” meaning apparently iron ore. Stephen Parks has credit in 1746, “Aug 2. Cr by one wampum belt 0-15-0.” To another, in 1744, ‘Cr by Dressing 50 squirrel skins 0-6-3.’’ Credit is also given for fox skins and a few deer skins. But above all Jones gives credit for timber brought to the store, or, more commonly, carted to Menotomy, Mistick, Med- ford, or Charlestown. Some customers live in Nisstis- sit (?). Credit is given by “ digging mine.” (Probably iron, after called “ mine.’’) For example of the quantity of rum and the like bought, vide pages 128-193 of No. 2. Long columns run down the page, of nothing but flip, flip, mug flip, mug flip, todey, toddy, punch, punch, bowl of tody, brandy punch, etc., etc.; sometimes charges for the breaking of the glass, also for sugar and limes and flip for himself and company. Jones appears to have kept a public house, for he frequently charges for entertain- ment. The animal merely makes him a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place. He does not make a house. But man, having discovered fire, warms a spacious apartment up to the same temperature with his body, and without robbing it, so that he can divest himself of cumbersome clothing, — not keeping his bed, —maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and, by means of windows, even admit the light. It was his invention to box up some air and warm it, make that his bed, and in this live and move and have his being still, and breathe as in a congenial climate or summer, without taking to his bed. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct and secures a little time for the fine arts. Though I began to grow torpid when exposed a long time to the pinching winter air, — my hands and feet grew numb, and my ears and face stiffened, — when I had reached the genial atmosphere of my house, I soon recovered my faculties. I did not squat in a form, or lie in a burrow or ensconced in a nest of leaves or grass, like the squirrels, nor become quite dormant in any hole, like the woodchuck. I ameliorated the winter climate with fire, and lengthened out the day with a lamp.’ Even Varro, to prove that the ancients did not shave (or that there were no barbers), is obliged to refer his readers to their bearded statues. “ Olim ton- sores non fuisse adsignificant antiquorum statuae, quod pleraeque habent capillum, et barbam magnam.” Yet it was true of the old statues only “for the most part.”’ P. M. — To walk. Begins to snow. At Hubbard’s blueberry swamp woods, near the bathing-place, came across a fox’s track, which I think was made last night or since. The tracks were about two inches long, or a little less, by one and a half vite (28 shaped thus where the snow was only. half an inch deep on ice generally from nine to fifteen inches aaa longitudinally and three to four inches apart transversely. It came from the west. I followed it back. At first it was diffi- cult to trace, to anvestigate, it, amid some rabbit tracks, of which I did not know whether they had been made before or since. It soon led out of the woods on to the ice of the meadow to a slight prominence, then turned and followed along the side of the wood, then crossed the meadow directly to the riverside just below the mouth of Nut Meadow Brook, visited a muskrat- house there and left its mark, — watered, — for, dog-like, it turned aside to every muskrat-house or the like prominence near its route and left its mark there. You could easily scent it there. It turned into the meadow eastward once or twice as it went up the riverside, and, after visitng another muskrat’s house, where it left its manure, large and light-colored, as if composed of fir, crossed the river and John Hos- mer’s meadow and potato-field and the road south of Nut Meadow Bridge. (If it had been a dog it would have turned when it reached the road.) It was not lost then, but led straight across, through J. Hosmer’s field and meadow again, and over ditch and up side- hill in the woods; and there, on the side of the hill, I could see where its tail had grazed the snow. It was then mixed with rabbit-tracks, but was easily unrav- elled. Passed out of the wood into J. P. Brown’s land, over some mice or mole tracks, then over the middle of Brown’s meadows westward, to Tarbell’s meadows, till at last, by the brook, I found that it had had a companion up to that point, which turned off. Then I saw the large tracks of hounds on the trail. Still it held on, from straight across the road again, some way on an old dog’s trail; had trodden and nosed very much about some hardhacks in the field beyond, where were a few mice-tracks, as if for food, the hound’s tracks numerous with it; and so I traced it into the Ministerial Swamp, where, the snow-storm increasing, I left it, having traced it back more than a mile west- ward in a pretty direct course. What expeditions they make in a night in search of food! No doubt the same one crosses the river many times.