24 March 1856 – 30 March 1856

Monday. Very pleasant day. Ther- mometer 48° at noon. 9 a. M.—Start to get two quarts of white maple sap and home at 11.30. One F. hyemalis in yard. Spend the forenoon on the river at the white maples. I hear a bluebird’s warble and a song sparrow’s chirp. . So much partly for being out the whole forenoon. Bluebirds seen in all parts of the town to-day for first time, as I hear. The F. hyemalis has been seen two or three days. Cross the river behind Monroe’s. Go everywhere on the North Branch — it is all solid — and almost everywhere on the South Branch. ‘The crust bears in the morning. The snow is so coarse-grained and hard that you can hardly get up a handful to wash your hands with, except the dirty surface. The early aspen buds down very conspicuous, half an inch long; yet I detect no flow of sap. The white maple sap does not flow fast generally at first, — or 9 A. M., —not till about ten. Yet last year I paddled my boat to Fair Haven Pond on the 19th of March! Before noon I slump two feet in the snow. You bore a little hole with your knife, and presently the wounded sap-wood begins to glisten with moisture, and anon a clear crystalline tear-like drop flows out and runs down the bark, or drops at once to the snow. This is the sap of which the far-famed maple-sugar is made. That’s the sweet liquor which the Indians boiled a thousand years ago. Cut a piece of Rhus Toxicodendron resting on rock at Ege Rock, five eighths of an inch in diameter, which had nineteen rings of annual growth. It is quite hard and stiff. My sugar-making was spoiled by putting in much soda instead of saleratus by accident. I suspect it would have made more sugar than the red did. It proved only brittle black candy. This sap flowed just about as fast as that of the red maple. It is said that a great deal of sap will run from the yellow birch. The river begins to open generally at the bends for ten or twenty rods, and I see the dark ice alternating with dark water there, while the rest of the river is still covered with snow.

P. M.— To Walden. The willow and aspen catkins have pushed out con- siderably since the Ist of February in warm places. I have frequently seen the sap of maples flow in warm days in the winter, in warm localities. This was in twigs. Would it in the trunks of large trees? And if not, is not this an evidence that this sap did not come up from the roots? The meadow east of the railroad causeway is bare in many spots, while that on the west is completely and deeply covered; yet a few weeks ago it was deep- est on the east. I think of no reason for this, except that the causeway may keep off the cold northwest winds from the former meadow. For thirty rods distant there are no bare spots. Why is the eastern slope, now, as every spring, (almost completely) bare, long before the western? The road runs north and south, and the sun lies on the one side as long as on the other. Is it more favorable that the frozen snow-be acted on by the warmed air before the sun reaches it than after it has left it? Another and second reason is probably that there is less snow on that side or on the west slope of a hill than on the eastern. Snow drifting from the north- west lodges under the west bank. So I observe to-day that the hills rising from the north and west (and this seems to give weight to the second reason urged above) sides of Walden are partially bare, while those on the south and east are deeply and completely covered with snow. Mr. Bull tells me that his grapes grow faster and ripen sooner on the west than the east side of his house. There have been few if any small migratory birds the past winter. I have not seen a tree sparrow, nut- hatch, creeper, nor more than one redpoll since Christ- mas. ‘hey probably went further south. I now slump from two to four inches into Walden, though there has been no rain since I can remember. I cannot cut through, on account of the water in the softened ice flowing into the hole. At last, in a drier place, I was not troubled with water, till I had cut about a foot, or through the snow ice, when two or three streams of water half an inch or more in diameter spurted up through holes in the disorganized, partly honeycombed clear ice; so I failed to get through. Probably the clear ice is thus riddled all over the pond, for this was a drier place than usual. Is it the effect of the melted snow and surface working down? or partly of water pressing up? ‘The whole mass in the middle is about twenty-four inches thick, but I scrape away about two inches of the surface with my foot, leaving twenty-two inches. For about a rod from the shore, on the north and west sides (I did not examine the others), it is comparatively firm and dry, then for two rods you slump four inches or more, then, and generally, only about two. Is that belt the effect of re- flection from the hills? Hear the hurried and seemingly frightened notes of a robin and see it flying over the railroad lengthwise, and afterwards its tut tut at a distance. This and the birds of yesterday have come, though the ground gen- erally is covered deep with snow. They will not only stay with us through a storm, but come when there are but resting-places for them. It must be hard for them to get their living now. The tallest water andromedas now rise six or eight inches above the snow in the swamp.

'To Cambridge. I hear that Humphrey Buttrick found a whole covey of quails dead.* At Philadelphia, a month or two since, they offered a reward for live ones, more than market price, to preserve them. We have heard of an unusual quantity of ice in the course of the Liverpool packets this winter. Perhaps the Pacific has been sunk by one, as we hear that some other vessels have been. Yet the papers say it has been warmer about Lake Superior than in Kansas and that the lake will break up earlier than usual. They are just beginning to use wheels in Concord, but only in the middle of the town, where the snow is at length worn and melted down to bare ground in the middle of the road, from two to ten feet wide. Sleighs are far the most common, even here. In Cambridge there is no sleighing. For the most part, the middle of the road from Porter’s to the College is bare and even dusty for twenty to thirty feet in width. The Col- lege Yard is one half bare. So, if they have had more snow than we, as some say, it has melted much faster. There is also less in the towns between us and Cam- bridge than in Concord. The snow lies longer on the low, level plain surrounded by hills in which Concord is situated. I am struck by the more wintry aspect — almost entirely uninterrupted snow-fields — on coming into Concord in the cars. | The Romans introduced husbandry into England, where but little was practiced before, and the English have introduced it into America. So we may well read the Roman authors for a history of this art as practiced by us. I am sometimes affected by the consideration that a man may spend the whole of his life after boyhood in accomplishing a particular design; as if he were put to a special and petty use, without taking time to look around him and appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. If so many purposes are thus necessarily left unaccomplished, perhaps unthought of, we are reminded of the transient interest we have in this life. Our interest in our country, in the spread of liberty, etc., strong and, as it were, innate as it is, cannot be as tran- sient as our present existence here. It cannot be that all those patriots who die in the midst of their career have no further connection with the career of their country.

Uncle Charles died this morning, about midnight, aged seventy-six. | The frost is now entirely out in some parts of the New Burying-Ground, the sexton tells me, — half-way up the hill which slopes to the south, unless it is bare of snow, he says. In our garden, where it chances to be bare, two or more rods from the house, I was able to dig through the slight frost. In another place near by T could not. The river is now open in reaches of twenty or thirty rods, where the ice has disappeared by melting. Elijah Wood, Senior, about seventy, tells me he does not remember that the river was ever frozen so long, nor that so much snow lay on the ground so long. People do not remember when there was so much old snow on the ground at this date.

Uncle Charles buried. He was born in February, 1780, the winter of the Great Snow, and he dies in the winter of another great snow, —a life bounded by great snows. Cold, and the earth stiff again, after fifteen days of steady warm and, for the most part, sunny days (with- out rain), in which the snow and ice have rapidly meited. Sam Barrett tells me that a boy caught a crow in his neighborhood the other day in a trap set for mink. Its leg was broken. He brought it home under his arm, and laid it down in a shop, thinking to keep it there alive. It looked up sidewise, as it lay seemingly helpless on the floor, but, the door being open, all at once, to their surprise, it lifted itself on its wings and flitted out and away without the least trouble. Many crows have been caught in mink-traps the past winter, they have been compelled to visit the few openings in brooks, etc., so much for food. Barrett has suffered all winter for want of water. I think to say to my friend, There is but one interval between us. You are on one side of it, I on the other. You know as much about it as I, — how wide, how impassable it is. I will endeavor not to blame you. Do not blame me. There is nothing to be said about it. Recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged. Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. ‘The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily pass- ing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching. Yet I have faith that, in the definite future, new suns will rise, and new plains expand before me, and I trust that I shall therein encounter pilgrims who bear that same virtue that I recognized in you, who will be that very virtue that was you. I accept the everlasting and salutary law, which was promulgated as much that spring that I first knew you, as this that I seem to lose you. My former friends, I visit you as one walks amid the columns of a ruined temple. You belong to an era, a civilization and glory, long past. I recognize still your fair proportions, notwithstanding the convulsions which we have felt, and the weeds and jackals that have sprung up around. I come here to be reminded of the past, to read your inscriptions, the hieroglyphics, the sacred writings. We are no longer the representa- tives of our former selves. Love is a thirst that is never slaked. Under the coarsest rind, the sweetest meat. If you would read a friend aright, you must be able to read through some- thing thicker and opaquer than horn. If you can read a friend, all languages will be easy to you. Enemies publish themselves. ‘They declare war. ‘The friend never declares his love.

Another cold day. Scarcely melts at all. Water skimmed over in chamber, with fire.

P. M. — To Walden and Fair Haven. Still cold and blustering. I come out to see the sand and subsoil in the Deep Cut, as I would to see a spring flower, some redness in the cheek of Earth. These cold days have made the ice of Walden dry and pretty hard again at top. It is just twenty-four inches thick in the middle, about eleven inches of snow ice. It has lost but a trifle on the surface. The inside is quite moist, the clear ice very crystalline and leaky, letting the water up from below, so as to hinder my cutting. It seems to be more porous and brittle than the snow ice. I go to Fair Haven via the Andromeda Swamps. The snow is a foot and more in depth there still. ‘There is a little bare ground in and next to the swampy woods at the head of Well Meadow, where the springs and little black nills are flowing. I see already one blade, three or four inches long, of that purple or lake grass, lying flat on some water, between snow-clad banks, — the first leaf with a rich bloom on it. How silent are the footsteps of Spring! There, too, where there is a fraction of the meadow, two rods over, quite bare, under the 1856} THE FOOTSTEPS OF SPRING 283 bank, in this warm recess at the head of the meadow, though the rest of the meadow is covered with snow a foot or more in depth, I am surprised to see the skunk- cabbage, with its great spear-heads open and ready to blossom (7. e. shed pollen in a day or two); and the Caltha palustris bud, which shows yellowish; and the golden. saxifrage, green and abundant; also there are many fresh tender leaves of (apparently) the gold- thread’ in open meadow there, all surrounded and hemmed in by snow, which [has] covered the ground since Christmas and stretches as far as you can sec on every side; and there are as intense blue shadows on the snow as I ever saw. ‘The spring advances in spite of snow and ice, and cold even. The ground under the snow has long since felt the influence of the spring sun, whose rays fall at a more favorable angle. The tufts or tussocks next the edge of the snow were crowned with dense phalanxes of stiff spears of the stiff triangularish sedge-grass, five inches high but quite yellow with a very slight greenness at the tip, showing that they pushed up through the snow, which melting, they had not yet acquired color. This is the greatest growth of any plant I have seen. I had not suspected any. I can just see a little greening on our bare and dry south bank. In warm recesses and clefts in meadows and rocks in the midst of ice and snow, nay, even under the snow, vegetation commences and steadily advances. I find Fair Haven Pond and the river lifted up a foot or more, the result [of] the long, steady thaw in the sun. The water of the pond and river has run over the 1 ? Probably not.