23–29 March 1835

The wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says. He is my creature, and spite of all his impertinent griefs he shall be glad with me. Almost I fear to think how glad I am.

He who writes should seek not to say what may be said, but what has not been said that is yet true. I will read and write. Why not? All the snow is shovelled away, all the corn planted, and the children and the creatures on the planet taken care of without my help. But if I do not read, nobody will. Yet am I not without my own fears. Captain Franklin after six weeks' travel- ling to the North Pole on the ice, found himself two hundred miles south of the spot he set out from : the ice had floated. And I sometimes start to think I am looking out the same vocables in the Dictionary, spelling out the same sentences, solving the same problems. — My ice may float also.

If life were long enough, among my thousand and one works should be a book of nature whereof Howitt's Seasons should be not so much the model as the parody. It should con- tain the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy, botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins, bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me. I dissected the buds of the birch and the oak ; in every one of the last is a star. The crow sat above as idle as I below. The river flowed brimful, and I philosophised upon this compo- site, collective beauty which refuses to be ana- lysed. Nothing is beautiful alone. Nothing but is beautiful in the whole. Learn the history of a craneberry. Mark the day when the pine cones and acorns fall.