Henry David Thoreau

“ The voice of nature is always encouraging.
When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round, and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue-scolloped rim. It is a spring landscape, and as impossible a fortnight ago as the song of birds. It is a deeper and warmer blue than in winter, methinks. The snow is off the mountains, which seem even to have come again like the birds. The undulating river is a bright blue channel between sharp-edged shores of ice retained by the willows. ”

“ The wind blows strong but warm from west by north (so that I have to hold my paper tight while I write this) , making the copses creak and roar, but the sharp tinkle of a song-sparrow is heard through it all. But, ah! the needles of the pine, how they shine, as I look down over the Holden wood and westward ! Every third tree is lit with the most subdued, but clear, ethereal light, as if it were the most delicate frost-work in a winter morning, reflecting no heat, but onty light. ”

“ I hear the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the robin, and the note of the lark leaks up through the meadows, as if its bill had been thawed by the warm sun. As I am going to the woods I think to take some small book in my pocket, whose author has been there already, whose pages will be as good as my thoughts, and will eke them out or show me human life still gleaming in the horizon when the woods have shut out the town. But I can find none. None will sail as far forward into the bay of nature as my thought. They stay at home. ”

“ I must receive my life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters over the brook. I must not be for myself, but God's work, and that is always good. I will wait the breezes patiently, and grow as they shall determine. My fate cannot but be grand so. We may live the life of a plant or an animal without living an animal life. This constant and universal content of the animal comes of resting quietly in God's palm. I feel as if I could at any time resign my life and the responsibility into God's hands, and become as innocent and free from care as a plant or stone. ”

“ In some places where the ice is exposed I see a kind of crystallized chaffy snow like little bundles of asbestos on its surface. I seek some sunny nook on the south side of a wood which keeps off the cold wind, among the maples and the swamp white oaks, and there sit and anticipate the spring and hear the chickadees and the belching of the ice. The sun has got a new power in his rays after all, cold as the weather is. He could not have warmed me so much a month ago, nor should I have heard such rumblings of the ice in December. I see where a maple has been wounded, the sap is flowing out. ”

“ Pond. Nature is constantly original and inventing new patterns, like a mechanic in his shop. When the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the action of the sun and of the wind rubbing it on the shore, its boughs become white and smooth, and assume fantastic forms, as if turned by a lathe. All things, indeed, are subjected to a rotary motion, either gradual and partial, or rapid and complete, from the planet and system to the simplest shell-fish and pebbles on the beach. As if all beauty resulted from an object's turning on its own axis, or from the turning of others about it. ”

“ Looking through this transparent vapor, all surfaces, not osiers and open water alone, look more vivid. The hardness of winter is relaxed. There is a fine effluence surrounding the wood, as if the sap had begun to stir, and you could detect it a mile off. Such is the difference in an object seen through a warm, moist, and soft air, and a cold, dry, hard one. Such is the genialness of nature that the trees appear to have put out feelers, by which the senses apprehend them more tenderly. I do not know that the woods are ever more beautiful or affect me more. ”

“ The heat reflected from the dry leaves reminds you of the sweet fern and those summer afternoons which are longer than a winter day, though you sit on a mere oasis in the snow. The snow is melting on the rocks, the water trickles down in shining streams, the mosses look bright; the first awakening of vegetation is at the root of the saxifrage. As I go by the farmer's yard the hens cackle more solidly, as if eggs were the burden of the strain.
A horse's fore legs are handier than his hind ones, the latter but fall into the place which the former have found. ”

“ The weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives, and of which he is a part. His life relaxes with the thawing ground. He pitches and tunes his voice to chord with the rustling leaves which the March wind has dried. Long before the frost is quite out he feels the influence of the spring rains and the warmer days. His is the very voice of the weather. He rises and falls like quicksilver in the thermometer. You do not perceive the spring so surely in the actions of men, their lives are so artificial. ”

“ If a partridge should drum in winter, probably it would not reverberate so softly through, the wood, and sound indefinitely far. Our voices even sound differently, and betray the spring. We speak as in a house, in a warm apartment still, with relaxed muscles and softened voices. The voice, like a woodchuck in his burrow, is met and lapped in and encouraged by all genial and sunny influences. There may be heard now, perhaps, under south hillsides and the south sides of houses, a slight murmur of conversation, as of insects, out of doors. ”

“ Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while that of the grackle is ragged and split.
It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth, very little ice to be seen. The red-wing and song-sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree-sparrows is pleasantly warbling. A new era has come. The red-wing's gurgle-ee is heard where smooth waters begin. One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side. ”

“ There, too, where there is a fraction of the meadow, two rods over, quite bare under the bank, in this warm recess at the head of the meadow, though the rest is covered with snow a foot or more in depth, I was surprised to see the skunk-cabbage, with its great spear-heads, open and ready to blossom, and the Calthia palustris bud, which shows yellowish, and the golden saxifrage green and abundant, all surrounded and hemmed in by snow which has covered the ground since Christmas, and stretches as far as you can see on every side. The spring advances in spite of snow and ice and cold even. ”

“ I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive in my daily walk, the conversations of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him? The sight of a marsh, hawk in Concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the allies into Paris. ”

“ To Walden and Goose Pond. I see a large flock of sheldrakes, which have probably risen from the pond, go over my head in the woods, a dozen large and compact birds flying with great force and rapidity, spying out the land, eyeing every traveler. Now you hear the whistling of their wings, and in a moment they are lost in the horizon. What health and vigor they suggest! The life of man seems slow and puny in comparison, reptilian.
How handsome a flock of red-wings, ever changing its oval form as it advances, from the rear birds pursuing the others. ”

“ The alder catkins just burst open are prettily marked spirally by streaks of yellow, contrasting with alternate rows of rich reddish-brown scales, which make one revolution in the length of the catkin. I hear in Heywood's north meadow the most unmusical low croak from one or two frogs, though it is half ice there yet. A remarkable note with which to greet the new year, as if one's teeth slid off with a grating sound in cracking a nut, but not a frog nor a dimple to be seen.
Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. ”

“ Everything is in rapid flux here, suggesting that nature is alive to her extremities and superficies. To-day we sail swiftly on dark rolling waves or paddle over a sea as smooth as a mirror, unable to touch the bottom, where mowers work and hide their jugs in August, coasting the edge of maple swamps where alder tassels and white-maple flowers are kissing the tide that has risen to meet them. But this particular phase of beauty is fleeting. Nature has so many shows for us, she cannot afford to give much time to this. In a few days, perchance, these lakes will all have run away to the sea. ”

“ Seen at mid-day even, it is still the light of dewy morning alone that is reflected from the needles of the pine. This is the brightening and awakening of the pines, a phenomenon, perchance, connected with the flow of sap in them. I feel somewhat like the young Astyanax at sight of his father's flashing crest. As if in this wind storm of March a certain electricity were passing from earth to heaven through the pines and calling them to life.
We are interested in the phenomena of nature mainly as children are, or as we are in games of chance. They are more or less exciting. ”

“ It would be worth while to tell why a swamp pleases us, why a certain kind of weather pleases us, etc., analyze our impressions. Why does the moaning of the storm give me pleasure? Methinks because it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life, and gives it, at least, a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life's territory. It is musical and thrilling as the sound of an enemy's bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in a storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. ”

“ Unless you watch long and closely, not a ripple nor a bubble will be seen, and a marsh hawk will have to look long to find one. The notes of the croaking frog and the hylodes are not only contemporary with, but analogous to, the blossom of the skunk cabbage and white maple.
March 26, 1860. This dry, whitish, tawny or drab color of the fields, withered grass lit by the sun, is the color of a teamster's coat. It is one of the most interesting effects of light now, when the sun coming out of clouds shines brightly on it. It is the fore-glow of the year. ”

“ The fish lurks by the mouth of its native brook watching its opportunity to dart up the stream by the cakes of ice. Do the fishes stay to hold prayer-meetings in Fair Haven Bay, while some monstrous pike gulps them down? Or is not each one privately, or with kindred spirits, as soon as possible, stemming the course of its native brook, making its way to more ethereal waters, burnishing its scaly armor by its speed? . . . . No wonder we feel the spring influences. There is a motion in the very ground under our feet. Each rill is peopled with new life rushing up it. ”

“ Our experience does not wear upon us. It is seen to be fabulous or symbolical, aud the future is worth expecting. Encouraged, I set out once more to climb the mountain of the earth, for my steps are symbolical steps, and I have not reached the top of the earth yet. In two or three places I hear the ground-squirrel's first chirrup or qui-vive in the wall, like a bird or a cricket. Though I do not see him, the sun has reached him too.
Ah, then! as I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime-kiln, there leaked into my open ear the faint peep of a hyla from some far pool. ”

“ There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. I go looking for green radical leaves. What a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they mark! How hard to find any trace of their stem now after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter. I go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the snow for their prostrate stems that I may reconstruct the plant. ”

“ Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. I heard this morning a nuthatch in the elms on the street. I think they are heard oftener at the approach of spring, just as the phebe note of the chickadee is, and so their quah quah is a herald of the spring. ”

“ If you were going to pitch a tent to-night on the Great Fields, you would inevitably pitch on one of those spots, or else lie down in water or mud, or on ice. It is as if they had chosen the site of their wigwams at this very season of the year.
March 14, 1842. It is not easy to find one brave enough to play the game of love quite alone with you, but they must get some third person or world to countenance them. They thrust others between. Love is so delicate and fastidious that I see not how it can ever begin. ”

“ The warmest springs hardly allow me the glimpse of a frog's heel as he settles himself in the mud, and I think I am lucky if I see one winter-defying hawk or a hardy duck or two at a distance on the water. As for the singing of birds, the few that have come to us, it is too cold for them to sing and for me to hear. The bluebird's warble comes feeble and frozen to my ear. ”

“ As we look over the lively tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and westward, our eyes fall on these shining russet hills. Ball's Hill appears in the strong light, at the verge of this undulating blue plain, like some glorious newly-created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the bill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky. ”

“ Going along the turnpike I look over to the pitch pines on Moore's hillside, and it strikes me that this pine, take the year round, is the most cheerful tree and most living to look at and have about your house, it is so sunny and full of light, in harmony with the yellow sand there and the spring sun. The deciduous trees are apparently dead and the white pine is much darker, but the pitch pine has an ingrained sunniness and is especially valuable for imparting warmth to the landscape at this season. Yet men will take pains to cut down these trees, and set imported larches in their places! ”

“ It must be that the willow twigs, both the yellow and green, are brighter colored than before; I cannot be deceived. They shine as if the sap were already flowing under the bark, a certain lively and glossy hue they have. The early poplars are pushing forward their catkins though they make not so much display as the willows. Still, in some parts of the woods it is good sledding. At Second Division Brook, the fragrance of the senecio, decidedly evergreen, which I have bruised, is very permanent. It is a memorable, sweet, meadow fragrance. ”