Henry David Thoreau

“ The effect of the snow is to press down the forest, confound it with the grasses, and create a new surface to the earth above, shutting us in with it, and we go along somewhat like moles through our galleries. The sight of the pure and trackless road up Blister's Hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again. The ice is covered up and skating gone. The bare hills are so white that I cannot see their outlines against the misty sky. The snow lies handsomely on the shrub-oaks, like a coarse braiding in the air. ”

“ You must be early on the hills to witness such a sunset,—by half-past four at least. Then all the vales, even to the horizon, are full of a purple vapor which half veils the distant mountains, and the windows of undiscoverable farm-houses shine like an early candle or a fire. After the sun has gone behind a cloud, there appears to be a gathering of clouds around his setting, and for a few moments his light in the amber sky seems more intense, brighter, and purer than at noonday, . . . like the ecstasy which we are told sometimes lights up the face of a dying man. ”

“ How new all things seem! Here is a broad, shallow pool in the fields which yesterday was slush, now converted into a soft, white, fleecy snow ice. . . . It is like the beginning of the world. There is nothing hackneyed where a new snow can come and cover all the landscape. . . . The world is not only new to the eye, but is still as at creation. Every blade and leaf is hushed, not a bird or insect is heard, only, perchance, a faint tinkling sleigh-bell in the distance. ”

“ The plumes of pitch pines are first filled up solid, and then they begin to make great snowy cassetêtes or pestles. In the fields the air is thick with driving snow. You see only a dozen rods into its warp and woof. It fills either this ear or that and your eyes with hard, cutting, blinding scales, if you face it. It is forming shelly drifts behind the walls, and stretches in folds across the roads. But in deep, withdrawn hollows in the woods the flakes at last come gently and deviously down, lodging on every twig and leaf, forming deep, downy, level beds between, and on the ice of the pools. ”

“ The steam is denser for the cold, and more white; like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky its volumes roll up between me and the moon, and far behind, when the cars are a mile off, it still goes shading the fields with its wreaths, the breath of the panting traveler. I now cross from the railroad to the road. This snow, the last of which fell day before yesterday, is two feet deep, pure and powdery. . . . From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected, which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface. ”

“ It would not be more enchanting to walk amid the purple clouds of the sunset sky. And, by the way, this is but a sunset sky under our feet, produced by the same law, the same slanting rays and twilight. Here the clouds are these patches of snow or frozen vapor, and the ice is the greenish sky between them. Thus all of heaven is realized on earth. You have seen those purple, fortunate isles in the sunset heavens, and that green and amber sky between them. Would you believe that you could ever walk amid those isles? You can on many a winter evening. ”

“ Though I see the boat turned up on the shore, and half buried under snow, as I walk over the invisible river, summer is far away with its rustling reeds. It only suggests the want of thrift, the carelessness of its owner.
Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses a particle of it.
Would you see your mind, look into the sky. Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise. He whom the weather disappoints, disappoints himself.
Let all things give way to the impulse of expression. It is the bud unfolding, the perennial spring. As well stay the spring. Who shall resist the thaw? ”

“ My life as essentially belongs to the present as that of a willow tree in the spring. Now, now, its catkins expand, its yellow bark shines, its sap flows, now or never must you make whistles of it. Get the day to back you. Let it back you, and the night.
The truest account of heaven is the fairest, and I will accept none which disappoints expectation. It is more glorious to expect a better, than to enjoy a worse.
When the thermometer is down to 20°, the streams of thought tinkle underneath like the rivers under the ice. Thought, like the ocean, is nearly of one temperature. ”

“ We are reduced to admire buds, even like the partridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice, the great red and forward looking buds of the azalea, the plump red ones of the blueberry, and the fine, sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda sleeping along its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid growing dogwood, the pale brown and cracked blueberry, etc. Even a little shining bud which lies sleeping behind its twig, perhaps half concealed by ice, is object enough. I feel myself upborne on the andromeda bushes beneath the snow as on a springy basket-work. ”

“ It is in fact a January thaw. The channel of the river is quite open in many places, and in others I remark that the ice and water alternate like waves and the hollow between them. There are long reaches of open water where I look for muskrats and ducks as I go along to Clamshell Hill. I hear the pleasant sound of running water. . . . The delicious, soft, spring-suggesting air, how it fills my veins with life. Life becomes again credible to me. A certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again. Here is my Italy, my heaven, my New England. ”

“ What a difference between life in the city and life in the country at present! between walking in Washington Street, threading your way between countless sledges and travelers over the discolored snow, and crossing Walden Pond, a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows and your own are the only objects. What a solemn silence reigns here!
Jan. 30, 1859. How peculiar is the hooting of an owl; not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. ”

“ In proportion as I have celestial thoughts is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought like? That is the hue, that the purity and transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind; for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation, accordingly, will gaze much into the sky. Fair thoughts and a serene mind make fair days. ”

“ In a caucus, a meeting-house, a lyceum, a club-room there is nothing like this fine experience for me. But away out of the town, on Brown's scrub oak lot, which was sold the other day for six dollars an acre, I have company such as England cannot buy nor afford. This society is what I live, what I survey for. I subscribe generously to this all that I have and am. There in that Well Meadow field, perhaps, I feel in my element again, as when a fish is put back into the water. I wash off all my chagrins. All things go smoothly as the axle of the universe. ”

“ What a contrast between the village street now and as it was last summer; the leafy elms then resounding with the warbling vireo, robins, bluebirds, the fiery hangbird, etc., to which the villagers, kept in doors by the heat, listened through open lattices. Now it is like a street in Nova Zembla, if they were to have any there. I wade to the post office as solitary a traveler as ordinarily in a wood-path in winter. The snow is mid-leg deep, while drifts as high as one's head are heaped against the houses and fences, and here and there range across the street like snowy mountains. ”

“ We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. It is the three-inch swing of some pendulum in a cupboard, which the great pulse of Nature vibrates clearly through each instant. When we lift our lids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle, like the cars on the railroad. ”

“ I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that any estrangement is well-founded. But my destiny is not narrowed, rather, if possible, the broader for it. The heavens withdraw, and arch themselves higher. I am sensible not only of a moral, but even of a grand physical pain, such as gods may feel, about my head and breast, a certain ache and fullness. This rending of a tie, it is not my work nor thine. It is no accident that we may avoid, it is only the award of fate that is affecting us. ”

“ The value of the pitch pine in winter is that it holds the snow so finely. I see it now afar on the hillsides decking itself with it, its whited towers forming coverts where the rabbit and the gray squirrel lurk. It makes the most cheerful winter scenery, beheld from the window, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes. The young oaks with their red leaves, covering so many acres, are also an indispensable feature of the winter landscape, and the limbs of oak woods where some of the trees have been cut off. ”

“ I find that it is an excellent walk for variety and novelty and wildness to keep round the edge of the meadow. The ice not being strong enough to bear, and transparent as water, on the bare ground or snow just between the highest water mark and the present water line is a narrow, meandering walk rich in unexpected views and objects. The line of rubbish which marks the higher tides, withered flags and seeds and twigs and cranberries, is to my eyes a very agreeable and significant line which nature traces along the edge of the meadows. ”

“ It has more life in it than any part of the earth's surface. It is where one of the arteries of the earth is palpable, visible. In winter not only some creatures, but the very earth is partially dormant. Vegetation ceases, and rivers, to some extent, cease to flow. Therefore when I see the water exposed in mid-winter, it is as if I saw a skunk or even a striped squirrel out. It is as if the woodchuck consoled himself, and snuffed the air to see if it were warm enough to be trusted. It excites me to see early in the spring that black artery leaping once more through the snow-clad town. ”

“ Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs. At Pratt's, the stupendous boughy branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky, heaven-defying, sending back dark, vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning.—The white oaks have a few leaves about the crown of the trunk, in the lower part of the tree, like a tree within a tree. The tree is thus less wracked by the wind and ice.—In the twilight I went through the swamp, and the yellow birches sent forth a yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster. ”

“ When we listen, we hear only that sound of the surf of our internal sea rising and swelling in our ears as in two sea-shells. It is the sabbath of the year, stillness audible, or at most we hear the ice belching and crackling, as if struggling for utterance.
A transient acquaintance with any phenomenon is not sufficient to make it completely the subject of your muse. You must be so conversant with it as to remember it, and be reminded of it long afterward, while it lies remotely fair and elysian in the horizon, approachable only by the imagination. ”

“ Never is there so much light in the air as in one of these bright winter afternoons when all the earth is covered with new-fallen snow, and there is not a cloud in the sky. The sky is much the darkest side, like the bluish lining of an egg-shell. With this white earth beneath, and that spotless, skimmed-milk sky above him, man is but a black speck inclosed in a white egg-shell. ”

“ It is a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig, and write my prayers on it; then, letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven; as if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. It is papyrus by the river side, it is vellum in the pastures, it is parchment on the hills. . . . Like the sere leaves in yonder vase, these have been gathered far and wide. Upland and lowland, forest and field, have been ransacked.
In our holiest moment, our devil with a leer stands close at hand. He is a very busy devil. ”

“ The preceding and succeeding days are a mere sloping down to and up from it. In the society of many men, or in the midst of what is called success, I find my life of no account, and my spirits rapidly fall. I would rather be the barrenest pasture lying fallow than cursed with the compliments of kings, than be the sulphurous and accursed desert where Babylon once stood. But when I hear only the rustling oak leaf, or the faint metallic cheep of the tree sparrow, for variety in my winter walk, my life becomes continent, and sweet as the kernel of a nut. ”

“ Now that the sun is setting, all its light seems to glance over the snow-clad pond [Walden] , and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the N. E. end. Though the bare, rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high, as I look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct, as if the pond showed its teeth. . . . How full of soft, pure light the western sky now, after sunset! I love to see the outlines of the pines against it. Unless you watch, you do not know when the sun goes down. It is like a candle extinguished without smoke. ”