in Thoreau’s Journal:

Memorable is the warm light of the spring sun on russet fields in the morning.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song-sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. This pleasant morning, after three days’ rain and mist, they generally burst forth into sprayey song from the low trees along the river.

The development of their song is gradual, but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As I stand looking over the river, looking from the bridge into the flowing, eddying tide, the almost strange chocolate-colored water, the sound of distant crows and cocks is full of spring. As Anacreon says “the works of men shine,” so the sounds of men and birds are musical.

Something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. At the end of winter there is a season in which we are daily expecting spring, and finally, a day when it arrives….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

At Corner Spring Brook the water reaches up to the crossing, and stands over the ice there, the brook being open and some space each side of it. When I look from forty to fifty rods off at the yellowish water covering the ice about a foot here, it is decidedly purple (through, when I am close by and looking down on it, it is yellowish merely),

while the water of the brook and channel, and a rod on each side of it, where there is no ice beneath, is a very beautiful dark blue. These colors are very distinct, the line of separation being the edge of the ice on the bottom; and this apparent juxtaposition of different kinds of water is a very singular and pleasing sight.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the brooks the floating of small cakes of ice with various speed is full of content and promise, and when the water gurgles under a natural bridge you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Walking by the river this P.M., it being half open, and the waves running pretty high, the black waves, yellowish where they break over ice,

I inhale a fresh meadowy spring odor from them which is a little exciting. It is like the fragrance of tea to an old tea-drinker.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The river is frozen more solidly than during the past winter, and for the first time for a year I could cross it in most places.

I did not once cross it the past winter, though by choosing a safe place I might have done so without doubt once or twice. But I have had no river walks before.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I must not forget the lichen-painted boles of the beeches….

The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I find that the ice of Walden has melted or softened so much that I sink an inch or more at every step and hardly any where can I cut out a small cake the water collects so fast in hole. But at last in a harder & dryer place I succeeded— It was now 15 1/2 inches thick….

Photo March 3, 2016, Beede Falls, Sandwich, New Hampshire

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The red maple sap, which I first noticed the 21st of February, is now frozen up in the auger holes, and thence down the trunk to the ground, except in one place where the hole was made on the south side of the tree, where it is melted and is flowing a little. Generally, then, when the thermometer is thus low, say below freezing point, it does not thaw in the auger holes. There is no expanding of buds of any kind, nor are early birds to be seen. Nature was, thus, premature, anticipated her own revolutions with respect to the sap of trees, the buds (spiraea, at least), and birds. The warm spell ended with February 26th.

Photo March 2, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-Maying. There may be a whole month of solid and interrupted winter yet, plenty of ice and good sleighing.

Photo March 1, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This morning the air is still, and, though clear enough, a yellowish light is widely diffused through the east now, just after sunrise.