in Thoreau’s Journal:

To Walden….It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind. The pond is now a plain snow field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. It is too cold for them…..I would go through the woods toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field. There is nothing so sanitive, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought….

Alone in distant woods or fields in unpretending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel my self grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine….and therefore I come out to these solitudes where the problem of existence is simplified. I get a way a mile or two from the town, into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me.

I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves along lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.