in Thoreau’s Journal:

This forenoon I walk up the Assabet to see it. The hemlocks are perhaps a richer sight than any tree. –– such Christmas trees, thus, sugared, as were never seen. On one side you see more or less greenness, but when you stand due north they are unexpectedly white and rich, so beautifully still, and then you look under them you see some great rock, or rocks, all hoary with the same, and a finer frost on the very fine dead hemlock twigs there and on hanging roots and twigs, quite like the cobwebs in a grist-mill covered with meal, –– and it implies a stillness like that; or it is like the lightest down glued on.