in Thoreau’s Journal:

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine….It was summer, and now again it is winter.

Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

On all sides, in swamps and about their edges and in the woods, the bare shrubs are sprinkled with buds, more or less noticeable and pretty, their little gemmæ or gems, their most vital and attractive parts now, almost all the greenness and color left, greens and salads for the birds and rabbits. Our eyes go searching along the stems for what is most vivacious and characteristic, the concentrated summer gone into winter quarters.

For we are hunters pursuing the summer on snow-shoes and skates, all winter long. There is really but one season in our hearts.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

December 5, 1852

Rowed over Walden! A dark, but warm, misty day, completely overcast.

December 5, 1856

I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

I find it invariably true, the poorer I am, the richer I am.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

1856:  I love the few homely color of nature at this season, her strong, wholesome browns, her sober and primeval grays, her celestial  blue, her vivacious green, her pure cold snowy white.

1859:  Awake to winter, and snow two or three inches deep, the first snow of any consequence.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Six weeks ago I noticed the advent of chickadees and their winter habits. As you walk along a woodside, a restless little flock of them, whose notes you hear at a distance, will seem to say, “Oh, there he goes, let’s pay our respects to him!”

and they will flit after and close to you and naively peck at the nearest twig to you, as if they were minding their own business all the while, without any reference to you.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Look at the trees, bare or rustling with sere brown leaves, except the evergreens; the buds dormant at the foot of the leaf-stalks; look at the fields, russet and withered, and the various sedges and weeds with dry bleached culms: such is our relation to nature at present, such plants are we.

We have no more sap, nor verdure, nor color now. I remember how cheerful it has been formerly to sit round a fire outdoors amid the snow, and while I felt some cold, to feel some warmth also, and see the fire gradually increasing and prevailing over damp steaming and dripping logs, and making a warm hearth for me. Even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer, a serene inward life not destitute of warmth and melody.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The trees and shrubs which retain their withered leaves through the winter, shrub oaks, and young white red, and black oaks, the lower branches of larger trees of the last mentioned species, hornbeams, young hickories, etc., seem to form an intermediate class between deciduous and evergreen trees. They may almost be called the ever-reds.

Their leaves, which are falling all winter long, serve as a shelter to rabbits and partridges, and other winter birds and quadrupeds. Even the chickadees love to skulk amid them, and peep out from behind them. I hear their faint, silvery, lisping notes, like tinkling glass, and occasionally a sprightly day-day-day, as they inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. They are a most honest and innocent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of all of the walker.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Where is my home? It is indistinct as an old cellar-hole now, a faint indentation merely in a farmer’s field, which he has plowed into, rounding off its edges, years ago, and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there.

Such is nature where we have lived.

Thick birch groves stand here and there,

dark brown now, with white lines here and there.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It has been cloudy and milder this afternoon, but now I begin to see in the western horizon a clear crescent of yellowish sky, and suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape, russet fields and hillsides, evergreens and rustling oaks, and single leafless trees. In addition to the clearness of the air at this season, the light is all from one side and none being absorbed or dissipated in the heavens, but it being reflected both from the russet earth and the clouds, it is intensely bright. All the limbs of a maple seen far eastward rising over a hill are wonderfully distinct and lit. I think we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year. It may not be warm, but must be clear and comparatively calm.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds, tree sparrows and chickadees, than usual about the house. There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P.M., a regular snowstorm has commenced, the fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet landscape is painted white, even to the horizon.

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me.

That is one peculiarity of winter walking.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Every tree, fence, and spire of grass that could raise its head above the snow was this morning covered with a dense hoar frost.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The chickadee is the bird of the wood, the most unfailing. When in a windy or in any day you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note. At this season, it is almost its sole inhabitant.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This month taxes a walker’s resources more than any other.  For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in winter.  If you do feel any fire at the season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a lichen day, with a little moist snow falling.  The great green lungwort lichen shows now on the oaks….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This morning the ground is white with snow, and it still snows.

This is the first time it has been fairly white this season….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

At the brook the partridge berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The witch hazel blossom on Conantum has, for the most part, lost its ribbons now.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Decidedly finger-cold to-night.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

There was also the columbine, its leaves still alive and green; and I was pleased to smell the pennyroyal which I had bruised, though this dried up long ago.

Each season is thus drawn out and lingers in certain localities, as the birds and insects know very well. If you penetrate to some warm recess under a cliff in the woods, you will be astonished at the amount of summer life that still flourishes there.