in Thoreau’s Journal:

Might I not write on sunshine as well as moonshine ?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To Hill. It is warmer and quite still; somewhat cloudy in the east. The water quite smooth, –April smooth waters. I hear very distinctly Barrett’s sawmill at my landing. The purple finch is singing on the elms about the house, together with the robins, whose strain its resembles, ending with a loud, shrill, ringing chilt chilt ehilt chilt. I push across the meadow and ascend the hill. The white-bellied swallows are circling about and twittering above the apple trees and walnuts on the hillside.

Not till I gain the hilltop do I hear the note of the Fringilia juncorum (huckleberry-bird) from the plains beyond. Returned again toward my boat, I hear the rich watery note of the martin, making haste over the edge of the flood. A warm morning, over smooth water, before the wind rises, is the time to hear it. Near the water are many recent skunk probings, as if a drove of pigs had passed along last night, death to many beetles and grubs. From amid the willows and alders along the wall there, I hear a bird sing, a-chitter chitter chitter chitter chitter chitter, che che che che, with increasing intensity and rapidity, and the yellow redpoll hops in sight. A grackle goes over (with two females), and I hear from him a sound like a watchman’s rattle, ––but little more musical.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

If it were not for the snow it would be a remarkably pleasant as well as warm day…. Can we believe when beholding this landscape––with only a few buds visibly swolen—on the trees & the ground covered 8 inches deep with snow––that the grain was waving in the fields & the apple trees were in blossom April 19, 1775… The snow goes off fast for I hear it melting & the eaves dripping all night as well as all day.  

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A driving snow storm in the night & still raging––5 or 6 inches deep on a level at 7 Am. All birds are turned into snow birds. Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter. 

The travelers carriage wheels, the farmer’s wagon are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house & read & write. We do not now go wandering all abroad & dissipated––but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts–– My life is enriched–  I love to hear the wind howl. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper––in some mean & apparently unfavorable place––in the kitchen for instance where the work is going on––rather a little cold than comfortable–– –– My thoughts are of more worth in such places than they would be in a well-furnished & warmed studio.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the New Forest in Hampshire they had a chief officer called the Lord Warden and under him two distinct officers, one to preserve the venison of the forest, another to preserve its vert, i. e. woods, lawns, etc. Does not our Walden need such? The Lord Warden was a person of distinction, as the Duke of Gloucester.

Walden Wood was my forest walk.

The English forests are divided into “walks,” with a keeper presiding over each. My “walk” is ten miles from my house every way. Gilpin says,”It is a forest adage of ancient date, Non est inquirendum unde venit venison” i. e. whether stolen or not.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely.  It will bear the closest inspection, even to the fine air-bubbles, like minute globules of quicksilver, that lie on its bottom. The minute particles or spangles of golden mica in these sands, when the sun shines on them, remind one of the golden sands we read of. Everything is washed clean and bright, and the water is the best glass through which to see it….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Speech never made man master of men, but the eloquently refraining from it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

I am surprised to find Walden completely open. When did it open? According to all accounts, it must have been between the 6th and 9th. Fair Haven must have opened entirely the 5th or 6th, and Walden very nearly at the same time. This proves how steadily it has been melting, notwithstanding the severe cold of the last half of March; i. e., it is less affected by transient heat or cold than most ponds.

The flowers have blossomed very suddenly this year as soon as the long cold spell was over, and almost all together.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season, and ground bare or not, meadows wet or dry, etc., etc., also on the variety of soils and localities within your reach.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Went to walk in the woods. When I had got half a mile or more away in the woods alone, and was sitting on a rock, was surprised to be joined by R.’s large Newfoundland dog Ranger, who had smelled me out and so tracked me. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Last night a snow-storm, and this morning we find the ground covered again six or eight inches deep — and drifted pretty badly beside.

The conductor in the cars, which have been detained more than an hour, says it is a dry snow up-country. Here it is very damp.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The long series of desultory mornings does not tarnish the brightness of the prospective days. Surely faith is not dead.

Wood, water, earth, air, are essentially what they were; only society has degenerated. The lament for a golden age is only a lament for golden men.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The atmosphere of morning gives a healthy hue to our prospects.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The last two Tribunes I have not looked at-  I have no time to read newspapers- If you chance to live & move and have your being in that thin stratum-in which the events which make the news transpire––thinner than the paper on which it is printed––then these things will fill the world for you–but if you soar above or dive below that plain—you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How unexpectedly dumb and poor and cold does Nature look, when, where we had expected to find a glassy lake reflecting the skies and trees in the spring,

we find only dull, white ice. Such I am, no doubt, to many friends.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It would be worth the while to tell why a swamp pleases us, what kinds please us, also what weather, etc., etc., – analyze our impressions.

Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is because it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life and gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge, to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life’s territory. It is musical and thrilling, as the sound of an enemy’s bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch, – of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks’ storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy March to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creature’s suffering for the sake of its experience and joy. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me. It is a backward season with me.

Perhaps we grow older and older till we no longer sympathize with the revolution of the seasons, and our winters never break up.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is surprising and memorable and, I may add, valuable experience, to be lost in the woods, especially at night. Sometimes in a snowstorm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though your reason tells you have travelled it one hundred times, yet no object looks familiar, but is as strange to you as if you were in Tartary. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. We are constantly steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, though we are not conscious of it, and if we go beyond our usual course we still preserve the bearing of some neighboring cape and not till we are completely lost or turned around, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.

Every man must once more learn the points of the compass as often as he wakes, whether from sleep or from an abstraction. In fact, not till we are lost do we begin to realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

From this hilltop I overlook, again bare of snow, putting on a warm, hazy spring face, this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it, as it were of more costly manufacture.

On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see. I see those familiar features, that large type, with which all my life is associated, unchanged.