in Thoreau’s Journal:

Some three inches of snow fell last night & this morning concluding with a fine rain which produced a slight glaze—the first of the winter. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a record of the mellow and ripe moments that I would keep.  

I would not preserve the husk of life—but the kernel.

When the cup of life is full and flowing over—preserve some drops as a specimen-sample. When the intellect enlightens the heart & the heart warms the intellect.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A slight whitening of snow last evening—the 2nd whitening of the winter—just enough to spoil the skating now 10 days old on the ponds— Walden skimmed over in the widest part, but some acres still open—will prob. freeze entirely to-night if this weather holds….

You cannot go out so early but you will find the track of some wild creature.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year.

Take Fair Haven Pond, for instance, a perfectly level plain of snow, untrodden as yet by any fisherman, surrounded by snow-clad hills, dark evergreen woods, and reddish oak leaves, so pure and still.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

My home is as much of nature as my heart embraces.  If I only warm my house, then is that only my home. But if I sympathize with the heats and colds, the sounds and silence of nature, and share the repose and equanimity that reign around me in the fields, then are they my house, as much as if the kettle sang and fagots crackled, and the clock ticked on the wall.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This plain sheet of snow which covers the ice of the pond is not such a blankness as is unwritten, but such as is unread. All colors are in white.

It is such simple diet to my senses as the grass and the sky. There is nothing fantastic in them. Their simple beauty has sufficed men from the earliest times.— they have never criticized the blue sky and the green grass.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops.

He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove, but he adds that it was dangerous, for even a small dead limb broken off by the wind and falling from such a height would kill a man at once.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The winter morning is the time to see in perfection the woods and shrubs wearing their snowy and frosty dress. Even he who visits them half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. The trees wear their morning burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree…the stems and branches of the trees look black by contrast.  You wander zigzag through the aisles of the woods where stillness and twilight reign. I do not know but a pine woods is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered than from this who are nearest to being my friends.  

Improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last….

My acquaintances sometimes wonder why I will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if I should associate with them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Beauty is where it is perceived.

When I see the sun shining on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

FAIR HAVEN 

When winter fringes every bough 

With his fantastic wreath.

And puts the seal of silence now 

Upon the leaves beneath;

When every stream in its penthouse 

Goes gurgling on its way.

And in his gallery the mouse 

Nibbleth the meadow hay;

Methinks the summer still is nigh,

And lurketh there below,

As that same meadow mouse doth lie 

Snug underneath the snow.

And if perchance the chickadee 

Lisp a faint note anon,

The snow is summer’s canopy, 

Which she herself put on.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As for the weather, all seasons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. I should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days, and as many cold ones in the course of the year, but the rest are all alike in respect to temperature. This is my answer to my acquaintances, who ask if I have not found it very cold being out all day….There are certain places where the ice will always be open, where, perchance, warmer springs come in.

There are such places in every character, genial and open in the coldest seasons.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Walk early through the woods to Lincoln to survey. Winter weather may be said to have begun yesterday. Why have I ever omitted early rising and a morning walk?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

My last stronghold is the forest.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions. They are the rule and character. It is the exception that we see and hear. Then I try to discover what it was in the vision that charmed and translated me. What if we could daguerreotype our thoughts and feelings! for I am surprised and enchanted often by some quality which I cannot detect. I have seen an attribute of another world and condition of things. It is a wonderful fact that I should be affected, and thus deeply and powerfully, more than by aught else in my experience — that this fruit should be borne in me, sprung from a seed finer than the spores of fungi, floated from other atmospheres! finer than the dust caught in the sails of vessels a thousand miles from land! Here the invisible seeds settle, and spring, and bear flowers and fruits of immortal beauty.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith’s shop, in the silence of the night. I cannot but smile at my own wealth when I am thus reminded that every chink and cranny of nature is full to overflowing. Such an incident as this startles me with the assurance that the primeval nature is still working, and makes tracks in the snow. It is my own fault that he must thus skulk across my premises by night. Now I yearn toward him, and heaven to me consists in a complete communion with the otter nature. He travels a more wooded path by watercourses and hedgerows, I by the highways, but though his tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A few petals of the witch-hazel still hold on.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It snowed in the night of the 6th and the ground is now covered.  our first snow 2 inches deep  A week ago I saw cows being driven home from pasture—  Now they are kept at home. Here’s an end to their grazing. The farmer improves this first light snow to accomplish some pressing jobs—to move some particular rocks on a drag, or the like—  I perceive how quickly he has seized the opportunity.  I see no tracks now of cows or men or boys beyond the edge of the wood—suddenly they are shut up—the remote pastures & hills beyond the woods are now closed to cows & cowherds aye & to cowards.

  I am struck by this sudden solitude & remoteness which these places have acquired.  The dear privacy & retirement & solitude which winter makes possible—carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than woolen feet to all walkers, cronching the snow only.  From Fair Haven I see the hills & fields aye & the icy woods in the Corner shine gleam with the dear old wintery sheen.  Those are not surely the cottages I have seen all summer. They are some cottages which I have in my mind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Never do we live a quite free life, like Adam’s, but are enveloped in an invisible network of speculations. Our progress is from one such speculation to another, and only at rare intervals do we perceive that it is no progress.

Could we for moment drop this by-play, and simply wonder without reference or inference!

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Go out at 9 AM to see the glaze. It is already half fallen, melting off. The dripping trees and wet falling ice will wet you through like rain in the woods. It is a lively sound, a busy tinkling, the incessant brattling and from time to time rushing, crashing sound of this falling ice, and trees suddenly erecting themselves when relieved of their loads.

It is now perfect only on the north sides of woods which the sun has not touched or affected. Looking at a dripping tree between you and the sun, you may see here or there one or another rainbow color, a small brilliant point of light.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

My themes shall not be far fetched—I will tell of homely everyday phenomena & adventures— Friends—! society—!  It seems to me that I have an abundance of it— there is so much that I rejoice & sympathize with—& men too that I never speak to but only know & think of.  What you call bareness & poverty—is to me simplicity: God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I love the winter with its imprisonment & its cold—for it compels the prisoner to try new fields & resources— I love to have the river closed up for a season & a pause put to my boating —to be obliged to get my boat in—

I shall launch it again in the spring with so much more pleasure— This is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation compared with the sea-side boating—where the boat ever lies on the shore. — 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.