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.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

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

in Thoreau’s Journal:

But even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer —& a serene inner life—not destitute of warmth & melody—

Only the cold evergreens wear the aspect of summer now and shelter the winter birds.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We are wont to foolishly to think that the creed a man professes is more significant than the fact he is….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The sun seen setting through the snow-carpeted woods—with shimmering pine needles or dark green spruces & warm brown oak leaves for screens.

With the advent of snow & ice—so much cold white—the browns are warmer to the eye—

in Thoreau’s Journal:

About three inches of snow fell last night. How light and bright the day now; methinks it is was good as a half hour added to the day. White houses no longer stand out and stare in the landscape. The pine woods snowed up look more like the bare oak woods with their gray boughs. The river meadows show now far off a dull straw color or pale brown amid the general white, where the coarse sedge rises about the snow; and distant oak woods are now indistinctly reddish. It is a clear and pleasant winter day. The snow has taken all the November out of the sky. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me. That is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp side all summer, and thought, to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here.

But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. But my hour is not his, and I may never meet him.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

There is little now to be heard along the river but the sedge rustling on the brink.

There is a little ice along most of the shore throughout the day.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

An inch of snow on the ground this morning—our first.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This afternoon, late & cold as it is has been a sort of Indian summer. Indeed, I think we have summer days from time to time the winter through, and that it is often the snow on the ground which makes the whole difference. This afternoon the air was indescribably clear—& exhilarating—& though the thermometer would have shown it to be cold I thought there was a finer & purer warmth than in summer. 

A wholesome intellectual warmth in which the body was warmed by the mind’s contentment—  The warmth hardly sensuous but rather the satisfaction of existence….

November 24, 1860 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The first spitting of snow—a flurry or squall—from out a gray or slate colored cloud that came up from the west—This consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter– These drove along almost horizontally curving upward like the outline of a breaker—before the strong & chilling wind. The plowed fields were for a short time whitened with them—

The green moss about the barest trees was very prettily  spotted white with them—and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures—

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am made to love the pond & meadow as the wind is made to ripple the water.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Decidedly finger-cold to-night.