in Thoreau’s Journal:

Another still more glorious day, if possible. Indian summer, even. These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness. Paddled up Assabet. 

Passed in some places between shooting ice crystals extending from both sides of the stream.

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, crounching 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:

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. As I sit under Lee’s Cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frostbitten catnip, I look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene, and see with surprise the pond, a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth, reflecting water….

It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer…

 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 gemmae 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 stem 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, and there is really but one season in our hearts.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Many living leaves are very dark red now the only effect of the frost on them—the checker-berry—Andromeda—low cedar and more or less lambkill—&c. Saw & heard a downy woodpecker on an apple tree—have not many winter birds, like this & the chickadee, a sharp note like tinkling glass or icicles  —  The chip of the tree-sparrow also & whistle of the shrike is not wintry in the same way?—& The sonorous hooting owl—  But not so the jay & E. Linaria —& still less the crow.  Now for the short days & early twilight—in which I hear the sound of wood chopping.  

The sun goes down behind a low cloud & the world is darkened—the partridge is budding on the apple tree—& burst away from the pathside.  Fair Haven pond is skimmed completely over—  The ground has been frozen more or less—about a week—not very hard….

Before I got home the whole atmosphere was suddenly filled with a mellow yellowish light equally diffused—so that it seemed much lighter around me than immediately after the sun sank behind the horizon cloud 15 minutes before. — Apparently not till the sun had sunk thus far did I stand in the angle of reflection.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

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

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Look at the trees bare or rustling with sere brown leaves—except the evergreens—their buds dormant at the foot of the leaf-stalks. Look at the fields russet & withered—& the various sedges & weeds with dry bleached culms— Such is our relation to nature at the present, —such plants are we. We have no more sap—nor verdure—nor color now—

….but even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer—& a serene inward 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:

Got up my boat and housed it, ice having formed about it.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:  

At this season, I observe the form of the buds which are prepared for spring….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A rather cold and windy afternoon with some snow not yet melted on the ground. Under the south side of the hill between Brown’s & Tarbel’s, in a warm nook—disturbed 3 large grey-squirrels & some partridges—who had all sought out this bare and warm place. While the squirrels hid themselves in the tree tops I sat on an oak stump by an old cellar hole and mused.

This squirrel is always an unexpected large animal to see frisking about. My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side, and in their aspect my eye finds something which addresses itself to my nature. Methinks that in my mood I was asking nature to give me a sign—  I do not know exactly what it was that attracted my eye—  I experienced a transient gladness at any rate at something which I saw. I am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines now reflecting a silvery light—the infinite stories of their boughs—tier above tier—a sort of basaltic structure—a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. Each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. A myriad white pine boughs extend themselves horizontally one above & behind another each bearing its burden of silvery sun-light—with darker seams between them—as if it were a great crumbling piny precipice thus stratified—  On this my eyes pastured while the squirrels were up the trees.  behind me  That at any rate it was that I got by my afternoon walk—a certain recognition from the pine.  some congratulation. 

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 ploughed into & rounded off its edges—years ago and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there.  Such is the nature where we have lived— Thick birch groves stand here & there dark brown? now with white lines more or less distinct—

 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. Now, blue shadows and green rivers (both which I see), and still winter life. 

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds, tree sparrows and chickadees, then 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, 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. 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:

I think Ruskin is wrong about reflections in his “Elements of Drawing,” page 181.  He says the reflection is merely the substance “reversed” or “topsy-turvey,” and adds, “Whatever you can see from the place in which you stand of the solid objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection, always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed.”

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

To the Colburn farm woodlot. 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 this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.  It is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o-clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. November Eat-heart, is that the name of it? Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, shall I go there, or there, or there? And cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often, and at random.

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew.  

 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…and the fresh bright chestnut fruit of other kinds, glistening with moisture, brings life and immortality to light. 

 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, though once before many weeks ago it was slightly whitened for 10 or 15 minutes….There is something genial even in the first snow–& nature seems to relent a little of her November harshness.  Men too are disposed to give thanks for the counties of the year all over the land–& the sound of the mortar is heard in all houses–& the odor of summer savory reaches even to poets’ garrets.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

As I returned through Hosmers field—the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured—and as it had been a raw & windy afternoon, its light which fell suddenly on some white pines between me & it lighting them up like a shimmering fire—and also on the oak leaves & chestnut stems was quite a circumstance.

It was from the contrast between the dark and comfortless afternoon and this bright & cheerful light almost fire….After a cold grey day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I saw the sun falling on a distant white-pine wood whose gray and moss-covered stems were visible amid the green, in an angle where this forest abutted on a hill covered with shrub oaks. It was like looking into a dreamland.

It is one of the avenues to my future. Certain coincidences like this are accompanied by a certain flash as of hazy lightning flooding all the world suddenly with a tremulous, serene light which it is difficult to see long at a time.