in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is remarkable how modest and unobtrusive these early flowers are.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

You take your walk some pretty cold and windy, but sunny, March day through rustling woods, perhaps, glad to take shelter in the hollows or on the south side of hills or woods.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I thought the other day, How we enjoy a warm and pleasant day at this season!

We dance like gnats in the sun.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

We describe only what we have had time to digest and dispose of in our minds, without being conscious that there were other things really more novel and interesting to us, which will not fail to occur to us and impress us suitably at last.

How little that occurs to us are we prepared at once to appreciate.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When I think what were the various sounds and notes, the migrations and works, and changes of fur and plumage which ushered in the spring and marked the other seasons of the year,

I am reminded that this my life in nature, this particular round of natural phenomena which I call a year, is lamentably incomplete.

I listen to [a] concert in which so many parts are wanting. The whole civilized country is to some extent turned into a city, and I am that citizen whom I pity. Many of those animal migrations and other phenomena by which the Indians marked the season are no longer to be observed.

I seek acquaintance with Nature, ––to know her moods and manners.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As soon as those spring mornings arrive in which the birds sing,

I am sure to be an early riser….

I have an appointment with Spring.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

River skimmed over at Willow Bay last night. Thought I should find ducks cornered up by the ice. They get behind this hill for shelter….I crawled far on my stomach and got a near view of them….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

We notice the color of the water especially at this season, when it is recently revealed (and in the fall) because there is little color elsewhere. It shows best in a clear air, contrasting with the russet shores.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We are interested in the phenomena of nature mainly as children are, or as we are in games of chance. They are more or less exciting. Our appetite for novelty is insatiable. We do not attend to ordinary things, though they are most important, but to extraordinary ones.

While it is only moderately hot or cold, or wet or dry, nobody attends to it, but when nature goes to an extreme in any of these directions we are all on the alert with excitement….this is a perfectly legitimate amusement only we should know that each day is peculiar and has its kindred excitements.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

What means this changing sky, that now I freeze and contract and go within myself to warm me, and now I say it is a south wind and go all soft and warm along the way? I sometimes wonder if I do not breathe the south wind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The ducks alight at this season on the windward side of the river in the smooth water, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves and diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the frost has not loosened….

They fly to windward first in order to get under weigh….When preparing to fly they swim about with their heads erect, and then, gliding along a few feet with their bodies just touching the surface, rise heavily with much splashing, and fly low at first….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Pond. Nature is constantly original and inventing new patterns….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

No sooner has the ice of Walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the face of the virgin water. It is affecting to see Nature so tender, however, old and wearing none of the wrinkles of age. Ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if it had been melted a million years. To see that which was lately so hard and immovable now so soft and impressible.

What if our moods could dissolve thus completely? It is like a flush of life on a cheek that was dead. It seems as if it must rejoice in its own newly acquired fluidity, as it affects the beholder with joy. Often the March winds have no chance to ripple its face at all.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The barrenest surfaces are perhaps the most interesting in such weather as yesterday, where the most terrene colors are seen. The wet earth and sand, and especially subsoil, are very invigorating sights.

March 13, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I go further east and look across the meadows to Bedford, and see the peculiar scenery of March in which I have taken so many rambles; the earth just bare and beginning to be dry, the snow lying on the north side of hills, the gray, deciduous trees, and the green pines soughing in the March wind. They look now as if deserted by a companion, the snow. When you walk over bare, lichen-clad hills, just beginning to be dry, and look afar over the blue water on the meadows, you are beginning to break up your winter quarters and plan adventures for the new year. The scenery is like, yet unlike, November. You have the same barren russet, but now instead of a dry, hard, cold wind, a peculiarly soft, moist air, or else a raw wind. Now is the reign of water. I see many crows on the water’s edge these days. It is astonishing how soon the ice has gone our of the river. But it sill lies on the bottom of the meadow.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song-sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alter to alder.

This pleasant morning, after three days’ rain and mist, they generally burst forth into sprayey song from the low trees along the river. The development of their song is gradual, but sure, like the expanding of a flower.  This is the first song I have heard.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

This clear, placid, silvery water is evidently a phenomenon of spring.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the spaces of still, open water I see the reflections of the hills and woods, which for so long I have not seen, and it gives expression to the face of nature.

The face of nature is lit up by these reflections in still water in the spring.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

1860

To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases in any season in this latitude. For there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little farther every warm day from the very beginning of winter,

and the skunk-cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing in the maples on some days in mid-winter, and perhaps some cress growing a little, certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing, if not blooming and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life, or motion, or growth, is to be detected every winter.

There is something of spring in all seasons.

_____________________________________

March 8, 1859 in Thoreau’s Journal:

To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring.

How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature.