in Thoreau’s Journal:

The winter morning is the time to see in perfection the woods and shrubs wearing their snowy and frosty dress….The trees wear their morning burden but coarsely after midday and it no longer expresses the character of the tree…..

You wander zigzag through the aisles of the wood, where stillness and twilight reign.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How indispensable to a correct study of Nature is a perception of her true meaning. The fact will one day flower out into a truth. The season will mature and fructify what the understanding had cultivated.

I still recall that characteristic winter evening of December 9th: The cold, dry, and wholesome diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on,

 

—oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow, the now dark green of pines, and perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree sparrow; the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day, the short boreal twilight, the smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still free from ice; the melodious hooting of the owl….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Ah, who can tell the serenity and clarity of a New England winter sunset?

These could not be till the cold and snow came.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

….the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds, really parallel columns of fine mackerel sky reaching quite across the heavens from west to east, with clear intervals of blue sky; and a fine-grained vapor like spun glass extending in the same direction beneath the former….But how long can a man be in a mood to watch the heavens?

….What a spectacle the subtle vapors that have their habitation in the sky present these winter days! You have not only unvarying forms of a given type of cloud, but various types at different heights or hours. It is a scene, for variety, for beauty and grandeur, out of all proportion to the attention it gets. Who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago? who watches them to-day?

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

If in the winter there are fewer men in the fields and woods, — as in the country generally, — you see the tracks of those who had preceded you, and so are more reminded of them than in summer.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired. Great winter itself looked like a precious gem reflecting rainbow colors from one angle. My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come into contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery. I can generally recall, have fresh in my mind, several scratches last received. These I continually recall to mind, reimpress and harp upon.

The ago of miracles is each moment thus returned; now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of red-polls. In winter too, resides immortal youth and perennial summer.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snow-clad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine….It was summer, and now again it is winter.

Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it.

 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 gemmæ 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 stems 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. There is really but one season in our hearts.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

December 5, 1852

Rowed over Walden! A dark, but warm, misty day, completely overcast.

December 5, 1856

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:

1856:  I love the few homely color of nature at this season, her strong, wholesome browns, her sober and primeval grays, her celestial  blue, her vivacious green, her pure cold snowy white.

1859:  Awake to winter, and snow two or three inches deep, the first snow of any consequence.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Six weeks ago I noticed the advent of chickadees and their winter habits. As you walk along a woodside, a restless little flock of them, whose notes you hear at a distance, will seem to say, “Oh, there he goes, let’s pay our respects to him!”

and they will flit after and close to you and naively peck at the nearest twig to you, as if they were minding their own business all the while, without any reference to you.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Look at the trees, bare or rustling with sere brown leaves, except the evergreens; the buds dormant at the foot of the leaf-stalks; look at the fields, russet and withered, and the various sedges and weeds with dry bleached culms: such is our relation to nature at present, such plants are we.

We have no more sap, nor verdure, nor color now. I remember how cheerful it has been formerly to sit round a fire outdoors amid the snow, and while I felt some cold, to feel some warmth also, and see the fire gradually increasing and prevailing over damp steaming and dripping logs, and making a warm hearth for me. Even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer, a serene inward life not destitute of warmth and melody.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The trees and shrubs which retain their withered leaves through the winter, shrub oaks, and young white red, and black oaks, the lower branches of larger trees of the last mentioned species, hornbeams, young hickories, etc., seem to form an intermediate class between deciduous and evergreen trees. They may almost be called the ever-reds.

Their leaves, which are falling all winter long, serve as a shelter to rabbits and partridges, and other winter birds and quadrupeds. Even the chickadees love to skulk amid them, and peep out from behind them. I hear their faint, silvery, lisping notes, like tinkling glass, and occasionally a sprightly day-day-day, as they inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. They are a most honest and innocent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of all of the walker.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

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 plowed into, rounding off its edges, years ago, and I sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there.

Such is nature where we have lived.

Thick birch groves stand here and there,

dark brown now, with white lines here and there.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It has been cloudy and milder this afternoon, but now I begin to see in the western horizon a clear crescent of yellowish sky, and suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape, russet fields and hillsides, evergreens and rustling oaks, and single leafless trees. In addition to the clearness of the air at this season, the light is all from one side and none being absorbed or dissipated in the heavens, but it being reflected both from the russet earth and the clouds, it is intensely bright. All the limbs of a maple seen far eastward rising over a hill are wonderfully distinct and lit. I think we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year. It may not be warm, but must be clear and comparatively calm.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds, tree sparrows and chickadees, than 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, the 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.