in Thoreau’s Journal:

 The wonderful stillness of a winter day! the sources of sound are, as it were frozen up.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I find that it is an excellent walk for variety & novelty & wildness to keep round the edge of the meadow….A narrow meandering walk rich in unexpected views & objects…The wrecks of the meadow which fill a thousand coves and tell a thousand tales to those who can read them.

Our prairial mediterranean shore….If you cannot go on the ice—you are gently compelled to take this course which is on the whole more beautiful—to follow the sinuosities of the meadow.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the winter we so value the semblance of fruit that even the dry, black female catkins of the alder are an interesting sight, not to mention, on shoots rising a foot or two above these, the red or mulberry male catkins in tight parcels dangling at a less than right angle with the stems, and the short female ones at their bases.

February 10, 1860 in Thoreau’s Journal:

I do not know of any more exhilarating walking than up or down a broad field of smooth ice like this in a cold, glittering, winter day….

February 10, 1841

I asked a man to-day if he would rent me some land, and he said he had four acres as good soil “as any outdoors.” It was a true poet’s account of it. He and I, and all the world, went outdoors to breathe the free air and stretch ourselves. For the world is but outdoors, – and we duck behind a panel.

February 10, 1860

In the cold, clear, rough air from the northwest we walk amid what simple surroundings! Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million even sees the objects which are actually around him.

In Thoreau’s Journal:

It is easier to get about the country than at any other season— Easier than in summer because the rivers & meadows are frozen—& there is no high grass or other crops to be avoided—easier than in Dec. before the crust was frozen.

in Thoreau’s Journal

In this winter often no apparent difference between rivers, ponds & fields.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

….If possible, come upon the top of hill unexpectedly, perhaps through the woods, and then look off from it….

in Thoreau’s Journal

I see great shadows on the N.E.. sides of the mts 40 miles off….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When we have experienced many disappointments, such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did.

February 5, 1841

Friday….There is something in the effect of a harmonious voice upon the disposition of its neighborhood analogous to the law of crystals; it centralizes itself and sounds like the published law of things. If the law of the universe were to be audibly promulgated, no mortal lawgiver would suspect it, for it would be a finer melody than his ears ever attended to. It would be sphere music.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A mild thawy day. The needles of the pine are the touch-stone for the air-any change in that element is revealed to the practiced eye by their livelier green or increased motion.

They are the tell-tales Now they are (the white pine) a cadaverous misty blue-anon a lively silvery light plays on them—& they seem to erect themselves unusually-while the pitch pines are a brighter yellowish green than usual- The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine & pass rays through them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Access to nature for original observation is secured by one ticket—by one kind of expense—but access to the works of your predecessors by a very different kind of expense- All things tend to cherish the originality of the original. Nature at least takes no pains to introduce him to the works of his predecessors-but only presents him with her own Opera Omnia.

Is it the lover of nature who has access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite studies? No; he lives far away from this. It is the lover of books & systems-who know nature chiefly at 2nd hand.

 in Thoreau’s Journal

Already we begin to anticipate spring and this is an important difference between this time & a month ago — We begin to say that the day is spring-like.

Is not January the hardest month to get through—? When you have weathered that—you get into the gulf-stream of winter nearer the shores of Spring—

in Thoreau’s Journal:

….skated up the river yesterday, now here, now there….the great arundo in the Sudbury meadows was all level with ice. There was a great bay of ice stretching up the Pantry, and up Larned Brook.

I looked up a broad, glaring bay of ice at the last place which seemed to reach to the base of Nobscot and almost to the horizon. Some dead maple or oak saplings laid side by side made my bridges, by which I got on to the ice along the watery shore, It was a problem to get off, and another to get on, dry shod.

in Thoreau’s Journal

We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

You glance up these paths, closely imbowered by bent trees, as through the side aisles of as cathedral, and expect to hear a quire chanting from their depths. You are never so far in them as they are far before you. Their secret is where you are not, and where your feet can never carry you.

I tread in the tracks of the fox which has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if I were on the trail of the spirit itself which resides in these woods, and expected soon to catch it in its lair.

The snow falls on no two trees alike, but the forms it assumes are as various as those of the twigs and leaves which receive it.

Here is the distinct trail of a fox stretching quarter of a mile across the pond.  Now I am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, its greater or less spaces and distinctness, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind….

The pond was his journal, and last nights snow made a tabla rasa for him.  I know which way a mind wended this morning. —what horizon it faced by the setting of these tracks—whether it moved slowly or rapidly….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Men lie behind the barrier of a relation as effectually concealed as the landscape by a mist; and when at length some unforeseen accident throws me into a new attitude toward them, I am astounded as if for the first time I saw the sun on the hillside.

Of all strange and unaccountable things this journalizing is the strangest.  It will allow nothing to be predicted of it.

in Thoreau’s Journal

Perhaps I can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall thus have taken them out of.

in Thoreau’s Journal:
To Hill and beyond. It is so mild and moist as I saunter along by the wall and east of the hill that I remember or anticipate one of those warm rain storms in the spring when the earth is just laid bare, the wind is south, and the Cladonia lichens are swollen and lusty with moisture, your foot sinking into them, and pressing the water out as from a sponge, and the sandy places also are drinking it in. You wander indefinitely in a beaded coat, wet to the skin of your legs, sit on moss-clad rocks and stumps, and hear the lisping of migrating sparrows flitting amid the shrub oaks, sit long at a time, still, and have your thoughts. A rain which is as serene as fair weather, suggesting fairer weather than was ever seen. You could hug the clods that defile you. You feel the fertilizing influence of the rain in your mind. The part of you that is wettest is fullest of life, like the lichens.

You discover evidences of immortality not known to divines. You cease to die. You detect some buds and sprouts of life. Every step in the old rye field is on virgin soil. ––– And then the rain comes thicker and faster than before, thawing the remaining part of the ground, detaining the migrating bird, and you turn your back to it, full of serene, contented thoughts, soothed by the steady dropping on the withered leaves, more at home for being abroad, sinking at each step deep into the thawing earth, gladly breaking through the gray rotting ice. The dullest sounds seem sweetly modulated by the air. You leave your tracks in fields of spring rye, scaring the fox-colored sparrows along the woodsheds,…full of joy and expectation, seeing nothing but beauty, hearing nothing but music, as free as the fox-colored sparrow,….not indebted to any academy or college for this expansion, but chiefly to the April sun which shineth on all alike, not encouraged by men in your walks, not by the divines or the professors, and to the lawgiver an outlaw….Steadily the eternal rain falls, drip, drip, drip, the mist drives and clears your sight, the wind blows and warms your sitting on that sandy upland that April day.

in Thoreau’s Journal

Let us preserve religiously, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.

Excerpt of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
Arles, 24 September 1888

If we study Japanese art, we discover a man who is undeniably wise, philosophical and intelligent, who spends his time – doing what? Studying the distance from the earth and the moon? No! Studying the politics of Bismarck? No! He studies … a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants – then the seasons, the grand spectacle of landscapes, finally animals, then the human figure. That is how he spends his life, and life is too short to do everything.

So come, isn’t what we are taught by these simple Japanese, who live in nature as if they themselves were flowers, almost a true religion?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is glorious to be abroad this afternoon, the snow melts on the surface; the warmth of the sun reminds me of summer….Ah then, the brook beyond, its rippling waters and its sunny sands. They made me forget it was winter….

The sun reflected from the sandy, gravelly bottom, sometimes a bright sunny streak no bigger than your finger reflected from a ripple as from a prism, and the sunlight reflected from a hundred points of the surface of the rippling brook, enabled me to realize summer…