Page:Autumn. From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/436

422 with that account of it, leaving me thus to be amused by the coincidence, rather than impressed as by an intimation out of the deeps.

How much forbearance, aye, sacrifice and loss, goes to every accomplishment! I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost, a man learns to speak simply at last.

Nothing is so sure to make itself known as the truth, for what else waits to be known.

Dec. 12, 1852. Colder at last. Saw a violet on the C. Miles road where the bank had been burned in the fall. Beomyces rosea, also. Tansy still fresh yellow, by the lower bridge. From Cliffs, I see snow on the mountains. Last night's rain was then snow there. They now have a parti-colored look, like the skin of a pard, as if they were spread with a saddle-cloth for Boreas to ride. I hear of a cultivated rose blossoming in a garden in Cambridge within a day or two. The buds of the aspen are large, and show wool in the fall.

Dec. 12, 1856. Wonderful, wonderful is our life, and that of our companions! That there should be such a thing as a brute animal, not human! that it should attain to a sort of society with our race! Think of cats, for instance; they are neither Chinese nor Tartars, they neither go to school, nor read the Testament. Yet how near they come to doing so, how much they