Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/113

Rh silver. It is a perfect land of faery. Le Jeune describes the same in Canada in 1636: &quot;Nos grands bois ne paroissoient qu'une forest de cristal.&quot; The bells are particularly sweet this morning. I hear more, methinks, than ever before. Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush to-day as much as he did in a burning one to Moses of old. We build a fire on the Cliffs. When kicking to pieces a pine stump for the fat knots which alone would burn this icy day, at the risk of spoiling my boots, having looked in vain for a stone, I thought how convenient would be an Indian stone axe to batter it with. The bark of white birch, though covered with ice, burned well. We soon had a roaring fire of fat pine on a shelf of rock from which we overlooked the icy landscape. The sun, too, was melting the ice on the rocks, and the water was purling downwards in dark bubbles exactly like pollywogs. What a good word is flame, expressing the form and soul of fire, lambent, with forked tongue! We lit a fire to see it, rather than to feel it, it is so rare a sight these days. It seems good to have our eyes ache once more with smoke. What a peculiar, indescribable color has this flame!—a reddish or lurid yellow, not so splendid or full of light as of life and heat.