Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/155

Rh Covered with snow and yellowish green or brown pines, and shrub oaks, they look higher and more massive. Their white mantle relates them to the clouds in the horizon and to the sky. Perhaps what is light-colored looks loftier than what is dark.

Jan. 8, 1852. Even as early as 3 o'clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like night-fall, as if it were the sound of a twilight labor.

Heading from my MSS. to Miss Emerson this evening and using the word god, in one instance, in perchance a merely heathenish sense, she inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety, &quot;Is that god spelt with a little g?&quot; Fortunately it was. (I had brought in the word god without any solemnity of voice or connection.) So I went on as if nothing had happened.

Jan. 8, 1854. Stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker on an apple-tree. How curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hind head! I ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. It is so close to the bark I do not see its feet. It looks behind as it had a black cassock open behind and showing a white under-garment between the shoulders and down the back. It is briskly and incessantly tapping all round the dead limbs, but hardly twice in a place, as if to