Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/217

Rh thick, foggie weather, we sailed by an enchanted island,&quot; etc. This kind of remark, to be found in so many accounts of voyages, appears to be a fragment of tradition come down from the earliest account of Atlantis and its disappearance.

Varro, having enumerated certain writers on agriculture, says accidentally that they wrote &quot;soluta ratione,&quot; i. e., in prose. This suggests the difference between the looseness of prose and the precision of poetry. A perfect expression requires a particular rhythm or measure for which no other can be substituted. The prosaic is always a loose expression.

Jan. 19, 1856. Another bright winter day. To river to get some water-asclepias, to see what birds' nests are made of.

As I came home through the village at 8.15, by a bright moonlight, the moon nearly full and not more than 18° from the zenith, the wind N. W. but not strong, and the air pretty cold, I saw the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds on a larger scale and more distinct than ever before. There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus, in perfectly regular curves from W. to E. across the whole sky. The four middle ones, occupying the greater part of the visible cope, were