Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/270

256 another? My life as essentially belongs to the present as that of a willow tree in the spring. Now, now, its catkins expand, its yellow bark shines, its sap flows, now or never must you make whistles of it. Get the day to back you. Let it back you, and the night.

The truest account of heaven is the fairest, and I will accept none which disappoints expectation. It is more glorious to expect a better, than to enjoy a worse.

When the thermometer is down to 20°, the streams of thought tinkle underneath like the rivers under the ice. Thought, like the ocean, is nearly of one temperature.

In winter we will think brave, hardy, and most native thoughts. Then the tender summer birds are flown.

In few countries do they enjoy so fine a contrast of summer and winter. We really have four seasons, each incredible to the other. Winter cannot be mistaken for summer here. Though I see the boat turned up on the shore, and half buried under snow, as I walk over the invisible river, summer is far away with its rustling reeds. It only suggests the want of thrift, the carelessness of its owner.

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses a particle of it.

Would you see your mind, look into the sky.