Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/271

Rh Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise. He whom the weather disappoints, disappoints himself.

Let all things give way to the impulse of expression. It is the bud unfolding, the perennial spring. As well stay the spring. Who shall resist the thaw?

The word is well naturalized or rooted that can be traced back to a Celtic original. It is like getting out stumps and fat pine roots.

Nature never indulges in exclamations, never says ah! or alas! She is not French. She is a plain writer, uses few gestures, does not add to her verbs, uses few adverbs, no expletives. I find that I use many words for the sake of emphasis, which really add nothing to the force of my sentences, and they look relieved the moment I have canceled these, words which express my mood, my conviction, rather than the simple truth.

Youth supplies us with colors, age with canvas. Paint is costly. I think the heavens have had but one coat of paint since I was a boy, and their blue is paled and dingy and worn off in many places. I cannot afford to give them another coat. Where is the man so rich that he can give the earth a second coat of green in his manhood, or the heavens a second coat of blue. Our paints are all mixed when