Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/301

Rh Jan. 29, 1860. As usual, I now see, as I walk on the river and river meadow ice, thinly covered with the fresh snow, that conical rainbow, or parabola of rainbow-colored reflections from the myriad reflecting crystals of the snow, i. e., as I walk toward the sun, always a little in advance of me, of course, the angle of reflection being equal to that of incidence.

Jan. 30, 1841. The fashions of the wood are more fluctuating than those of Paris. Snow, rime, ice, green and dry leaves incessantly make new patterns. There are all the shapes and hues of the kaleidoscope, and the designs and ciphers of books of heraldry, in the outlines of the trees. Every time I see a nodding pine top, it seems as if a new fashion of wearing plumes had come into vogue.

You glance up these paths, closely embraced by bent trees, as through the side aisles of a cathedral, and expect to hear a choir chanting from their depths. You are never so far in them as they are far before you. Their secret is where you are not, and where your feet can never carry you.

Here is the distinct trail of a fox stretching a quarter of a mile across the pond. I am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, its greater or less spaces and distinctness, and how surely they were coincident