Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/399

Rh to us but a certain number more of days like those we have lived, to be cheered not by more friends and friendship, but probably fewer and less, as perchance we anticipate the end of this day before it is done, close the shutters, and, with a cheerless resignation, commence the barren evening whose fruitless end we clearly see. We despondingly think that all of life which is left is only this experience repeated a certain number of times, and so it would be, if it were not for the faculty of imagination.

The wonderful stillness of a winter day! the sources of sound are, as it were, frozen up. Scarcely a tinkling rill of it is to be heard. When we listen, we hear only that sound of the surf of our internal sea rising and swelling in our ears as in two sea-shells. It is the sabbath of the year, stillness audible, or at most we hear the ice belching and crackling, as if struggling for utterance.

A transient acquaintance with any phenomenon is not sufficient to make it completely the subject of your muse. You must be so conversant with it as to remember it, and be reminded of it long afterward, while it lies remotely fair and elysian in the horizon, approachable only by the imagination.

Feb. 13, 1860. It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us,