Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/417

Rh A man is the hydrostatic paradox, the counterpoise of the system. You have studied flowers and birds cheaply enough, but you must lay yourself out to buy him.

Feb. 18, 1842. I have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry, and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind, I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.

It is impossible for the same person to see things from the poet s point of view and that of the man of science. The poet's second love may be science (not his first), when use has worn off the bloom. I realize that men may be born to a condition of mind at which others arrive in middle age by the decay of their poetic faculties.

Feb. 18, 1854. It is a little affecting to walk over the hills now, looking at the reindeer lichens here and there amid the snow, and remember that erelong we shall find violets also in their midst. What an odds the season makes! The birds know it; whether a rose-tinted water lily is sailing amid the pads, or neighbor