Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/44

30 frost work, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, great wisps that they are and ghosts of trees, with recurved twigs. The walls and fences are incased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. Already the wind is rising and a brattling is heard overhead in the street. The sun shining down a gorge over the woods at Brister's Hill reveals a wonderfully brilliant, as well as seemingly solid and diversified region in the air. The ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine needles, only one half as thick commonly on one side. The heads of the trees are bowed, and their plumes and needles stiff as if preserved tinder glass for the inspection of posterity. The pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top, and remind me of firs and even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. The crust is already strewn with bits of the green needles which have been broken off. Frequently the whole top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches are drooping and massed together, resting on one another.—But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the woodpaths are the most interesting. Here are asters (savory-leaved), whose flat, imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent