Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/65

Rh Dec. 29, 1841. Whole weeks or months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mists or smoke, till at length some warm morning, perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, its shadow flitting across the fields which have caught a new significance from that accident, and as that vapor is raised above the earth, so shall the next weeks be elevated above the plane of the actual; or a like experience may come when the setting sun slants across the pastures, and the cows low to my inward ear, and only enhance the stillness, and the eve is as the dawn, a beginning hour and not a final one, as if it would never have done, with its clear, western amber, inciting men to lives of limpid purity. At evening, other parts of my work shine than I had thought at noon, and I discover the real purport of my toil as when the husbandman has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can best tell where the pressed earth shines most.

A man should go out of Nature with the chirp of the cricket or the trill of the veery singing in his ear. These earthly sounds should only die away for a season, as the strains of the harp rise and fall. Death is that expressive pause in the music of the blast. I would be as clean as ye, O Woods. I shall not rest till I am as innocent as you. I know that I shall sooner or later