Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/66

52 attain to an unspotted innocence, for when I consider that state even now I am thrilled.

If we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we were indebted for any happier moment we might have. No doubt we had earned this at some time.

These motions everywhere in Nature must surely be the circulations of God; the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind, whence else their infinite health and freedom. I can see nothing so holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower God has built for us. The suspicion of sin never comes to this experience. If men felt this they would never build temples even of marble or diamond (it would be sacrilege and profane), but disport them forever in this paradise.

It seems as if only one trait, one little incident in human biography need to be said or written in some era, that all readers may go mad after it, and the man who did the miracle is made a demigod henceforth.—What we all do, not one can tell, and when some lucky speaker utters a truth of our experience and not of our speculation, we think he must have had the nine Muses and the three Graces to help him.

Dec. 29, 1851. The sun just risen. The ground is almost entirely bare. It is warm as