Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/97

Rh 9.30 To Fair Haven. Moon little more than half full. Not a cloud in the sky. It is a remarkably warm night for the season, the ground almost entirely bare. The stars are dazzlingly bright. The fault may be in my own barrenness, but methinks there is a certain poverty about the winter night s sky. The stars of higher magnitude are more bright and dazzling, and therefore appear more near and numerable; while those that appear indistinct and infinitely remote in the summer, giving the impression of unfathomableness in the sky, are scarcely seen at all. The front halls of heaven are so brilliantly lighted that they quite eclipse the more remote. The sky has fallen many degrees.

The worst kind of tick to get under your skin is yourself in an irritable mood. These are some of the differences between this and the autumn or summer night: the stiffened glebe under my feet, the dazzle and seeming nearness of the stars, the duller gleam from ice on rivers and ponds, the white spots in the fields and streaks by the wall sides where are the remains of drifts yet unmelted. Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me in this walk was the bare, lichen-covered, gray rock at the cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer.

I have so much faith in the power of truth to