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The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters coitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice But such was not the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no streah it to melt or wear away the ice I never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of &039;52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days later than Flint&039;s Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to an to freeze It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature A severe cold of a few days duration in Marchof the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32x, or freezing point; near the shore at 33x; in the middle of Flint&039;s Pond, the same day, at 32+x; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shalloater, under ice a foot thick, at 36x This difference of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, shohy it should break up so much sooner than Walden The ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle In midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of the pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottoh the increased teh ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shalloater, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the sa it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and doard until it is completely honeyco rain Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of honeycoht angles as the water surface Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat; and I have been told that in the experie to freeze water in a shalloooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun froe When a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from Walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the h thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat Also, as I have said, the bubbles thelasses to melt the ice beneath

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a s, the shalloater is being warh itit is being cooledThe day is an epito and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the sue of teht, February 24th, 1850, having gone to Flint&039;s Pond to spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice with the head offor ht druan to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun&039;s rays slanted upon it frotumult, which was kept up three or four hours It took a short siesta at noon, and boo his influence In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity But in thefull of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it The fisher of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its lahich it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring The earth is all alive and covered with papillae The largest pond is as sensitive to atlobule of mercury in its tube

One attraction in co to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring coins to be honeycos and rains and warrown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through the winter without adding to er necessary I a, to hear the chance note of so bird, or the striped squirrel&039;s chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick As the weather grearmer it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated ater, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a war, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away One year I went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in &039;46, the 25th of March; in &039;47, the 8th of April; in &039;51, the 28th of March; in &039;52, the 18th of April; in &039;53, the 23d of March; in &039;54, about the 7th of April

Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a clireat extremes When the warmer days coht with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent fro out So the alligator cos of the earth One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and seeard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel -- who has corowth, and can hardly acquire e of Methuselah -- told me -- and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature&039;s operations, for I thought that there were no secrets between theht that he would have a little sport with the ducks There was ice still on the one out of the river, and he dropped doithout obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice It was a warreat a body of ice re any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them The ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a ht it likely that so pretty soon After he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seerand and iradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and , a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to hi in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was ently nibbled and cru its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it cath the sun&039;s rays have attained the right angle, and inds blow upthe mist, s with incense, through which the traveller picks his way fro rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off

Few phenoht than to observe the for down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on e a scale, though the nuht reatly multiplied since railroads were invented The ree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay When the frost co day in the winter, the sand begins to flon the slopes like lava, so it where no sand was to be seen before Innumerable little strea a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation As it flows it takes the for heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or , as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard&039;s paws or birds&039; feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excreetation, whose forms and color we see ie more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under soists The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, eray, yellowish, and reddish When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate strea ether as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forth, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those foretation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom

The whole bank, which is froh, is soe, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of aday Whatinto existence thus suddenly When I see on the one side the inert bank -- for the sun acts on one side first -- and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world andon this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is so such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly The atonant by it The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (jnai, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip doard, a lapsing; jiais, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft le lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the s of birds are still drier and thinner leaves Thus, also, you pass fro butterfly The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becoins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have impressed on the watery mirror The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in thethe streaain into a myriad of others You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward fro mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly doard, until at last with her, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the lahich the most inert also yields, separates fro channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery streae of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon sed up in the sand It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best es of its channel Such are the sources of rivers In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony systeanic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue What is er is but a drop congealed The fingers and toes flow to their extent fro mass of the body Who knohat the huenial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop The lip -- labium, from labor (?) -- laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous ealed drop or stalactite The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or sers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so enial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther

Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf What Chalyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This pheno to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has soain is round; this is Spring It precedes the green and flowery spring, as ative of winter fuestions It convinces -clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side Fresh curls spring froanic These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within The earth is not a ment of dead history, stratueologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit -- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; coetable life is merely parasitic Its throes will heave our exuviae froraves You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost coround like a dormant quadruped frorates to other clientle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a fearm days had dried its surface sons of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter -- life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses,frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, -steranaries which entertain the earliest birds -- decent weeds, at least, which ed Nature wears I a and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it brings back the su the fordom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronoyptian Many of the phenoestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy We are accusto described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Suot under my house, two at a ti, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in theirhumanity to stop them No, you don&039;t -- chickaree -- chickaree They holly deaf to uments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare andsparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a tiies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring Thethe first sli snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds The grass fla fire -- "et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata" -- as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flarass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the suain, lifting its spear of last year&039;s hay with the fresh life below It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground It is al days of June, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and froreen stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply So our hureen blade to eternity

Walden isthe northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end A great field of ice has cracked off fro from the bushes on the shore -- olit, olit, olit -- chip, chip, chip, che char -- che wiss, wiss, wiss He too is helping to crack it How handso soular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore -- a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish Such is the contrast betinter and spring Walden was dead and is alive again But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said

The change from storish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a ly instantaneous at last Suddenly an influx of light filledwas at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain I looked out the , and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already cal a suh none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for et foras of yore O the evening robin, at the end of a New England su he sits upon! I ratorius The pitch pines and shrub oaks aboutdrooped, suddenly resureener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain I knew that it would not rain anyof the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late fro at last in unrestrained co attoward ht, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond So I caht in the woods

In the h thein the e and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their coot into rank circled about over ht to Canada, with a regular honk fro to break their fast in muddier pools A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins

For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of so its coer life than they could sustain In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in s over h it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere whiteare a the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plu and blooht oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature

As every season see is like the creation of Cose--

"Eurus ad Auroraa subdita matutinis"