Thoreau writes in his journal:
Up river on ice 9 A.M., above Pantry . . . There is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates. But why does it lodge at such regular intervals? I see this fine drifting snow in the air ten or twelve feet high at a distance… Made a roaring fire on the edge of the meadow at Ware (?) Hill in Sudbury . . . When we got off at some distance from our fire, returning, we saw a light bluish smoke rising as high as the woods above it, though we had not perceived it before, and thought that no one could have detected us. At the fall on Clematis Brook the forms of the ice were admirable . . . The coarse spray had frozen as it fell on the rocks, and formed shell-like crusts over them, with irregular but beautifully clear and sparkling surface like egg-shaped diamonds, each being the top of a club-shaped and branched fungus icicle. This spray had improved the least core—as the dead and slender rushes drooping over the water—and formed larger icicles about them, shaped exactly like horns, with the skulls often attached, or roots of horns. On similar slight limbs there were built out from the shore and rocks all sorts of fantastic forms, with broader and flatter bases, from which hung stalactites of ice; and on logs in the water were perfect ice fungi of all sizes, under which the water gurgled, flat underneath and hemispherical.
Concord, Mass. William Ellery Channing writes in his journal:
Excursion up river. Rustling oak-trees. Fine, films of cloud not produced by heat [saw] to-day quite cold. Crost the deep brook on an icy log. A variety of fine icicles. Clematis brook. Horns inverted, drip freeze as they fall. Stalactites, stalagmites, ferns green, organ-pipes, shields. Mt. Misery. Mts & river, The fire lasted long.
(William Ellery Channing notebooks and journals. Houghton Library, Harvard University)
