Log Search Results | The Walden Woods Project

19 March 1834. Cambridge, Mass.

Thoreau checks out Six Month’s Residence and Travels in Mexico by William Bullock from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 286).

19 March 1841. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

No true and brave person will be content to live on such a footing with his fellow and himself as the laws of every household now require. The house is the very haunt and lair of our vice. I am impatient to withdraw myself from under its roof as an unclean spot. There is no circulation there; it is full of stagnant and mephitic vapors.

(Journal, 1:240)

Ralph Waldo Emerson notes in his journal that he sent a copy of his book Essays to “D. H Thoreau” and 47 other people. The inscription reads “Henry D. Thoreau, from his friend, R.W.E. 19 March 1841” (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 7:546; Studies in the American Renaissance 1983, 161).

See 21 March.

19 March 1842. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

When I walk in the fields of Concord and meditate on the destiny of this prosperous slip of the Saxon family, the unexhausted energies of this new country, I forget that this which is now Concord was once Musketaquid, and that the American race has had its destiny also . . . I have been walking this afternoon over a pleasant field planted with winter rye, near the house, where this strange people once had their dwelling-place.

(Journal, 1:337-339)

19 March 1852. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Observed as I stood with Channing [William Ellery Channing] on the brink of the rill on Conantum, where, falling a few inches, it produced bubbles, our images, three quarters of an inch long and black as imps, appear to lean toward each other on account of the convexity of the bubble.

(Journal, 3:356-357)

19 March 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Observed the leaves of a dock in the water more forward than any vegetation I have noticed (Journal, 5:27).

Thoreau writes in his journal on 20 March:

Yesterday I forgot to say I painted my boat. Spanish brown and raw oil were the ingredients. I found the painter had sold me the brown in hard lumps as big as peas, which I could not reduce with a stick; so I passed the whole when mixed through an old coffee-mill, which made a very good paint-mill, catching it in an old coffee-pot, whose holes I puttied up, there being a lack of vessels; and then I broke up the coffee-mill and nailed a part over the bows to protect them, the boat is made so flat. I had first filled the seams with some grafting-wax I had, melted.

(Journal, 5:27-31)

19 March 1854. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

The meadow ice bears where shallow. William Rice 2d (?) saw a woodchuck last Sunday. Met his father in Walden Woods, who described a flock of crows he had just seen which followed him “eying down, eying down.”

Saw in Mill Brook behind Shannon’s three or four shiners (the first), poised over the sand with a distinct longitudinal light-colored line midway along their sides and a darker line below it . . .

Goodwin killed a pigeon yesterday.

Flint’s Pond almost entirely open,—much more than Fair Haven.

(Journal, 6:172-173)

19 March 1855. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

A fine clear and warm day for the season. Launched my boat.

P.M.—Paddled to Fair Haven Pond.

Very pleasant and warm, when the wind lulls and the water is perfectly smooth. I make the voyage without gloves. The snow of March 14th is about gone, and the landscape is once more russet. The thick ice of the meadows lies rotting on each side of the stream . . .

(Journal, 7:255-258)

19 March 1856. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—To Walden.

pleasured the snow again. West of railroad, 15; east of railroad, 11 4/5, average 13 2/5, Trillium Woods, 16 3/4. The last measurement was on the 7th, when it averaged about sixteen inches in the open land . . .

The thickness of the ice on Walden in the long cove on the south side, about five rods from shore, where the water is nineteen and a half feet deep, is just twentysix inches, about one foot being snow ice. In the middle it was twenty-four and a quarter on the 11th. It is the same there now, and undoubtedly it was then twenty-six in the long cove . . .

(Journal, 8:210-212)

19 March 1857. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

[O]bserved yesterday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker (Journal, 9:298).

19 March 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Painted my boat this afternoon . . .

Met Channing [William Ellery Channing] and walked on with him to what we will call Grackle Swamp, admiring the mosses . . .

It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth; very little ice to be seen . . .

(Journal, 10:306-309)