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2 January 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Saw at Clinton last night a room at the gingham-mills which covers one and seven-eighths acres and contains 578 looms, not to speak of spindles, both throttle and mule. The rooms all together cover three acres. They were using between three and four hundred horse-power, and kept an engine of two hundred horsepower, with a wheel twenty-three feet in diameter and a band ready to supply deficiencies, which have not often occurred. Some portion of the machinery—I think it was where the cotton was broken up, lightened up, and mixed before being matted together-revolved eighteen hundred times in a minute. I first saw the pattern room where patterns are made by a handloom. There were two styles of warps ready for the woof or filling. The operator must count the threads of the woof, which in the mill is done by the machinery. It was the ancient art of weaving, the shuttle flying back and forth, putting in the filling. As long as the warp is the same, it is but one “style,” so called.
(Journal, 2:134-136)
2 January 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  9 A.M.—Down railroad to Cliffs . . . We build a fire on the Cliffs. When kicking to pieces a pine stump for the fat knots which alone would burn on this icy day, at the risk of spoiling my boots, having looked in vain for a stone, I thought how convenient would be an Indian stone axe to batter it with . . . We soon had a roaring fire of fat pine on a shelf of rock, from which we overlooked the icy landscape.
(Journal, 4:440-444)

Concord, Mass. William Ellery Channing writes in his journal:

  Again walked this morning to see the coats of ice . . . Fire on cliffs of fat pine (William Ellery Channing notebooks and journals. Houghton Library, Harvard University).

New York, N.Y. Horace Greeley writes to Thoreau:

  Friend Thoreau,—

  I have yours of the 29th, and credit you $20. Pay me when and in such sums as may be convenient. I am sorry you and C [George William Curtis] cannot agree so as to have your whole MS. printed. It will be worth nothing elsewhere after having partly appeared in Putnam’s. I think it is a mistake to conceal the authorship of the several articles, making them all (so to speak) editorial; but if that is done, don’t you see that the elimination of very flagrant heresies (like your defiant Pantheism) becomes a necessity? If you had withdrawn your MS., on account of the abominable misprints in the first number, your ground would have been far more tenable.

  However, do what you will.

  Yours,

  Horace Greeley

“George William Curtis, the editor of the Putnam’s and an old friend of Thoreau, insisted on omitting certain ‘heretical’ passages from his “Excursion to Canada” without consulting the author. As a result, the manuscript was withdrawn after only three of the five installments had appeared.”

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 293)

2 January 1854. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  The trees are white with a hoar frost this morning, small leafets, a tenth of an inch long, on every side of the twigs. They look like ghosts of trees. Took a walk on snow-shoes at 9 A.M. to Hubbard’s Grove . . .

  P.M.—Up Union Turnpike.

  The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystalline and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. I wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape . . .

(Journal, 6:46-49)
2 January 1855. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  I see, in the path near Goose Pond, where the rabbits have eaten the bark of the smooth sumachs and young locusts rising above the snow; also barberry. Yesterday we saw the pink light on the snow within a rod of us. The shadow of the bridges, etc., on the snow was a dark indigo blue.
(Journal, 7:99)
2 January 1856. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Probably the coldest morning yet, our thermometer 6º below zero at 8 A. M.; yet there was quite a mist in the air. The neighbors say it was 10º below zero at 7 A.M.

  P.M. As for the fox and rabbit race described yesterday, I find that the rabbit was going the other way, and possibly the fox was a rabbit, for, tracing back the rabbit, I found drat, it bad first been walking with alternate steps, fox-like.

  There were many white rabbits’ tracks in those woods, and many more of the gray rabbit, but the former broke through and made a deep track, except where there was a little crust on the south slope . . .

(Journal, 8:79-81)
2 January 1857. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  To-day I see Parker is out with horse and cart, collecting dead wood at the Rock and drawing it home over the meadow. I saw the English servant-girl with on of the children flat on the ice hard at work on the river cutting a hole with a hatchet, but as the ice was thick and the water gushed up too soon for her, I saw that she would fail and directed her to an open place. She was nearly beat out . . .
(Journal, 9:204)
2 January 1859. Concord, Mass.
Thoreau writes in his journal:

  P.M.—To Cliff and Walden . . .

  Minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to thin ice in order that he may get in . . . Looking from the southwest side of Walden toward Heywood’s Peak before sunset, the brown light on the oak leaves is almost dazzling.

(Journal, 11:384-387)
2 January 1860. Concord, Mass.
Thoreau writes in his journal:

  8 A.M.—15º below.

  Take the whole day, this is probably the coldest thus far . . . (Journal, 13:71).

2 July 1837. Cambridge, Mass.

Thoreau completes his senior year with a final ranking of nineteenth in a class of forty-four students. With a grand total of 14,397 points, he qualifies for a part in the Commencement Exercises on 30 August (Thoreau’s Harvard Years, part 1:18).

2 July 1840. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  I am not taken up, like Moses, upon a mountain to learn the law, but lifted up in my seat here, in the warm sunshine and genial light.

  They who are ready to go are already invited.

  Neither men nor things have any true mode of invitation but to be inviting.

  Can that be a task which all things abet, and to postpone which is to strive against nature?

(Journal, 1:158)

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes to Margaret Fuller:

  I intended to ask you what rules of distribution do you adopt [for the Dial]. Here is Henry Thoreau who subscribed; but I told Weeks & Co. that he is a contributor & not to be charged; for he ought not to pay . . . One thing more—they made sad typographical errors. In Thoreau’s Persius they have printed nature for satire p. 118—(Do correct it where you see the book) and in the Latin per for pes recretam for secretam.
(The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2:310-231)

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