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  The river is broadly open, as usual this winter. You can hardly say that we have had any sleighing at all this winter, though five or six inches of snow lay on the ground five days after January 6th. But I do not quite like this warm weather and bare ground at this season. What is a winter without snow and ice in this latitude? The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer . . .

  I see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows, many of those large, dark, hairy, with longitudinal light stripes, somewhat like the common apple one. Many of them are frozen in yet, some for two thirds their length, yet all are alive . . .

  After the lecture Thoreau and I go to Emerson’s and talk further on it. Anna Whiting is there. I ask if civilization is not the ascendency of sentiment over brute force, the sway of ideas over animalism, of mind over matter. the more animated the brain, the higher is the man or creature in the scale of intelligence. The barbarian has no society; this begins in sympathy, the perception and sentiment of personality binding the general in one. Thoreau defends the Indian from the doctrine of being lost or exterminated, and thinks he holds a place between civilized man and nature, and must hold it. I say that he goes along with the woods and the beasts, who retreat before and are superseded by man and the planting of orchards and gardens. The savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man. No civilized man as yet, nor refined nations, for all ar brute largely still. Man’s victory over nature and himself is to overcome the brute beast in him.

  7 P.M.—To the hills by Abel Hosmer’s.

  How dusty the roads! Wagons, chaises, loads of barrels, etc., all drive into the dust and are lost. The dust now, looking toward the sun, is white and handsome like a vapor in the morning, curling round the head and load of the teamster, while his dog walks obscured in it under the wagon. Even this dust is to one at a distance an agreeable object . . .

  P. M.—To Corner Spring and Fair Haven Hill . . .

  On Fair Haven a quarter of an hour before sunset.—How fortunate and glorious that our world is not roofed in, but open like a Roman house,—our skylight so broad and open! We do not climb the hills in vain. It is no crystal palace we dwell in. The windows of the sky are always open, and the storms blow in at them . . .

  Solidago strieta, Ingraham Path, well out, some days. Chimaphila maculata, three flowers, apparently but few days, while the umbellata is quite done there. Leaves just shooting up . . .