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27 October 1843. New York, N.Y.

The New-York Daily Tribune prints an excerpt from Thoreau’s “A Winter’s Walk” (New-York Daily Tribune, 27 October 1843:4).

27 October 1849. London, England.

The London Athenæum reviews A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

   . . . the matter is for the most part poor enough; but there are a few things in the volume, scattered here and there, which suggest that the writer is a man of habit original thinking, which with more careful culture may produce a richer harvest in some future season. The manner is that of the worst offshoots of Carlyle and Emerson.
27 October 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  This morning I wake and find it snowing and the ground covered with snow; quite unexpectedly, for last night it was rainy but not cold . . . Saw a woodcock feeding, probing the mud with its long bill, under the railroad bridge within two feet of me for a long time . . . The highest arch of the stone bridge is six feet eight inches above the present surface of the water, which I should think was more than a foot higher than it has been this summer, and is four inches below the long stone in the east abutment.
(Journal, 3:82-83)
Concord, Mass. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal:

  It would be hard to recall the ramble of last night’s talk with Henry Thoreau. But we stated over again, to sadness almost, the eternal loneliness. I found that though the stuff of Tragedy and of Romances is in a moral union of two superior person, and the confidence of each in the other, for long years, out of sight and in sight, and against all appearances, is at last justified by victorious proof of probity to gods and men, causing a gush of joyful emotion, tears, glory, or what-not,—though there be for heroes this moral union, yet they, too, are still as far off as ever from an intellectual union, and this moral union is for comparatively low and external purposes, like the cooperation of a ship’s crew or of a fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know!
(EJ, 8:260)
27 October 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  6.30 A.M.—To Island by boat . . .

  I love to be reminded of that universal and eternal spring when the minute crimson-starred female flowers of the hazel are peeping forth on the hillsides,—when Nature revives in all her pores.

  Some less obvious and commonly unobserved signs of the progress of the seasons interest me most . . .

(Journal, 5:457-458)
27 October 1855. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  P.M.—A-chestnutting down the Turnpike.

  There are many fringed gentians, now considerably frost-bitten, in what was E. Hosmer’s meadow between his dam and the road. It is high time we came a-nutting, for the nuts have nearly all fallen, and you must depend on what you can fold on the ground, left by the squirrels, and cannot shake down any more to speak of . . .

  To appreciate, the flavor of those wild apples requires vigorous and healthv senses, papillæ firm and erect on the tongue and palete, not easily tamed and flattened. Some of those apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

(Journal, 7:520-521)
27 October 1856. Perth Amboy, N.J.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Began to survey along the shore and through the woods. One of the largest and commonest trees, the tulip, in the moist ravines; its dried tulip-shaped relic of a flower, the broad flat stamens still remaining. Noticed a medicinal odor, somewhat like fever-bush . . .
(Journal, 9:136)
27 October 1857. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  The real facts of a poet’s life would be more value to us than any work of his art. I mean that the very scheme and form of his poetry (so called) is adopted at a sacrifice of vital truth and poetry. Shakespeare has left us his fancies and imaginings, but the truth of his life, with its becoming circumstances, we know nothing about. The writer is reported, the liver not at all. Shakespeare’s house! how hollow it is! No man can conceive of Shakespeare in that house. But we want the basis of fact, of an actual life, to complete our Shakespeare, as much as a statue wants its pedestal. A poet’s life with this broad actual basis would be as superior to Shakespeare’s as a lichen, with its base or thallus, is superior in the order of being a fungus . . .
(Journal, 10:129-132)
27 October 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  P.M.—Sail to Fair Haven Pond.

  A moderate northerly wind and pleasant, clear day. There is a slight rustle from the withered pontederia . . .

  We have a cool, white sunset, Novemberish, and no redness to warm our thoughts . . .

(Journal, 11:251-256)
27 October 1860. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  I have come out this afternoon to get ten seedling oaks out of a purely oak wood, and as many out of a purely pine wood, and then compare them . . .

  I then searched in the large Woodis Park, the most oaken parts of it, wood some twenty-five or thirty years old, but I found only three . . .

(Journal, 14:178-183)
27 September 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

  Here is a cloudy day, and now the fisherman is out. Some tall, many-flowered, bluish-white asters are still abundant by the brook-sides . . .

  2 P.M.—Rowed down the river to Ball’s Hill . . . The river is so low that, off N. Barrett’s shore, some low islands are exposed, covered with a green grass like mildew . . . From Ball’s Hill the Great Meadows, now smoothly shorn, have a quite imposing appearance, so spacious and level . . .

(Journal, 3:24-29)

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