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Thoreau writes in his journal:

Minott told me this afternoon of his catching a pickerel in the Mill Brook once—before the pond was drawn off, when the brook had four or five times as much water as now,—which weighed four pounds. Says they stayed in it all winter in those days. This was near his land up the brook. He once also caught there, when fishing for pickerel, a trout which weighed three and a half pounds. He fell within two feet of the water, but [he] succeeded in tossing him higher up. When cutting peat thereabouts, he saw a stinkpot turtle in the water eating . . .

(Journal, 8:194-195)

29 January 1834. Cambridge, Mass.

A. G. Peabody checks out Grecian Antiquities; or, An account of the public and private life of the Greeks by Thomas Harwood for Thoreau from Harvard College Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 286).

29 January 1840. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

A friend in history looks like some premature soul. The nearest approach to a community of love in these days is like the distant breaking of waves on the seashore. An ocean there must be, for it washes our beach. This alone do all men sail for, trade for, plow for, preach for, fight for.

(Journal, 1:115-117)

29 January 1841. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

There is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in God, which is so solemnly preached in extremities and arduous circumstances, is only to retreat to one’s self, and rely on our own strength. In trivial circumstances I find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous I have no ally but myself, and must silently put by their harm by my own strength, as I did the former. As my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. God is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. If by trusting in God you lose any particle of your vigor, trust in Him no longer. When you trust, do not lay aside your armor, but put it on and buckle it tighter.

(Journal, 1:180-182)

29 January 1852. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway . . .

I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains . . .

I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was . . .

Heard C. [William Ellery Channing] lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him and take his thought at the same time. You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture I have heard. For, well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When I see him in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. It was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion. A thick succession of mountain passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. Yet it would be how much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if there [were] a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap!

Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.

(Journal, 3:245-250)

29 January 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

To Walden. Melvin calls the ducks which I saw yesterday sheldrakes; being small, then wood sheldrakes. He never shot any at this season. Saw a woodcock last month; never before. Killed a goshawk (which was eating a rabbit) and a cat owl lately. Says I hear the cat owl. Has got only three or four minks this year. Never saw an otter track.

(Journal, 4:484-489)

29 January 1854. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

A very cold morning. Thermometer, or mercury, 18° below zero . . . (Journal, 6:82-83).

29 January 1855. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Not cold. Sun comes out at noon (Journal, 7:154).

29 January 1856. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—Measured the snow in the same places measured the 16th and 23rd, having had, except yesterday, fair weather and no thaw . . .

Miss Minott has been obliged to have some of her locusts about the house cut down. She remembers when the whole top of the elm north of the road close to Dr. Heywood’s broke off,—when she was a little girl . . .

(Journal, 8:148-150)

29 January 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—To Great Meadow at Copan.

I go through the northerly part of Beck Stow’s, north of the new road . . . (Journal, 10:266-267).