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  Great concert of song sparrows in willows and alders along Swamp Bridge Brook by river . . .

  R.W.E. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] saw a small bird in the woods yesterday which reminded him of the parti-colored warbler.

  P.M.—To Great Meadows . . .

  Counted over forty robins with my glass in the meadow north of Sleepy Hollow, in the grass and on the snow. A large company of fox-colored sparrows in Heywood’s maple swamp close by . . . No ice visible as I look over the meadows from Peter’s, though it lies at the bottom . . .

  P.M.—To Andromeda Ponds.

  That ice of February has destroyed almost the whole of Charles Hubbard’s young red maple swamp in front of the Hollowell place. Full an acre of thrifty young maples, as well as alders and birches four to seven feet high, is completely destroyed . . .

  Tapped several white maples with my knife, but find no sap flowing; but, just above Pinxter Swamp, one red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark . . . As I return by the old Merrick Bath Place, on the river,—for I still travel everywhere on the middle of the river,—the setting sun falls on the osier row toward the road and attracts my attention . . .

  Saw E. Hosmer take up the cellar stairs. They are of white oak . . .

  The cowslip in pitcher has fairly blossomed to-day.

  I see a large flock of grackles searching for food along the water’s edge, just below Dr. Bartlett’s. Some wade in the water . . .

  I am surprised to find Walden almost entirely open. There is only about an acre of ice at the southeast end, north of the Lincoln bound, drifted there, and a little old and firm and snowy in the bottom of the deep south bay. I may say it opens to-morrow. I have not observed it to open before before the 23d of March . . .

  If we are not sensible of kindness, then indeed we incur a debt. Not to be pleased by generous deeds at any time, though done to another, but to sit crabbedly silent in a corner, what is it but a voluntary imprisonment for debt? It is to see the world through a grating. Not to let the light of virtuous actions shine on us at all times, through every crevice, is to live in a dungeon. War is the sympathy of concussion. We would fain rub one against another. Its rub may be friction merely, but it would rather be titillation. We discover in the quietest scenes how faithfully war has copied the moods of peace. Men do not peep into heaven but they see embattled hosts there. Milton’s heaven was a camp. When the sun bursts through the morning fog I seem to hear the din of war louder than when his chariot thundered on the plains of Troy. Every man is a warrior when he aspires. He marches on his post. The soldier is the practical idealist; he has no sympathy with matter, he revels in the annihilation of it. So do we all at times. When a freshet destroys the works of man, or a fire consumes them, or a Lisbon earthquake shakes them down, our sympathy with persons is swallowed up in a wider sympathy with the universe. A crash is apt to grate agreeably on our ears.

  Let not the faithful sorrow that he has no car for the more fickle harmonies of creation, if he is awake to the slower measure of virtue and truth. If his pulse: does not beat in unison with the musician’s quips and turns, it accords with the pulse-beat of the ages.

  A foul day. The scent of golden senecio recalls the meadows of my golden age. It is like sweet-briar a little.

  First kingbird. Its voice and flight relate it to the swallow . . .

  Most men can be easily transplanted from here there, for they have so little root,—no tap-root,—or their roots penetrate so little way, that you can thrust a shovel quite under them and take them up, roots and all.

  On the 11th, when Kossuth was here, I looked about for shade, but did not find it, the trees not being leaved out. Nature was not prepared for great heats . . .