Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/190

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176
WINTER.

vines to rest on; ninth, a wood that yields mast (glandaria silva). He says elsewhere the arbustum yields ligna et virgœ.

He says, "In early manhood, the master of a family must study to plant his ground. As for building, he must think a long time about it (diu cogitare). He must not think about planting, but do it. When he gets to be thirty-six years old, then let him build, if he has his ground planted. So build that the villa may not have to seek the farm, nor the farm the villa." This contains sound advice, as pertinent now as ever. . . . "If you have done one thing late, you will do all your work late," says Cato to the farmer.—They raised a sallow (salicem), to tie vines with. Ground subject to fogs is called nebulosus. . . . Oxen "must have muzzles (or little baskets, fiscellas) that they may not go in quest of grass (ne herbam sectentur), when they plow."

Jan. 14, 1855. Skated to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall (the water having settled in the suddenly cold night) which I had not time to see. . . . A man feels like a new creature, a deer perhaps, moving at this rate. He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. There was I, and there, and there, as Mercury went down the Idæan