#118--My Tree--Early Morning Snow

There must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning.

- Henry David Thoreau

#116--My Tree--Covered in Ice and Snow

When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet;

that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go.

How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain!

The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them.

At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.

- Henry David Thoreau

#104--My Tree--Love to Think in Winter

We love to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold. Alas, the poet too is in one sense a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and serene thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest experience. Other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then.

- Henry David Thoreau

#95--My Tree--Early September Light

Happy we who can bask in this warm September sun,

which illumines all creatures,

as well when they rest as when they toil,

not without a feeling of gratitude;

whose life is as blameless,

how blameworthy soever it may be,

on the Lord’s Mona-day as on his Suna-day.

- Henry David Thoreau

#84--My Tree--Rolling on into Summer

And so the seasons went rolling on into summer,

as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

- Henry David Thoreau

#49 My Tree--Buds Willing to Burst Forth

The buds swell imperceptibly,

without hurry or confusion,

as if the short spring days were an eternity.

- Henry David Thoreau

#40 My Tree--I'm Really "Lichen" This Tree

The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield

which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there.

Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.

- Henry David Thoreau

#35 My Tree--Framing Progress in the Silver Valley

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements,

so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest

and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape,

and make it more and more tame and cheap.

- Henry David Thoreau