west. To Abner Buttrick and Tarbell Hills. See a flock of large ducks in a line (may be black?) over Great Meadows, also a few sheldrakes. It was pleasant to hear the tinkling of very coarse brash, broken, honey-combed, dark ice, rattling one piece against another along the northeast shores to which it had drifted. Scarcely any ice now about river except what rests on the bottom of the meadow, dirty with sediment. The first song-sparrows are very inconspicuous and shy on the brown earth. You hear some weeds rustle, or think you see a mouse run amid the stubble, and then the sparrow flies low away.
March 4, 1840. I learned to-day that my ornithology had done me no service. The birds I heard, which fortunately did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation and had for background to their song an untrodden wilderness stretching through many a Carolina and Mexico of the soul.
March 4, 1841. Ben Jonson says in his epigrams, “He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.” This is true, for by vice the substance of a man is not changed, but all his pores and cavities and avenues are profaned by being made the thoroughfares of vice. The searching devil courses through and through him. His
