420 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIRDS 



seeds and buds now just ripe for them on the sunny 

 side of a wood, shaking down the powdery snow there 

 in their cheerful social feeding, as if it were high mid- 

 summer to them. These crimson aerial creatures have 

 wings which would bear them quickly to the regions of 

 summer, but here is all the summer they want. What 

 a rich contrast! tropical colors, crimson breasts, on 

 cold white snow ! Such etherealness, such delicacy in 

 their forms, such ripeness in their colors, in this stern 

 and barren season ! It is as surprising as if you were 

 to find a brilliant crimson flower which flourished amid 

 snows. They greet the chopper and the hunter in their 

 furs. Their Maker gave them the last touch and 

 launched them forth the day of the Great Snow.^ He 

 made this bitter, imprisoning cold before which man 

 quails, but He made at the same time these warm and 

 glowing creatures to twitter and be at home in it. He 

 said not only. Let there be linnets in winter, but linnets 

 of rich plumage and pleasing twitter, bearing summer 

 in their natures. The snow will be three feet deep, the 

 ice will be two feet thick, and last night, perchance, 

 the mercury sank to thirty degrees below zero. All the 

 fountains of nature seem to be sealed up. The traveller 

 is frozen on his way. But under the edge of yonder 

 birch wood will be a little flock of crimson-breasted 

 lesser redpolls, busily feeding on the seeds of the birch 

 and shaking down the powdery snow ! As if a flower 

 were created to be now in bloom, a peach to be now 



^ [The " Great Snow " to which Thoreau refers several times in his 

 Journal and in Walden occurred in 1780, as we learn from the entry 

 ■for March 28, 1856.] 



