^{Note 1 in page 1007} Thoreau was able to identify many of the phenomena of the first group so completely with the seasons they epitomized that he could use one or another, regardless of descriptive context, to summon up the basic symbolic meaning of its season almost at a stroke. With the second group he moved in the opposite direction. Instead of having symbols carrying wide ranges of meaning, he could create specific ones that he could group around specific ideas, e.g., influence of the Oversoul was variously represented by images of light, depth, translucence, silence, moving air, flowing water, elevation, and certain colors.

^{Note 2 in page 1008} See R. C. Cook, Thoreau and His Imagery: The Anatomy of an Imagination,“ Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 70 (Winter 1960), pp. 1–3.

^{Note 3 in page 1008} All citations from Thoreau in my text are to The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Riverside ed., 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1893), and will be cited internally.

^{Note 4 in page 1008} Thoreau probably did not even guess that the logic of his symbolic use of white, here, would be supported by modern physics. While white light is considered to be the presence of all color, the white color of a physical object is considered to be the absence of all color, the object's surface having rejected the whole color spectrum.

^{Note 5 in page 1008} Speaking of the hope for the renewal of human spiritual values that he saw represented in these mountains, distant and indistinct on the horizon, he says: “Methinks ye take luxurious pleasure /In your novel western leisure;/So cool your brows and freshly blue, / As Time had naught for ye to do; / For ye lie at your length, / An unappropriated strength, / … The stock of which new earths are made, / One day to be our Western trade.” And singling out Wachusett from the rest as a vehicle for a pointed self-comment, he adds: “But special I remember thee, / Wachusett, who like me / Standest alone without society. / Thy far blue eye, / A remnant of the sky. /… Even beyond the West / Thou migratest, / Into unclouded tracts, /… May I approve myself thy worthy brother!” (i, 213–15).

^{Note 6 in page 1008} “Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. … I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. … Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest” (ii, 457–58).

^{Note 7 in page 1008} Even when Thoreau used gold in place of yellow, it was to intensify this particular meaning rather than to introduce traditional associations with money, though the phrase “true-blue coins” and another, “brilliant coin fresh from the mint,” applied to his symbolic “sun-fish,” indicate that these associations were not necessarily repugnant to him.

^{Note 8 in page 1008} The Service, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: C. E. Good-speed, 1902), p. 22.