“They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like pines, nor gray like stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses” (Thoreau 309).

It would seem through the winter Thoreau is struggling connect spiritually, but here he begins to reconnect in this chapter. He once again finds this “transcendent beauty” musing in him once again spiritual, transcendental thought.

“Such a rule of two diameters not only guides us towards the sun in the system and the heart in the man, but draws lines through the length and the breadth of the aggregate of man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height and depth of his character” (Thoreau 315).

Here Thoreau seems muse the idea of extending this analysis of pond topography to an analysis of the depth of man’s character.

“No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing, and now, when the great world for the first time puts out her hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak, she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away” (Jewett 1207).

I interpreted this quote as a passage that summed up the main character’s inner struggle. She has these social anxieties that nature allows her to escape. In this one instance telling the hunter of the bird’s whereabouts would allow her to step into the social world and escape these anxieties, but she realizes she cannot do that. Nature has been her comfort away from the uncomfortable social world, and she cannot do it wrong as a way of trying to step into the social world.