# Summer in Massachusetts/Summer in Massachusetts

SUMMER.
June 1, 1852. Evening. To the Lee place. The moon about full. The sounds I hear by the bridge: the midsummer frog (I think it is not the toad), the night-hawk, crickets, the peet-weet (it is early), the hum of dor-bugs, and the whippoorwill. The boys are coming home from fishing, for the river is down at last.
June 1, 1853. Quite a fog this morning. Does it not always follow the cooler nights after the first really warm weather about the end of May? Saw a water-snake yesterday with its tail twisted about some dead-weed stubble, and quite dry and stiff, as if it were preparing to shed its skin. . . .
Bees are swarming now, and those who keep them often have to leave their work in haste to secure them.
p. m. To Walden. Summer begins now, about a week past, with the expanded leaves, the shade, and warm weather. Cultivated fields, too, are leaving out, that is, corn and potatoes ​coming up. Most trees have leaved and are now forming fruit. Young berries, too, are forming, and birds are being hatched. Dor-bugs and other insects have come forth the first warm evening after showers. The birds have now [all?] come, and no longer fly in flocks. The hylodes are no longer heard; the bull-frogs begin to trump. Thick and extensive fogs in the morning begin. Plants are rapidly growing, shooting. Hoeing corn has commenced. The first bloom of the year is over. It is now the season of growth. Have not wild animals now henceforth their young, and fishes, too?
The pincushion galls on young white oaks are now among the most beautiful objects in the woods,—coarse, woolly, white, spotted with bright red or crimson on the exposed side. It is remarkable that a mere gall, which at first we are inclined to regard as something abnormal, should be made so beautiful, as if it were the flower of the tree; that a disease, an excrescence, should prove, perchance, the greatest beauty, as the tear of the pearl; beautiful scar let sins they may be. Through our temptations, aye, and our falls, our virtues appear. As in many a character, many a poet, we see that beauty exhibited in a gall which was meant to have bloomed in a flower, unchecked. Such, however, is the accomplishment of the world.
​The poet cherishes his chagrin and sets his sighs to music. This gall is the tree's "Ode to Dejection." How oft it chances that the apparent fruit of a shrub, its apple, is merely a gall or blight! How many men, meeting with some blast in the moist, growing days of their youth, so that what should have been a sweet and palatable fruit in them becomes a mere puff and excrescence, say that they have experienced religion! Their fruit is a gall, a puff, an excrescence, for want of moderation and continence. So many plants never ripen their fruit. . . .
The news of the explosion of the powder mills was not only carried seaward by the cloud which its smoke made, but more effectually, though more slowly, by the fragments which were floated thither by the river. M——— yesterday showed me quite a pile of fragments and short pieces of large timber, still black with powder, which he had saved as they were drifting by. . . . Some, no doubt, were carried down to the Merrimack, and by the Merrimack to the ocean, till, perchance, they got into the Gulf Stream and were cast upon the coast of Norway, covered with barnacles,—or who can tell on what more distant strand?—still bearing traces of burnt powder, still capable of telling how and where they were launched, to those who can read their signs. Mingling with wrecks of vessels, which told a ​different tale, this wreck of a powder-mill was cast up on some outlandish strand, and went to swell the pile of drift-wood—collected by some native—shouldered by whales, alighted on at first by the musk-rat and the peet-weet, and finally, perhaps, by the stormy petrel and other beach birds. It is long before nature forgets it. How slowly the ruins are being dispersed. . . .
I am as white as a miller—a rye-miller, at least—with the lint from the young leaves and twigs. The tufts of pinks on the side of the peak by the pond grow raying out from a centre, somewhat like a cyme, on the warm, dry side hill,—some a lighter, some a richer and darker shade of pink. With what a variety of colors we are entertained! Yet most colors are rare or in small doses, presented to us as a condiment or spice; much of green, blue, black, and white, but of yellow and the different shades of red, far less. The eyes feast on the colors of flowers as on tidbits.
I hear now, at five o'clock, a farmer's horn calling the hands in from the field to an early tea. Heard afar by the walker, over the woods, at this hour, or at noon, bursting upon the stillness of the air, putting life into some portion of the horizon, this is one of the most suggestive and pleasing of the country sounds produced by man. I know not how far it is peculiar to New ​England or the United States. I hear two or three prolonged blasts, as I am walking along, some sultry noon, in the midst of the still woods,—a sound which I know to be produced by human breath, the most sonorous parts of which alone reach me; and I see in my mind's eye the hired men and master dropping the implements of their labor in the field, and wending their way with a sober satisfaction toward the house. I see the well-sweep rise and fall. I see the preparatory ablutions, and the table laden with the smoking meal. It is a significant hum in a distant part of the hive. . . .
How much lupine is now in full bloom on bare sandy brows or promontories, running into meadows where the sod is half worn away and the sand exposed! The geraniums are now getting to be common. Hieracium venosum just out on this peak, and the snapdragon catchfly is here, abundantly in blossom a little after five p. m.,—a pretty little flower, the petals dull crimson beneath or varnished mahogany color, and rose-tinted white within or above. It closed on my way home, but opened again in water in the evening. Its opening in the night chiefly is a fact which interests and piques me. Do any in sects visit it then?—Lambkill just beginning,—the very earliest. . . . New, bright, glossy, light-green leaves of the umbelled wintergreen ​are shooting on this hill-side, but the old leaves are particularly glossy and shining, as if varnished and not yet dry, or most highly polished. Did they look thus in the winter? I do not know any leaf so wet-glossy.
While walking up this hill-side I disturbed a night-hawk eight or ten feet from me, which went half fluttering, half hopping, the mottled creature, like a winged toad (as Nuttall says the French of Louisiana call it) down the hill as far as I could see. Without moving I looked about and saw its two eggs on the bare ground on a slight shelf of the hill, on the dead pine needles and sand, without any cavity or nest whatever; very obvious when once you had detected them, but not easily detected from their color, a coarse gray, formed of white spotted with bluish or slaty brown or amber,—a stone-granite color, like the places it selects. I advanced and put my hand on them, and while I stooped, seeing a shadow on the ground, looked up and saw the bird, which had fluttered down the hill so blind and helpless, circling low and swiftly past over my head, showing the white spot on each wing in true night-hawk fashion. When I had gone a dozen rods it appeared again, higher in the air, with its peculiar limping kind of flight, all the while noiseless, and suddenly descending it dashed at me within ten ​feet of my head, like an imp of darkness; then swept away high over the pond, dashing now to this side, now to that, on different tracks, as if, in pursuit of its prey, it had already forgotten its eggs on the earth. I can see how it might easily come to be regarded with superstitious awe.—A cuckoo very plainly heard.
Within little more than a fortnight the woods, from bare twigs, have become a sea of verdure, and young shoots have contended with one an other in the race. The leaves are unfurled all over the country. Shade is produced, the birds are concealed, their economies go forward uninterruptedly, and a covert is afforded to animals generally. But thousands of worms and insects are preying on the leaves while they are young and tender. Myriads of little parasols are suddenly spread all the country over to shield the earth and the roots of the trees from the parching heat, and they begin to flutter and to rustle in the breeze.
From Bare Hill there is a mist on the landscape, giving it a glaucous appearance. Now I see gentlemen and ladies sitting in boats at anchor on the lakes, in the calm afternoons, under parasols, making use of nature. The farmer, hoeing, is wont to look with scorn and pride on a man sitting in a motionless boat a whole half day, but he does not realize that the ​object of his own labor is perhaps merely to add another dollar to his heap, nor through what coarseness and inhumanity to his family and servants he often accomplishes this. He has an Irishman or a Canadian working for him by the month, and what, probably, is the lesson he is teaching him by precept and example? Will it make that laborer more of a man? this earth more like heaven?
A redwing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? It is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays this egg, who determines the style of the marking? When you approach, away dashes the dark mother, betraying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red-shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chattering and uttering a sharp "phe phee-e."
I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple-tree behind me. Though this bird's full strain is ordinarily somewhat trivial, this one appears to be meditating a strain as yet unheard in meadow or orchard. Paulo majora canamus. He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, ​and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his tuning throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. Methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever heard. They are as refreshing to my ear as the first distant tinkling and gurgling of a rill to a thirsty man. Oh, never advance farther in your art; never let us hear your full strain, sir! But away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody. Its notes fall with the apple blossoms in the orchard. The very divinest part of his strain drops from his overflowing breast singultim, in globes of melody. It is the foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all that we possess and are. Or it seemed as if in that vase full of melody some notes sphered themselves, and from time to time bubbled up to the surface, and were with difficulty repressed.
June 2, 1853. Half past three a. m. When I awake I hear the low, universal chirping or twittering of the chip-birds, like the bursting head on the surface of the uncorked day. First come, first served. You must taste the first glass of the day's nectar if you would get all ​the spirit of it. Its fixed air begins to stir and escape. Also the robin's morning song is heard, as in the spring,—earlier than the notes of most other birds, thus bringing back the spring; now rarely heard or noticed in the course of the day.
Four a. m. To Nashawtuck. I go to the river in a fog—through which I cannot see more than a dozen rods—three or four times as deep as the houses. As I row down the stream, the dark, dim outlines of the trees on the banks appear coming to meet me on the one hand, while they retreat and are soon concealed in it on the other. My strokes soon bring them behind me. The birds are wide awake, as if knowing that this fog presages a fair day. I ascend Nashawtuck from the north side. I am aware that I yield to the same influence which inspires the birds and the cockerels whose hoarse courage I hear now vaunted. I would crow like chanticleer in the morning, with all the lustiness that the new day imparts, without thinking of the evening, when I and all of us shall go to roost; with all the humility of the cock that takes his perch upon the highest rail and wakes the country with his clarion brag. Shall not men be inspired as much as cockerels? My feet are soon wet with fog. It is indeed a vast dew. Are not the clouds another kind of dew? ​Cool nights produce them. Now I have reached the hill-top above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appearing as distant islands in the main. Wachusett is a more distant and larger island, an Atlantis in the west; there is hardly one to touch at between me and it. It is just like the clouds beneath you as seen from a mountain. It is a perfect level in some directions, cutting the hills near their summits with a geometrical line, but puffed up here and there, and more and more toward the east, by the influence of the sun. An early freight train is heard, not seen, rushing through the town beneath it. You can get here the impression which the ocean makes, without ever going to the shore. The sea-shore exhibits nothing more grand, or on a larger scale. How grand where it rolls off over Ball's Hill, like a glorious ocean after a storm, just lit by the rising sun. It is as boundless as the view from the highlands of Cape Cod. These are exaggerated billows, the ocean on a larger scale, the sea after some tremendous and unheard-of storm, for the actual sea never appears so tossed up and universally white with foam and spray as this, now, far in the north eastern horizon, where mountain billows are ​breaking on some hidden reef or bank. It is tossed up toward the sun and by it into the most boisterous of seas, which no craft, no ocean steamer, is vast enough to sail on. Meanwhile, my hands are numb with cold, and my feet ache with it. Now, at quarter past five, before this southwest wind, it is already grown thin as gossamer in that direction, and woods and houses are seen through it, while it is heaped up toward the sun, and finally becomes so thick there that for a short time it appears in one place a dark, low cloud, such as else can only be seen from mountains; and now long, dark ridges of wood appear through it, and now the sun reflected from the river makes a bright glow in the fog, and now, at half past five, I see the green surface of the meadows, and the water through the trees sparkling with bright reflections. Men will go further and pay more to see a tawdry picture on canvas, a poor, painted scene, than to behold the fairest or grandest scene that nature ever displays in their immediate vicinity, although they may never have seen it in their lives. . . .
Cherry birds are the only ones I see in flocks now. I can tell them afar by their peculiar fine Spring-y note. . . .
Four p. m. To Conantum. . . . Arethusas are abundant in what I may call Arethusa ​Meadow. They are the more striking for growing in such green localities in meadows where the brilliant purple, more or less red, contrasts with the green grass. Found four perfect arrowheads, and one imperfect, in the potato field just plowed up for the first time that I remember, at the Hubbard bathing place . . .
Clintonia borealis a day or two. Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear, dark-green leaves, which Bigelow describes truly as "more than half a foot long, oblanceolate, smooth, and shining." They are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate, with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a centre at the ground; and from their midst rises the scape, a foot high, with one or more umbels of "green, bell-shaped flowers,"—yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward, but without fragrance. In fact, the plant is all green, both leaves and corolla. The leaves alone—and many have no scape—would detain the walker. Its berries are its flower. A single plant is a great ornament in a vase, from the beauty of its form and the rich, unspotted green of its leaves.
The sorrel now reddens the fields far and wide. As I look over the fields thus reddened in extensive patches, now deeper, now passing ​into green, and think of the season now in its prime and heyday, it looks as if it were the blood mantling in the cheek of the beautiful year,—the rosy cheek of its health, its rude June health. The medeola has been out a day or two, apparently,—another green flower. . . .
June 2, 1854. p. m. Up Assabet to Castilleja and Anursnack. While waiting for —— and S—— I look now from the yard to the waving and slightly glaucous-tinged June meadows, edged by the cool shade of shrubs and trees,—a waving shore of shady bays and promontories, yet different from the August shades. It is beautiful and Elysian. The air has now begun to be filled with a bluish haze. These virgin shades of the year, when everything is tender, fresh, and green, how full of promise!—promising bowers of shade in which heroes may repose themselves. I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves. . . . The black willows are already beautiful, and the hemlocks with their bead-work of new green. Are these not king-bird-days,—these clearer first June days, full of light, when this aerial, twittering-bird flutters from willow to willow, and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail? The Azalea nudiflora is about done, or there was apparently little of it.—I see some breams' ​nests near my old bathing place above the stone heaps, with sharp, yellow, sandy edges, like a milk pan from within. . . . Also there are three or four small stone heaps formed. . . .
The painted-cup meadow is all lit up with ferns on its springy slopes. The handsome flowering fern, now rapidly expanding and fruiting at the same time, colors these moist slopes afar with its now commonly reddish fronds; and then there are the interrupted and the cinnamon ferns in very handsome and regular tufts, and the brakes standing singly, and more backward. . . .
June 2, 1855. From that cocoon of the Attacus cecropia which I found—I think it was on the 24th of May—came out this forenoon a splendid moth. I had pinned the cocoon to the sash at the upper part of my window, and quite forgotten it. About the middle of the forenoon S—— came in, and exclaimed that there was a moth on my window. My Attacus cecropia had come out and dropped down to the window-sill, where it hung on the side of a slipper, to let its wings hang down and develop themselves. At first the wings were not only not unfolded later ally, but not longitudinally, the thinner ends of the foremost ones for perhaps three fourths of an inch being very feeble, and occupying very little space. It was surprising to see the creature unfold and expand before our eyes, the ​wings gradually elongating, as it were, by their own gravity, and from time to time the insect assisting this operation by a slight shake. It was wonderful how it waxed and grew, revealing some new beauty every fifteen minutes, which I called S—— to see, but never losing its hold on the shoe. It looked like a young emperor just donning the most splendid ermine robes, the wings every moment acquiring greater expansion, and their at first wrinkled edge becoming more tense. At first, they appeared double, one within the other. But at last it advanced so far as to spread its wings completely, but feebly, when we approached. This process occupied several hours. It continued to hang to the shoe, with its wings ordinarily closed erect behind its back, the rest of the day, and at dusk, when apparently it was waving them preparatory to its evening flight, I gave it ether, and so saved it in a perfect state. As it lies, not outspread to the utmost, it is five and nine tenths inches by two and one fourth. . . .
The Azalea nudiflora now in its prime. What splendid masses of pink, with a few glaucous green leaves sprinkled here and there, just enough for contrast!
June 2, 1858. Half past eight a. m. Start for Monadnock. Between Shirley Village and Lunenburg I notice, in a meadow on the right ​hand, close to the railroad, the Kalmia glauca in bloom, as we are whirled past. Arrived at Troy station at five minutes past eleven, and shouldered our knapsacks, steering northeast to the mountain, its top some four miles off. It is a pleasant, hilly road, leading past a few farmhouses, where you already begin to sniff the mountain or at least up-country air. Almost without interruption we had the mountain in sight before us, its sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat color. Probably these crests of the earth are for the most part of one color in all lands,—that gray color of antiquity which nature loves, the color of unpainted wood, weather stain, time stain; not glaring nor gaudy; the color of all roofs, the color of all things that endure, the color that wears well; color of Egyptian ruins, of mummies, and all antiquity, baked in the sun, done brown,—not scarlet, like the crest of the bragging cock, but that hard, enduring gray, a terrene sky color, solidified air with a tinge of earth.
We left the road at a school-house, and, crossing a meadow, began to ascend gently through very rocky pastures. . . . The neighboring hills began to sink, and entering the wood we soon passed Fassett's shanty, he so busily at work inside that; He did not see us, and we took our dinner by the rocky brookside in the woods just ​above. A dozen people passed us early in the afternoon while we sat there,—men and women on their way down from the summit, this suddenly very pleasant day after a lowering one, having attracted them. . . .
Having risen above the dwarfish woods (in which mountain ash was very common) which reached higher up along the ravine we had traversed than elsewhere, and nearly all the visitors having descended, we proceeded to find a place for and to prepare our camp at mid p. m. We wished it to be near water, out of the way of the wind—which was northwest—and of the path, and also near to spruce-trees, for a bed. There is a good place, if you would be near the top, within a stone's-throw of it, on the north side, under some spruce-trees. We chose a sunken yard in a rocky plateau on the southeast side of the mountain, perhaps half a mile from the summit by the path, a rod and a half wide by many more in length, with a mossy and bushy floor about five or six feet beneath the general level, where a dozen black spruce-trees grew, though the surrounding rock was generally bare. There was a pretty good spring within a dozen rods, and the western wall shelved over a foot or two. We slanted two scraggy spruce-trees, long since bleached, from the western wall; and, cutting many spruce boughs with our knives, made ​a thick bed and walls on the two sides, to keep out the wind. Then, putting several poles transversely across our two rafters, we covered them with a thick roof of spruce twigs, like shingles. The spruce, though harsh for a bed, was close at hand, we cutting away one tree to make room. We crawled under the low eaves of this roof, about eighteen inches high, and our extremities projected about a foot.
Having left our packs here, and made all ready for the night, we went up to the summit to see the sun set. Our path lay through a couple of small swamps, and then up the rocks. Forty or fifty rods below the very apex, or quite on the top of the mountain, I saw a little bird flit from beneath a rock close by the path, where there were only a very few scattered dwarf black spruces about, and looking I found a nest with three eggs. It was the Fringilla hiemalis, which soon disappeared around a projecting rock. The nest was sunk in the ground by the side of a tuft of grass, and was pretty deep, made of much fine, dry grass or [sedge?]. The eggs were three, of a regular oval form, faint bluish-white, sprinkled with fine pale-brown dots, in two of the three condensed into a ring about the larger end. They had just begun to develop. The nest and tuft were covered by a projecting rock. Brewer says that only one nest is known to naturalists. ​We saw many of these birds flitting about the summit, perched on the rocks and the dwarf spruces, and disappearing behind the rocks. It is the prevailing bird now on the summit. They are commonly said to go to the fur countries to breed, though Wilson says that some breed in the Alleghanies. The New York Reports make them breed in the Catskills and some other mountains of that State. This was a quite interesting discovery. They probably are never seen in the surrounding low grounds at this season. The ancestors of this bird had evidently perceived in their flight northward that here was a small piece of arctic region containing all the conditions they require, coolness and suitable food, etc., etc., and so for how long have builded here. For ages they have made their home here with the Arenaria Groenlandica and Potentilla tridentata. They discerned arctic isles sprinkled in our southern sky. I did not see any of them below the rocky and generally bare portion of the mountain. It finds here the same conditions as in the north of Maine and in the far countries, Labrador mosses, etc. . . . Now that the season is advanced, migrating birds have gone to the extreme north or to the mountain tops. By its color it harmonized with the gray and brownish-gray rocks. We felt that we were so much nearer to perennial spring and winter. . . . ​We heard the hylodes peeping from a rainwater pool, a little below the summit, toward night. As it was quite hazy we could not see the shadow of the mountain well, and so returned just before sunset to our camp. We lost the path coming down, for nothing is easier than to lose your way here, where so little trail is left upon the rocks, and the different rocks and ravines are so much alike. Perhaps no other equal area is so bewildering in this respect as a rocky mountain summit, though it has so conspicuous a central point. Notwithstanding the newspaper and egg-shell left by visitors, these parts of nature are still peculiarly unhandseled and untracked. The natural terraces of rock are the steps of this temple, and it is the same whether it rises above the desert or a New England village. Even the inscribed rocks are as solemn as most ancient grave-stones, and nature reclaims them with bog and lichen. These sculptors seemed to me to court such alliance with the grave as they who put their names over tombstones along the highway. One, who was probably a blacksmith, had sculptured the emblems of his craft, an anvil and hammer, beneath his name. Apparently, a part of the regular outfit of mountain climbers is a hammer and cold chisel, and perhaps they allow themselves a supply of garlic also. But no Old Mortality will ​ever be caught renewing their epitaphs. It reminds one what kind of steep do climb the false pretenders to fame, whose chief exploit is the carriage of the tools with which to inscribe their names. For speaking epitaphs they are, and the mere name is a sufficient revelation of the character. They are all of one trade,—stone-cutters, defacers of mountain tops. "Charles and Lizzie!" Charles carried the sledge-hammer, and Lizzie the cold chisel. Some have carried up a paint pot, and painted their names on the rocks.
We returned to our camp, and got our tea in our sunken yard. While one went for water to the spring, the other kindled a fire. The whole rocky part of the mountain, except the extreme summit, is strewn with the relics of spruce-trees a dozen or fifteen feet long, and long since dead and bleached, so that there is plenty of dry fuel at hand. We sat out on the brink of the rocky plateau, near our camp, taking our tea in the twilight, and found it quite dry and warm there, though you would not have thought of sitting out at evening in the surrounding valleys. I have often perceived the warm air high on the sides of hills, while the valleys were filled with a cold, damp night-air, as with water, and here the air was warmer and drier the greater part of the night. We perceived no dew there this or the next night. This was our parlor and ​supper-room; in another direction was our wash-room. The chewink sang before night, and this, as I have before observed, is a very common bird on mountain tops; the wood-thrush sang, too, indefinitely far or near, a little more distant and unseen, as great poets are. It seems to love a cool atmosphere, and sometimes lingers quite late with us. Early in the evening the night-hawks were heard to spark and boom over these bare gray rocks, and such was our serenade at first as we lay on our spruce bed. We were left alone with the night-hawks. These withdrawn, bare rocks must be a very suitable place for them to lay their eggs, and their dry and unmusical, yet supra-mundane and spirit-like, voices and sounds gave fit expression to the rocky mountain solitude. It struck the very key-note of that stern, gray, and barren region. It was a thrumming of the mountain s rocky chords; strains from the music of chaos, such as were heard when the earth was rent and these rocks heaved up. Thus they went sparking and booming while we were courting the first access of sleep, and I could imagine their dainty, limping flight, inclining over the kindred rocks with a spot of white quartz in their wings. No sound could be more in harmony with that scenery. Though common below, it seemed peculiarly proper here. But ere long the night-hawks are stilled, and we hear ​only the sound of our companion's breathing, or of a bug in our spruce roof. I thought I heard once, faintly, the barking of a dog far down under the mountain.
A little after one a. m. I woke and found that the moon had risen, and heard some little bird near by sing a short strain of welcome to it, song-sparrow-like. Before dawn the night-hawks commenced their sounds again, which were as good as a clock to us, telling how the night got on. At length, by three o'clock, June 3d, the signs of dawn appear, and soon we hear the robin and the Fringilla hiemalis (its prolonged jingle as it sat on the top of a spruce), the chewink, and the wood-thrush. Whether you have slept soundly or not, it is not easy to lie abed under these circumstances, and we rose at half past three, in order to see the sun rise from the top and get our breakfast there. It was still hazy, and we did not see the shadow of the mountain until it was comparatively short, nor did we get the most distant views, as of the Green and White mountains, while we were there. . . .
We concluded to explore the whole rocky part of the mountain in this wise: to saunter slowly around it at about the height and distance from the summit, of our camp, or say half a mile, more or less, first going north, and returning by ​the western semicircle, and then exploring the east side, completing the circle, and returning over the summit at night. . . .
During this walk, in looking toward the summit, I first observed that its steep, angular projections and the brows of the rocks were the parts chiefly covered with dark brown lichens, umbilicaria, etc., as if they were to grow on the ridge and slopes of a man's nose only. It was the steepest and most exposed parts of the high rocks alone on which they grew, where you would think it most difficult for them to cling. They also covered the more rounded brows on the sides of the mountain, especially on the east side, where they were very dense, fine, crisp, and firm, like a sort of shagreen, giving a firm hold to the feet where it was needed. It was these that gave that Ararat brown color of antiquity to these portions of the mountain, which a few miles distant could not be accounted for, compared with the more prevalent gray. From the sky blue you pass through the misty gray of the rocks to this darker and more terrene color. The temples of the mountain are covered with lichens, which color it for miles. . . .
We had thus made a pretty complete survey of the top of the mountain. It is a very unique walk, and would be almost equally interesting to take if it were not elevated above the ​surrounding valleys. It often reminded me of my walks on the beach, and suggested how much both depend for their sublimity on solitude and dreariness. In both cases we feel the presence of some vast, titanic power. The rocks and valleys and bogs and rain pools of the mountain are so wild and unfamiliar still that you do not recognize the one you left fifteen minutes before. This rocky region, forming what you may call the top of the mountain, must be more than two miles long by one wide in the middle, and you would need to ramble round it many times before it would begin to be familiar. . . .
We proceeded to get our tea on the summit, in the very place where I had made my bed for a night some fifteen years before. . . . It was interesting to watch from that height the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the landscape. You could hardly distinguish them from forests. It reminded me of similar shadows seen on the sea from the high bank of Cape Cod beach. There the perfect equality of the sea atoned for the comparatively slight elevation of the bank. . . . In the valley or on the plain you do not commonly notice the shadow of a cloud unless you are in it, but on a mountain top or on a lower elevation in a plane country, or by the sea-side, the shadows of clouds flitting over the landscape are a never-failing source of ​amusement. It is commonly easy enough to refer a shadow to its cloud, since in one direction its form is perceived with sufficient accuracy. Yet I was surprised to observe that a long, straggling, downy cumulus, extending north and south a few miles east of us, when the sun was perhaps an hour high, cast its shadow along the base of the Peterboro hills, and did not fall on the other side, as I should have expected. It proved the clouds not so high as I had supposed. . . . It was pleasant enough to see one man's farm in the shadow of a cloud, which perhaps he thought covered all the Northern States, while his neighbor's farm was in sunshine.
June, 4th. At six a. m. we began to descend. As you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it is interesting to see how it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression.
June 2, 1859. Found, within three rods of Flint's Pond, a rose-breasted grossbeak's nest, and one fresh egg (three on the 4th). It was in a thicket where there was much catbriar, in a high blueberry bush, some five feet from the ground, in the forks of the bush, and of very loose construction, being made of the dead gray extremities of the catbriar with its tendrils (and ​some of them had dropped on the ground beneath), and this was lined, lined merely, with fine brown stems of weeds, like pinweeds, without any leaves or anything else, a slight nest on the whole. Saw the birds. The male uttered a very peculiar sharp clicking or squeaking note of alarm while I was near the nest. The egg is thickly spotted with reddish brown on a pale blue ground (not white ground, as Buonaparte and the New York ornithologist says), like a hermit thrush's, but rounder, very delicate.
June 2, 1860. A boy brought me yesterday a nest with two Maryland yellow-throat's eggs and two cow-bird's eggs in it, and said that they were all found together.
You see now in suitable shallow and warm places, where there is a sandy bottom, the nests of the bream begun, circular hollows recently excavated, weeds, confervæ, and other rubbish neatly removed, and many whitish root fibres of weeds left bare and exposed.
8 p. m. Up Assabet. Bats go over, and a king-bird very late. . . . Ever and anon we hear the stake-driver from a distance. There is a more distinct sound from animals than by day, and an occasional bull-frog's trump is heard. Turning the island, I hear a very faint and slight screwing or working sound once, and suspect a screech owl, which I afterwards see on an oak. I ​soon hear its mournful scream, probably to its mate; not loud now, but though within thirty or thirty-two rods, sounding a mile off. I hear it louder from my bed at night.
June 3, 1838. Walden.
"True, our converse a stranger is to speech;
Only the practised ear can catch the surging words That break and die upon thy pebbled lips. Thy flow of thought is noiseless as the lapse of thy own waters, Wafted as is the morning mist up from thy surface, So that the passive soul doth breathe it in, And is infected with the truth thou wouldst express."
June 3, 1853. p. m. To Anursnack. By way of the Linnæa, which I find is not yet out. That thick pine wood is full of birds. . . . The painted cup is in its prime. It reddens the meadow, Painted Cup Meadow. It is a splendid show of brilliant scarlet, the color of the cardinal flower and surpassing it in mass and profusion. They first appear on the side of the hill, on dryer ground, half a dozen inches high, and the color is most striking then, when it is most rare and precious: but they now cover the meadow mingled with buttercups, etc., and many are more than eight inches high. I do not like the name. It does not remind me of a cup, rather of a flame when it first appears. It might be called flame flower, or scarlet tip. Here is a large meadow full of it, and yet very ​few in the town have ever seen it. It is startling to see a leaf thus brilliantly painted, as if its tip were dipped into some scarlet tincture, surpassing most flowers in intensity of color.
Seen from Anursnack the woods now appear full-leafed, smooth green, no longer hoary, and the pines a dark mulberry, not green. But you are still covered with lint as you go through the copses. Summer begins when the hoariness disappears from the forest as you look down on it, and gives place thus to smooth green, full and universal.
The song of the robin and the chirp (?) of the chip-bird now begin prominently to usher in and to conclude the day. The robin's song seems not so loud as in the early spring, perhaps be cause there are so many other sounds at present.
June 3, 1854. 9 a. m. To Fair Haven. Going up Fair Haven Hill, the blossoms of the huckleberries and blueberries imparted a sweet scent to the whole hillside. . . . On the pond played a long time with the bubbles which we made with our paddles on the smooth, perhaps unctuous surface, in which little hemispherical cases we saw ourselves and boat, small, black, and distinct, with a fainter reflection on the opposite side of the bubble (head to head). These lasted sometimes a minute before they burst. They reminded me more of Italy than of New ​England. . . . Thought how many times other similar bubbles, which had now burst, had reflected here the Indian, his canoe and paddle, with the same faithfulness that they now image me and my boat.
June 3, 1856. While running a line in the woods close to the water on the southwest side of Loring's Pond, I observed a chickadee sitting quietly within a few feet. Suspecting a nest, I looked and found it in a small, hollow maple stump, which was about five inches in diameter and two feet high. I looked down about a foot, and could just discern the eggs. Breaking off a little, I managed to get my hand in and took out some eggs. There were seven, making by their number an unusual figure, as they lay in the nest, a sort of egg rosette, a circle around, with one or more in the middle. In the mean while the bird sat silent, though rather restless, within three feet. The nest was very thick and warm, of average depth, and made of the bluish slate rabbit's (?) fur. The eggs were a perfect oval, five-eighths of an inch long, white, with small reddish-brown or rusty spots, especially about larger end, partly developed. The bird sat on the remaining eggs next day. I called off the boy in another direction that he might not find it.
Picked up a young wood tortoise about an ​inch and a half long, but very orbicular. Its scales very distinct, and, as usual, very finely and distinctly sculptured; but there was no orange on it, only buff or leather color on the sides beneath. So the one of similar rounded form and size, and with distinct scales, but faint yellow spots on back, must have been a young spotted turtle, I think, after all.
June 3, 1857. p. m. To White Cedar Swamp. . . . I see a branch of Salix lucida which has been broken off, probably by the ice in the winter, and come down from far up stream, and lodged, butt downward, amid some bushes, where it has put forth pink fibres from the butt end in the water, and is growing vigorously, though not rooted in the bottom. Thus detained, it begins to sprout and send its pink fibres down to the mud, and finally the water, getting down to the summer level, leaves it rooted in the bank. . . .
The pitch pine at Hemlocks is in bloom. The sterile flowers are yellowish, while those of the Pinus resinosa are dark purple. As usual, when I jar them, the pollen rises in a little cloud about the pistillate flowers and the tops of the twigs, there being a little wind. . . .
I have several friends and acquaintances who are very good companions in the house, or for an afternoon walk, but whom I cannot make up ​my mind to make a longer excursion with, for I discover all at once that they are too gentle manly in manners, dress, and all their habits. I see in my mind s eye that they wear black coats, considerable starched linen, glossy boots and shoes, and it is out of the question. It is a great disadvantage for a traveler to be a gentleman of this kind, he is so ill-treated, only a prey to landlords. It would be too much of a circumstance to enter a strange town or house with such a companion. You could not travel incognito. You might get into the papers. You should travel as a common man. If such a one were to set out to make a walking journey, he would betray himself at every step. Every one would see that he was trying an experiment, as plainly as they see that a lame man is lame by his limping. The natives would bow to him, other gentlemen would invite him to ride, conductors would warn him that this was the second-class car, and many would take him for a clergyman, and so he would be continually pestered and balked and run upon. He could not see the natives at all. Instead of going in quietly and sitting by the kitchen fire, he would be shown into a cold parlor, there to confront a fire-board and excite a commotion in a whole family. The women would scatter at his approach, and the husbands and sons would go right off to hunt up ​their black coats, for they all have them. They are as cheap as dirt. He would go trailing his limbs along the highways, mere bait for corpulent innholders, as a frog's leg is trolled along a stream to catch pickerel, and his part of the profits would be the frog's. No, you must be a common man, or at least travel as one, and then nobody will know you are there or have been there. I could not undertake a simple pedestrian excursion with one of these, because to enter a village or a hotel or a private house with such a one would be too great a circumstance, would create too great a stir. You would not go half as far with the same means, for the price of board and lodging would rise everywhere; so much you have to pay for wearing that kind of coat. Not that the difference is in the coat at all, for the character of the scurf is determined by that of the true liber beneath. Innkeepers, stablers, conductors, clergymen, know a true way faring man at first sight, and let him alone. It is of no use to shove your gaiter shoes a mile further than usual. Sometimes it is mere shiftlessness or want of originality; the clothes wear them. Sometimes it is egoism that cannot afford to be treated like a common man; they wear the clothes. They wish to be at least fully appreciated by every stage-driver and school-boy. They would like well enough to see a new place, ​perhaps, but then they would like to be regarded as important public personages. They would consider it a misfortune if their names were left out of the published list of passengers, because they came in the steerage, an obscurity from which they might never emerge.
June 3, 1860. These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few, and the sorrel not yet in its prime. Perceive the meadow fragrance. . . . The roads are strewn with red maple seed. The pine shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distinct impression, even at some distance, of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green. Tree-toads heard. There are various sweet scents in the air now. Especially as I go along an arbor-vitæ hedge, I perceive a very distinct fragrance like strawberries from it.
June 4, 1852. The birds sing at dawn. What sounds to be awakened by! If only our sleep, our dreams are such as to harmonize with the song, the warbling of the birds ushering in the day. They appear comparatively silent an hour or two later.
The dandelions are almost all gone to seed, and children may now see if "your mother wants you." . . . Lupines in prime. The ​Canada snapdragon, that little blue flower that lasts so long, grows with the lupines under Fair Haven. The early chickweed? with the star-shaped flower, cerastium? is common in fields now.
June 4, 1853. The date of the introduction of the Rhododendron maximum into Concord is worth preserving, May 16, 1853. They were small plants one to four feet high, some with large flower buds, twenty-five cents apiece, and I noticed the next day one or more in every front yard on each side of the street, and the in habitants out watering them. Said to be the most splendid native flower in Massachusetts. In a swamp in Medfield. I hear to-day that one in town has blossomed. . . . The clintonia is abundant in Hubbard's shady swamp, along by the foot of the hill, and in its prime. Look there for its berries. Commonly four leaves there with an obtuse point.—The lady's slipper leaf out, so rich, dark green and smooth, having several channels. The bull-frog now begins to be heard at night regularly, has taken the place of the hylodes.
Looked over the earliest town records at the clerk's office this evening, the old book containing grants of land. Am surprised to find such names as "Wallden Pond" and "Fair Haven" as early as 1653, and apparently '52; also under ​the first date, at least, "2d Division," the rivers as North and South rivers (not Assabet at that date), "Swamp Bridge," apparently on Back road, "Goose Pond," "Mr. Flint's Pond," "Nutt Meadow," "Willow Swamp," "Spruce Swamp," etc., etc. . . . It is pleasing to read these evergreen wilderness names, now, perchance, cleared fields and meadows, said to be redeemed. The 2d Division appears to have been a very large tract between the two rivers.
June 4, 1854. 8 a. m. Up Assabet with B—— and B——.
These warm and dry days which put Spring far behind, the sound of the crickets at noon has a new value and significance, so severe and cool. It is the iced cream of song. It is modulated shade.
I see now, here and there, deep furrows in the sandy bottom, two or three inches wide, leading from the middle of the river toward the side, and a clam on its edge at the end of each. There are distinct white lines. Plainly, then, about these times the clams are coming up to the shore, and I have caught them in the act.
p. m. To Walden. Now is the time to observe the leaves, so fair in color and so perfect in form. I stood over a sprig of chokeberry with fair and perfect glossy, green, obovate and serrate leaves in the woods this p. m., as if it ​were a rare flower. Now the various forms of oak leaves in sproutlands, wet-glossy, as if newly painted green and varnished, attract me. The chinquapin and black shrub oaks have such leaves as I fancy crowns were made of. And in the washing breeze the lighter under-sides begin to show, and a new light is flashed upon the year, lighting up and enlivening the landscape. Perhaps, on the whole, as most of the undersides are of a glaucous hue, they add to the glaucous mistiness of the atmosphere which now has begun to prevail. The mountains are hidden. The first drought may be beginning. The dust is powdery in the street, and we do not always have dew in the night.
In some cases Fame is perpetually false and unjust. Or rather I should say that she never recognizes the simple heroism of an action, but only as connected with its apparent consequence. She praises the interested energy of the Boston Tea Party, but will be comparatively silent about the more bloody and disinterestedly heroic attack on the Boston Court House, simply because the latter was unsuccessful. Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs. The truest acts of heroism never reach her ear, are never published by her trumpet.
June 4, 1855. p. m. To Hubbard's Close. ​White clover out probably some days; also red, as long. . . . It has just cleared off after this first rain of consequence for a long time, and now I observe the shadows of massive clouds still floating here and there in the peculiarly blue sky. These dark shadows on field and wood are the more remarkable by contrast to the light, yellow-green foliage, and where they rest on evergreens, they are doubly dark, like dark rings about the eyes of June. Great white-bosomed clouds, darker beneath, float through the clearest sky, and are seen against its delicious blue, such a sky as we have not had before. This is after the first important rain at this season. The song of birds is more lively and seems to have a new character; a new season has commenced. In the woods I hear the tanager, the chewink, and the redeye. It is fairly summer, and mosquitoes begin to sting in earnest. . . . There are now many potentillas ascendant, and the Erigeron bellidifolium I see sixteen inches high and quite handsome. . . . Now the crimson velvety leaves of the black oak, showing also a crimson edge on the downy undersides, are beautiful as a flower, and the more salmon-colored white oak.
​June 4, 1857. p. m. To Bare Hill. . . . One thing that chiefly distinguishes this season from three weeks ago is that fine serene undertone or earth-song, as we go by sunny brooks and hillsides, the creak of crickets, which affects our thoughts so favorably, imparting its own serenity. It is time now to bring our philosophy out of doors. Our thoughts pillow themselves unconsciously in the trough of this serene rippling sea of sound. Now first we begin to be peripatetics. No longer our ears can be content with the bald echoing earth, but everywhere recline on the spring-cushion of a cricket's chirp. These rills that ripple from every hillside become at length a universal sea of sound, nourishing our ears when we are most unconscious. . . . In the high pasture behind Jacob Baker's, soon after coming out of the wood, I scare up a baywing. She runs several rods close to the ground through the thin grass, and then lurks behind tussocks, etc. The nest has four eggs, dull pinkish white with brown spots. It is low in the ground, made of stubble lined with white horse-hair.
June, 4, 1860. The foliage of the elms over the street is dense and heavy already, comparatively. The black-poll warblers appear to have left, and some others, if not the warblers generally, with this first clear, bright, and warm ​peculiarly June weather, immediately after the May rain. About a month ago, after the stormy and cold winds of March and April, and the (in common years) rain and high water, the ducks, etc., left us for the north. Now there is a similar departure of the warblers, on the expansion of the leaves and advent of yet warmer weather. Their season with us, i. e., the season of those that go further, is when the buds are bursting, till the leaves are about expanded, and probably they follow these phenomena northward till they get to their breeding places, flying from tree to tree, i. e., to the next tree north which contains their insect prey. . . .
The clear brightness of June was well represented yesterday by the buttercups (Ranunculus bulbosus) along the roadside. Their yellow cups are glossy and varnished within, but not without. Surely there is no reason why the new butter should not be yellow now.
The time has now come when the laborers, having washed and put on their best suits, walk into the fields on the Sabbath, and lie on the ground at rest.
A cat-bird has her nest in our grove. We cast out strips of white cotton cloth, all of which she picked up and used. I saw a bird flying across the street with so long a strip of cloth, or the like, the other day, and so slowly, that at ​first I thought it was a little boy's kite, with a long tail. The cat-bird sings less now while its mate is sitting, or may be taking care of her young, and probably this is the case with robins and birds generally.
At the west spring of Fair Haven Hill I cast a bit of wood against a pitch-pine in bloom (perhaps not yet in bloom generally), and I see the yellow pollen dust blown away from it in a faint cloud, distinctly for three rods at least, and gradually rising all the while (rising five or six feet perhaps).
You may say that now, when most trees have fully expanded leaves, and the black ash fairly shows green, that the leafy season has commenced. (I see that I so called it May 27 and 31, 1853.)
June 5, 1850. To-night, after a hot day, I hear the first peculiar summer breathing of the frogs.
​The first of June, when the lady's slipper and the wild pink have come out in sunny places on the hill-sides, then the summer is begun according to the clock of the seasons.
June 5, 1852. The medeola has blossomed in a tumbler. I seem to perceive a pleasant fugacious fragrance from its rather delicate, but in conspicuous, green flower. Its whorls of leaves of two stages are the most remarkable. I do not perceive the smell of the cucumber in its root.
To Harrington's, p. m. The silvery cinquefoil, Potentilla argentea, now. A delicate spring yellow, sunny yellow (before the dog-days) flower. None of the fire of autumnal yellows in it. Its silvery leaf is as good as a flower. White weed.
The constant inquiry which Nature puts is, "Are you virtuous? Then you can behold me." Beauty, fragrance, music, sweetness, and joy of all kinds are for the virtuous. That I thought when I heard the telegraph harp to-day.
​Some poet must sing in praise of the bulbous Arethusa.
The lupine is now in its glory. It is the more important, because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together, and of such a pleasing variety of colors, purple, pink or lilac, and white, especially with the sun on it, when the transparency of the flower makes its color changeable. It paints a whole hill-side with its blue, making such a field (if not meadow) as Proserpine might have wandered in. Its leaf was made to be covered with dew-drops. I am quite excited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps, with narrow intervals, such a profusion of the heavenly, the Elysian color, as if these were the Elysian Fields. . . . That is the value of the lupine. The earth is blued with it. Yet a third of a mile distant I do not detect their color on the hill-side. Perchance because it is the color of the air. It is not distinct enough. You may have passed along here a fort night ago, and the hill-side was comparatively barren, but now you come, and these glorious redeemers appear to have flashed out here all at once. Who plants the seeds of lupines in the barren soil? Who watereth the lupines in the fields?
​June 5, 1853. 5 a. m. By river to Nashawtuck. For the most part we are inclined to doubt the prevalence of gross superstition among the civilized ancients; whether the Greeks, for instance, accepted literally the mythology which we accept as matchless poetry. But we have only to be reminded of the kind of respect paid to the Sabbath as a holy day here in New England, and the fears which haunt those who break it, to see that our neighbors are the creatures of an equally gross superstition with the ancients. I am convinced that there is no very important difference between a New Englander's religion and a Roman's. We both worship in the shadow of our sins. They erect the temples for us. Jehovah has no superiority to Jupiter. The New Englander is "a pagan suckled in a creed out worn." Superstition has always reigned. It is absurd to think that these farmers, dressed in their Sunday clothes, proceeding to church, differ essentially in this respect from the Roman peasantry. They have merely changed the name and number of their gods. Men were as good then as they are now, and loved one another as much or as little. . . .
p. m. To Mason's Pasture.
The world is now full of verdure and fragrance, and the air comparatively clear (not yet the constant haze of the dog-days), through ​which the distant fields are seen, reddened with sorrel, the meadows wet-green, full of fresh grass, and the trees in their first beautiful, bright, untarnished, and unspotted green. May is the bursting into leaf and early flowering with much coolness and wet, and a few decidedly warm days ushering in summer; June, verdure and growth, with not intolerable, but agreeable heat. The young pitch pines in Mason's Pasture are a glorious sight now, most of the shoots grown six inches, so soft and blue-green, nearly as wide as high. It is Nature s front yard. The mountain laurel shows its red flower buds, but many shoots have been killed by frost.
There is a tract of pasture and wood land, orchard, and swamp in the north part of the town through which the old Carlisle road runs, which is nearly two miles square, without a single house, and with scarcely any cultivated land, four square miles. . . .
I perceive some black birch leaves with a beautiful crimson kind of sugaring along the furrows of the nerves, giving them a bright crimson color, either a fungus or the deposit of an insect. Seen through a microscope it sparkles like a ruby.
​June 5, 1854. 6 p. m. To Cliffs. Now, just before sundown, a night-hawk is circling imp-like with undulating, irregular flight over the sproutland on the Cliff Hill with an occasional squeak, and showing the spot on his wings. He does not circle away from this place, and I associate him with two gray eggs somewhere on the ground beneath, and a mate there sitting. This squeak and occasional booming is heard in the evening air, while the stillness on the side of the village makes more distinct the increased hum of insects.
I see at a distance a king-bird, or blackbird, pursuing a crow lower down the hill, like a satellite revolving about a black planet. I have come to the hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity, and put myself again in relation with Nature. I would fain drink a draught of Nature's serenity. Let deep answer to deep. Already I see reddening clouds reflected in the smooth mirror of the river, a delicate tint, far off and elysian, unlike anything in the sky as yet. The evergreens now look even black by contrast with the sea of fresh and light green foliage which surrounds them. Children have been to the cliffs and woven wreaths or chaplets of oak leaves which they have left, unconsciously attracted by the beauty of the leaves now. The sun goes down red and shorn of his beams, a sign of hot ​weather, as if the western horizon or the lower stratum of the air were filled with the hot dust of the day. The dust of his chariot eclipses his beams. I love to sit here and look off into the broad deep vale in which the shades of night are beginning to prevail. When the sun has set, the river becomes more white and distinct in the landscape. . . . I return by moonlight.
June 5, 1855. p. m. To Clam Shell by river. . . . I am much interested to see how Nature proceeds to heal the wounds where the turf was stripped off this meadow. There are large patches where nothing remained but pure black mud, nearly level, or with slight hollows like a plate in it. This the sun and air had cracked into irregular polygonal figures, a foot, more or less, in diameter. The whole surface of these patches is now covered with a short, soft, and pretty dense moss-like vegetation springing up and clothing it. The little hollows and the cracks are filled with a very dense growth of reddish grass or sedge, about an inch high, the growth in the cracks making pretty regular figures as in a carpet, while the intermediate spaces are very evenly, but much more thinly covered with minute sarothra and whitish Gnaphalium uliginosum. Thus the wound is at once scarred over. Apparently the seeds of that grass were heavier and were washed into the ​hollows and cracks. It is not likely that the owner has sprinkled seed here.
June 5, 1856. Everywhere now in dry pitch-pine woods stand the red lady's slippers over the red pine leaves on the forest floor, rejoicing in June, with their two broad, curving green leaves (some even in swamps), upholding their rich, striped, drooping sack.
A cuckoo's nest with three light bluish-green eggs, partly developed, short, with rounded ends, nearly of a size; in a black cherry-tree that had been lopped three feet from the ground, amid the thick sprouts; of twigs, lined with green leaves, pine needles, etc., and edged with some dry, branchy weeds. The bird stole off silently at first.
[June 10. The cuckoo of June 5 has deserted her nest, and I find the fragments of eggshells in it; probably because I found it.]
June 5, 1857. I am interested in each contemporary plant in my vicinity, and have attained to a certain acquaintance with the larger ones. They are cohabitants with me of this part of the planet, and they bear familiar names. Yet how essentially wild they are, as wild really as those strange fossil plants whose impression I see on my coal. Yet I can imagine that some race gathered those too with as much admiration and knew them as intimately as I do these, ​that even they served for a language of the sentiments. Stigmariæ stood for a human sentiment in that race's flower language. Chickweed or a pine-tree is but little less wild. I assume to be acquainted with these, but what ages between me and the tree whose shade I enjoy. It is as if it stood substantially in a remote geological period.
June 5, 1860. . . . When I open my window at night, I hear the peeping of the hylodes distinctly through the rather cool rain (as also some the next a. m.), but not of toads; more hylodes than in the late very warm evenings when the toads were heard most numerously. The hylodes evidently love the cooler nights of spring. The toads, the warm days and nights of May. Now it requires a cool (and better if wet) night, which will silence the toads, to make the hylodes distinct.
June 6, 1852. First devil's needles in the air, and some smaller bright green ones on flowers. The earliest blueberries are now forming as green berries. The wind already injures the just expanded leaves, tearing them and making them turn black. . . . The side-flowering sandwort, an inconspicuous white flower like a chickweed.
​Corydalis glauca, a delicate glaucous plant rarely met with, with delicate flesh-colored and yellow flowers, covered with a glaucous bloom, on dry rocky hills. Perhaps it suggests gentility. Set it down as early as middle of May or earlier. . . .
This morning I hear the note of young bluebirds in the air, which have recently taken wing, and the old birds keep up such a warbling and twittering as remind me of spring.
According to S——'s account, she must have seen an emperor moth, "pea-green with some thing like maple keys for tail," in a lady's hand in Cambridge to-day. So one may have come out of the chrysalid seen May 23d.
p. m. To Conanturn by boat. . . . Blue-eyed grass now begins to give that slaty blue tint to meadows.
The deep shadow of Conantum Cliff and of mere prominences in the hills, now at mid-afternoon as we row by, is very interesting. It is the most pleasing contrast of light and shade that I notice. Methinks that in winter a shadow is not attractive. The air is very clear, at least as we look from the river valley, and the land scape all swept and brushed. We seem to see to some depth into the side of Fair Haven Hill.
The side-saddle flowers are now in their prime. There are some very large ones ​hereabouts, five inches in diameter when you flatten out their petals, like great dull-red roses. Their petals are of a peculiar red, and the upper sides of their calyx leaves, of a shiny leather red or brown red, are agreeable.
A slippery elm, Ulmus fulva, on Lee's Cliff, red elm. Put it with the common. It has large rough leaves and straggling branches, a rather small, much-spreading tree, with an appearance between the common elm and ironwood.
The aspect of the dry rocky hills already indicates the rapid revolution of the seasons. The spring, that early age of the world, following hard on the reign of winter, and the barren rocks yet dripping with it, is past. How many plants have already dried up, lichens and algæ, which we can still remember as if belonging to a former epoch, saxifrage, crowfoot, anemone, columbine for the most part, etc. It is Lee's Cliff I am on. There is a growth confined to the damp and early spring. How dry and crisp the turf feels there now, not moist with melted snows, remembering, as it were, when it was the bottom of the sea. How wet-glossy the leaves of the red oak now, fully expanded. They shine as when the sun comes out after rain.
I find on a shelf of the rock the Turrìtis stricta, now gone to seed, two feet two inches ​high, . . . pods upright and nearly three inches long, linear and flat, leaves decidedly lanceolate or linear. Some minute, imperfect, unexpanded flowers, still on it, appear as if they would have been yellowish.
In the very open park in rear of the rocks on the hill-top, where lambkill and huckleberries and grass alternate, came to one of those handsome, round, mirror-like pools, a rod or two in diameter, and surrounded with a border of fine weeds, such as you frequently meet with on the top of springy hills. Though warm and muddy at bottom, they are very beautiful and glassy, and look as if they were cool springs, so high, exposed to the light, yet so wild and fertile; as if the fertility of the lowlands was transferred to the summit of the hills. They are the kind of mirrors at which the huntresses in the golden age arranged their toilets, which the deer frequented and contemplated their branching horns in.
June 6, 1854. I perceive the sweetness of the locust blossoms fifteen or twenty rods off, as I go down the street. p. m. To Assabet bathing place and return by Stone Bridge. . . . The painted tortoises are now-a-days laying their eggs. I see where they have just been digging in the sand or gravel in a hundred places on the southerly sides of hills and banks near the river, ​but they have laid their eggs in very few. I find none whole. Here is one which has made its hole with the hind part of its shell and its tail, apparently. . . . They are remarkably circumspect, and it is difficult to see one working. They stop instantly and draw in their heads, and do not move till you are out of sight, and then probably try a new place. They have dabbled in the sand and left the marks of their tails all around.
The black oaks, birches, etc., are covered with ephemerae of various sizes and colors, with one, two, or three, or no streamers, ready to take wing at evening, i. e., about seven. I am covered with them and much incommoded.
The air over the river meadows is saturated with sweetness, but I look round in vain for the source, on the yellowish sensitive fern and the reddish eupatorium springing up.
From time to time at mid-afternoon, is heard the trump of a bull-frog, like a triton's horn. I am struck now by the large, light-purple, Viola palmatas rising above the grass near the river.
Of oak leaves, there is the small, firm, few-lobed, wholesome, dark-green shrub oak leaf, light beneath.
​The very wet-glossy, obovatish, sinuate-edged swamp white oak, light beneath.
The small narrower, sinuated, and still more chestnut-like chinquapin, a little lighter beneath.
All these, more or less glossy, especially the swamp-white and shrub.
Then the dull green, sometimes reddish, more or less deeply cut or fingered, unarmed, round-lobed white oak, not light beneath.
The last three without bristles.
I remember best the sort of rosettes made by the wet-glossy leaves at the ends of some swamp white oak twigs; also the wholesome and firm dark green shrub oak leaves, and some glossy and finely cut light green, black? or red? or scarlet? oak leaves.
I see some devil's needles, a brilliant green with white and black, or open work and black wings, some with clear black wings, some with white bodies and black wings, etc.
6.30 a. m. Up Assabet. . . . Beautiful the hemlock fans now, broad at the ends of the lower branches which slant down, seen in the shade against the dark hillside; such is the contrast of the very light green just put forth on their edges, with the old, very dark. I feast my eyes on it.
​June 6th, 1855. You see the dark eye and shade of June on the river as well as on land, and a dust-like lint on river, apparently from the young leaves and bud scales, covering the waters which begin to be smooth, and imparting a sense of depth.
Blue-eyed grass, may be several days, in some places.
White weed, two or three days.
June 6, 1856. p. m. To Andromeda Ponds. Cold, mizzling weather. In the large circular hole or cellar at the turn-table on the railroad, which they are repairing, I see a star-nosed mole endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy and gravelly bottom. Some inhuman fellow has cut off his tail. He is blue-black, with much fur, a very thick, plump animal, apparently some four inches long, but he occasionally shortens himself one third or more; looks as fat as a fat hog. His fore-feet are large, and set side-wise, or on their edges, and with these he shovels the earth aside, while his large, long, starred snout is feeling the way and breaking ground. I see deep indentations in his fur, where his eyes are situated, and once I saw distinctly his eye open, a dull, blue? black bead, not very small; and he very plainly noticed my movements two feet off. He was using his eye as plainly as any creature that I ever saw. Yet it is said to be a question ​whether their eyes are not merely rudimentary. . . . I carried him along to plowed ground where he buried himself in a minute or two.
How well-suited the lining of a bird's nest not only to the comfort of the young, but to keep the eggs from, breaking, fine elastic grass stems or root fibres, pine needles, hair, or the like. These tender and brittle things, which you can hardly carry in cotton, lie there without harm.
June 6, 1857. 8 a. m. To Lee's Cliff by river. . . . This is June, the month of grass and leaves. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse, and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts, which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. I see ​a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a certain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what the grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass. I only see those other facts as through a glass, darkly. . . .
Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the forenoon, and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers.
June 6, 1860. . . . 6.30 p. m. Up Assabet. . . . Not only the foliage begins to look dark and dense, but many ferns, are fully grown, as the cinnamon and interrupted, and being curved over the bank and shore, add to the leafy impression of the season. The Osmunda regalis looks later and more tender, reddish brown still. It preserves its habit of growing in circles, though it may be on a steep bank, and one half the circle in the water. . . .
​The white ash is considerably thinner than either. . . .
How full is the air of sound at sunset and just after! Especially at the end of a rain storm. Every bird seems to be singing in the wood across the stream, and there are the hylodes and the sounds of the village. Beside, sounds are more distinctly heard. Ever and anon we hear a few sucks or strokes from the bittern or stake driver, whenever we lie to, as if he had taken the job of extending all the fences up the river, to keep the cows from straying. We hear but three or four toads in all, to-night, but as many hylodes as ever. It is too cool, both water and air (especially the first), after the rain for the toads. . . .
As the light is obscured after sunset, the birds rapidly cease their songs, and the swallows cease to flit over the river. Soon the bats are seen taking the places of the swallows, and flying back and forth like them, and commonly a late king-bird will be heard twittering still in the air. After the bats, or half an hour after sunset, the water bugs begin to spread themselves over the stream (though fifteen minutes earlier not one was seen without the pads), now when it is difficult to see them or the dimples they make, except you look toward the reflected western sky. It is evident that they dare not ​come out thus by day for fear of fishes, and probably the nocturnal or vespertinal fishes, as eels and pouts, do not touch them. I think I see them all over Walden by day, and if so, it may be because there is not much danger from fishes in that very deep water.
June 7, 1841. . . . We are accustomed to exaggerate the immobility and stagnation of those eras [the early Oriental], as of the waters which leveled the steppes; but those slow revolving "years of the gods" were as rapid to all the needs of virtue as these bustling and hasty seasons. Man stands to revere, he kneels to pray. Methinks history will have to be tried by new tests to show what centuries were rapid and what slow. Corn grows in the night. Will this bustling era detain the future reader longer? Will the earth seem to have conversed more with the heavens during these times? Who is writing better Vedas? How science and art spread and flourished, how trivial conveniences were multiplied, that-which is the gossip of the world is not recorded in them, and if they are left out of our scriptures, too, what will remain?
Since the battle of Bunker Hill we think the world has not been at a stand-still.
June 7, 1851. My practicalness is not to be trusted to the last. To be sure, I go upon my ​legs for the most part, but being hard pushed and dogged by a superficial common sense which is bound to near objects by beaten paths, I am off the handle, as the phrase is; I begin to be transcendental and show where my heart is. I am like those Guinea fowl which Charles Darwin saw at the Cape de Verde Islands. He says: "They avoided us like partridges on a rainy day in September, running with their heads cocked up, and if pursued they readily took to the wing." Keep your distance, do not impinge on the interval between us, and I will pick up lime and lay real terrestrial eggs for you, and let you know by cackling when I have done it. When I have been asked to speak at a temperance meeting, my answer has been, I am too transcendental to serve you in your way. They would fain confine me to the rum-sellers and rum-drinkers, of whom I am not one, and whom I know little about. . . . There are few so temperate that they can afford to remind us even at table that they have a palate and a stomach.
We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishments of the past. We review the past with the common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In any sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have ​experienced within the period of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are for gotten. Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval impossible to the memory.
One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins by spotting the cultivated fields, as if shaken down from a pepper-box; a fishing day, when I see one neighbor after an other, having donned his oil-cloth suit, walking or riding past with a fish-pole, having struck work, a day and an employment to make philosophers of them all.
June 7, 1853. p. m. To Walden. Clover begins to redden the fields generally. The quail is heard at a distance. Buttercups of various kinds mingled, yellow the meadows, the tall, the bulbous, the repens. The cinquefoil, in its ascending state, keeping pace with the grass, is now abundant in the fields. Saw it one or two weeks ago. This is a feature of June. Still both high and low blueberry and huckleberry blossoms abound. The hemlock woods, their fan-like sprays edged or spotted with short, yellowish-green shoots, tier above tier, shelf above shelf, look like a cool bazaar of rich embroidered goods. How dense their shade, dark and cool beneath them, as in a cellar. No plants grow there, but the ground is covered with fine red leaves. It is oftenest on a side hill they grow.
​The oven-bird runs from her covered nest, so close to the ground, under the lowest twigs and leaves, even the loose leaves on the ground, like a mouse, that I cannot get a fair view of her. She does not fly at all. Is it to attract me, or partly to protect herself?
Visited my night-hawk on her nest. Could hardly believe my eyes when. I stood within seven feet and beheld her sitting on her eggs, her head towards me; she looked so Saturnian, so one with the earth, so sphynx-like, a relic of the reign of Saturn which Jupiter did not destroy, a riddle that might well cause a man to go dash his head against a stone. It was not an actual living creature, far less a winged creature of the air, but a figure in stone or bronze, a fanciful production of art, like the gryphon or phœnix. In fact, with its breast toward me, and, owing to its color or size, no bill perceptible, it looked like the end of a brand, such as are common in a clearing, its breast mottled, or alternately waved with dark brown and gray, its flat, grayish, weather-beaten crown, its eyes nearly closed, purposely, lest these bright beads should betray it, with the stony cunning of the sphynx. A fanciful work in bronze to ornament a mantel. It was enough to fill one with awe. The sight of this creature sitting on its eggs impressed me with the venerableness of the globe. There was ​nothing novel about it. All the while this seemingly sleeping bronze sphynx, as motionless as the earth, was watching me with intense anxiety through those narrow slits in its eyelids. An other step, and it fluttered down the hill, close to the ground, with a wabbling motion, as if touching the ground now with the tip of one wing, now with the other, so ten rods to the water, which it skimmed close over a few rods, and then rose and soared in the air above me. Wonderful creature, which sits motionless on its eggs, on the barest, most exposed hills, with its eyes shut and its wings folded; and after the two days storm, when you think it has become a fit symbol of the rheumatism, it suddenly rises into the air, a bird, one of the most aerial, supple, and graceful of creatures, without stiffness in its wings or joints. It was a fit prelude to meeting Prometheus bound to his rock on Caucasus.
June 7, 1854. . . . p. m. To Dugan Desert via Linnæa Hills. Linnæa abundantly out some days, say three or four.
The locusts so full of pendulous white racemes five inches long, filling the air with their sweetness, and resounding with the hum of humble and honey-bees, are very interesting. These racemes are strewn along the path by children.
I am struck by the rank, dog-like scent of the rue budded to blossom.
​I am surprised at the size of green berries, shad-bush, low blueberries, choke-cherries, etc., etc. It is but a step from flower to fruit.
As I expected, I find the desert scored by the tracks of turtles, made evidently last night, though the rain of this morning has obliterated the marks of their tails. The tracks are about seven eighths of an inch in diameter, half an inch deep, two inches apart (from centre to centre) in each row, and the rows four or five inches apart. They have dabbled in the sand in many places, and made some small holes. Yesterday it was hot and dusty, and this morning it rained. Did they choose such a time? Yesterday I saw the painted and the wood tortoise out. Now I see a snapping turtle, its shell about a foot long, out here on the damp sand, with its head out, disturbed by me. It had just been excavating, and its shell, especially the forepart and sides, and still more its snout, were deeply covered with earth. It appears to use its shell as a kind of spade, whose handle is within, tilting it now this way, now that, and perhaps using its head and claws as a pick. It was in a little cloud of mosquitoes, which were continually settling on its head and flippers, but which it did not mind. Its sternum was slightly depressed. It seems that they are frequently found ​fighting in the water, and sometimes dead in the spring, perhaps killed by the ice.
Common iris some days, one withered.
Saw again what I have pronounced the yellow-winged sparrow, Fringilla passerina, with white line down head, and yellow over eyes, and my seringo note. But this time the yellow of wings is not apparent; ochreous throat and breast. Quite different from the bay-wing and smaller.
This muggy evening I see fire-flies, the first I have seen or heard of this year.
June 7, 1855. . . . I have heard no musical gurgle-ee from blackbirds for a fortnight. They are now busy breeding.
June 7, 1858. p. m. To Walden. Warm weather has suddenly come, beginning yesterday. To-day it is yet warmer, 87° at 3 p. m., compelling me to put on a thin coat, and I see that a new season has arrived. June shadows are moving over waving grass fields, the crickets chirp uninterruptedly, and I perceive the agreeable acid scent of high blueberry bushes in bloom. The trees having leaved out, you notice their rounded tops suggesting shade. The night-hawk booms over arid hill-sides and sproutlands.
It is evidence enough against crows, hawks, and owls, proving their propensity to rob birds' nests of eggs and young, that smaller birds pursue them so often. You do not need the ​testimony of so many farmers' boys when you can see and hear the small birds daily crying "Thief and murder" after these spoilers. What does it signify, the kingbird, blackbird, swallow, etc., pursuing a crow. They say plainly enough, "I know you of old, you villain; you want to devour my eggs or young. I have often caught you at it, and I'll publish you now." And probably the crow, pursuing the fish-hawk and eagle, proves that the latter sometimes devour their young.
As I was wading in this Wyman meadow, looking for bull-frog spawn, I saw a hole at the bottom where it was six or eight inches deep, by the side of a mass of mud and weeds, which rose just to the surface three or four feet from the shore. It was about five inches in diameter, with some sand at the mouth, just like a musquash's hole. As I stood there within two feet, a pout put her head out, as if to see who was there, and directly came forth, and disappeared under the target weed; but as I stood perfectly still, waiting for the water which I had disturbed to settle about the hole, she circled round and round several times between me and the hole cautiously, stealthily approaching the entrance, but as often withdrawing, and at last mustered courage to enter it. I then noticed another similar hole in the same mass, two or three feet from this. I ​thrust my arm into the first, running it down about fifteen inches. It was a little more than a foot long, and enlarged somewhat at the end, the bottom also being about a foot beneath the surface, for it slanted downward. But I felt nothing within. I only felt a pretty regular and rounded apartment with firm walls of weedy or fibrous mud. I then thrust my arm into the other hole, which was longer and deeper, at first discovering nothing. But, trying again, I found that I had not reached the end, for it turned a little and descended more than I supposed. Here I felt a similar apartment or enlargement some six inches in diameter horizontally, but not quite so high, nor nearly so wide at its throat. Here, to my surprise, I felt something soft like a gelatinous mass of spawn, but, feeling a little further, felt the horns of a pout. I deliberately took hold of her by the head, and lifted her out of the hole and the water, having run my arm in two thirds of its length. She offered not the slightest resistance from first to last, even when I held her out of water before my face, and only darted away suddenly when I dropped her into the water. The entrance to the apartment was so narrow that she could hardly have escaped, if I had tried to prevent her. Putting in my arm again, I felt under where she had been, a flattish mass of ova, several inches in diameter, ​resting on the mud, and took out some. Feeling again in the first hole, I found as much more there. Though I had been stepping round and over the second nest for several minutes, I had not scared the pout. The ova of the first nest already contained white wiggling young. I saw no motion in the others. The ova in each case were dull yellowish, and the size of small buckshot. These nests did not communicate with each other, and had no other outlet.
Pouts then make their nests in shallow mud-holes or bays in masses of weedy mud, or probably in the muddy bank, and the old pout hovers over the spawn or keeps guard at the entrance. Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to the meadow? The first pout, whose eggs were most developed, was the largest, and had some slight wounds on the back. The other may have been the male, in the act of fertilizing the ova.
I sit in my boat in the twilight, by the edge of the river. Bull-frogs now are in full blast. I do not hear other frogs. Their notes are probably drowned. . . . Some of these great males are yellow, or quite yellowish over the whole back. Are not the females oftenest white-throated? What lungs, what health, what terrenity (if not serenity) their note suggests! At length I hear the faint stertoration of a Rana palustris (if not halecina?)
​Seeing a large head with its prominent eyes projecting above the middle of the river, I found it was a bull-frog coming across. It swam under water a rod or two, and then came up to see where it was, on its way. It is thus they cross when sounds or sights attract them to more desirable shores. Probably they prefer the night for such excursions, for fear of large pickerel, etc.
June 7, 1860. White clover already whitens some fields, and resounds with bees.
June 8, 1850. Not till June can the grass be said to be waving in the fields. When the frogs dream and the grass waves, and the buttercups toss their heads, and the heat disposes one to bathe in the ponds and streams, then is summer begun.
June 8, 1851. I found the white pine top full of staminate blossom buds, not yet fully grown or expanded, with a rich red tint, like a tree full of fruit, but I could find no pistillate blossom.
June 8, 1853. p. m. To Well Meadow. . . . As I stood by the last small pond near Well Meadow, I heard a hawk scream, and looking up, saw a pretty large one circling not far off, and incessantly screaming, as I at first supposed to scare and so discover its prey. But its screaming was so incessant, and it circled from ​time to time so near me as I moved southward, that I began to think it had a nest near by, and was angry at my intrusion into its domains. As I moved, the bird still followed and screamed, coming sometimes quite near, or within gunshot, then circling far off or high into the sky. At length, as I was looking up at it, thinking it the only living creature within view, I was singularly startled to behold, as my eye by chance penetrated deeper into the blue,—the abyss of blue above which I had taken for a solitude,—its mate silently soaring at an immense height, and seemingly indifferent to me. We are surprised to discover that there can be an eye on us on that side, and so little suspected, that the heavens are so full of eyes, though they look so blue and spotless. Then I knew that it was the female that circled and screamed below. At last the latter rose gradually to meet her mate, and they circled together there, as if they could not possibly feel any anxiety on my account. When I drew nearer to the tall trees where I suspected the nest to be, the female descended again, swept by screaming, still nearer to me, just over the tree tops, and finally, while I was looking for the orchis in the swamp, alighted on a white pine twenty or thirty rods off. (The great fringed orchis just open.) At length I detected the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a ​very large white pine by the edge of the swamp. It was about three feet in diameter, of dry sticks, and a young hawk, apparently as big as its mother, stood on the edge looking down at me, and only moving its head when I moved.
In its imperfect plumage, and the slow motion of its head, it reminded me strongly of a vulture, so large and gaunt. It appeared a tawny brown on its neck and breast, and dark brown or blackish on wings. The mother was light beneath, and apparently lighter still on the rump.
White pine in flower. All the female flowers on the very top of the tree, a small crimson cone upright on the ends of its peduncles, while the last year's, now three or four inches long, and green, are curved downward like scythes. Best seen looking down on the tops of lower pines from the top of a higher one. Apparently just beginning.
June 8, 1854. The Rosa nitida bud, which I plucked yesterday, has blossomed to-day, so that notwithstanding the rain, I will put it down for to-day. Erigeron strigosum slowly opening, perhaps to-morrow.
Meadow rue, with its rank, dog-like scent. Ribwort plantain is abundantly in bloom, fifteen or sixteen inches high. How long?
Herndon in his "Exploration of the Amazon," says that "There is wanting an industrious and ​active population, who know what the comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants, to draw out the great resources of the country." But what are the "artificial wants" to be encouraged, and the "great resources" of a country? surely not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of his native (?) Virginia, or that fertility of soil which produces these. The chief want is ever a life of deep experiences, i. e., character, which alone draws out "the great resources" of Nature. When our wants cease to be chiefly superficial and trivial, which is commonly meant by artificial, and begin to be wants of character, then the great resources of a country are taxed and drawn out, and the result, the staple production, is poetry. Have the great resources of Virginia been drawn out by such artificial wants as there exist? Was that country really designed by its maker to produce slaves and tobacco? or something more than freemen, and food for freemen? Wants of character, aspirations, this is what is wanted, but what is called civilization does not always substitute this for the barren simplicity of the savage.
June 8, 1860. 2 p. m. To Well Meadow via Walden. Within a day or two has begun that season of summer when you see afternoon showers—perhaps with thunder—or the threat of them dark in the horizon, and are uncertain ​whether to venture far away or without an umbrella. I noticed the very first such cloud on the 25th of May; the dark iris of June. When you go forth to walk at 2 p. m. you see perhaps, in the southwest or west, or may be eastern horizon, a dark and threatening mass of cloud, showing itself just over the woods, its base horizontal and dark, with lighter edges where it is rolled up to the light, while all beneath is a dark skirt of falling rain. These are summer showers, come with the heat of summer.
What delicate fans are the great red-oak leaves, now just developed, so thin, and of so tender a green. They hang loosely, flaccidly down, at the mercy of the wind, like a new-born butterfly or dragon fly. A strong, cold wind would blacken and tear them now. They remind me of the frailest stuffs hung around a dry-goods shop. They have not been hardened by exposure yet, these raw and tender lungs of the tree. The white-oak leaves are especially downy and lint your clothes.
This is truly June when you begin to see brakes (dark green) fully expanded in the wood paths.
In early June, methinks, as now, we have clearer days, less haze, more or less breeze, especially after rain, and more sparkling water, than before. I look from Fair Haven Hill. As ​there is more shade in the woods, so there is more shade in the sky, i. e., dark, heavy clouds contrasted with the bright sky; not the gray clouds of spring.
The leaves generally are almost fully expanded, i. e., some of each tree.
June 9-14, 1850. I see the pollen of the pitch-pine now beginning to cover the surface of the pond. Most of the pines at the north-northwest end have none, and in some there is only one pollen-bearing flower.
There are as many strata at different levels of life as there are leaves in a book. Most men have probably lived in two or three. When on the higher levels we can remember the lower, but when on the lower we cannot remember the higher.
My imagination, my love and reverence and admiration, my sense of the miraculous, is not so excited by any event as by the remembrance of my youth. Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.
Woe to him who wants a companion, for he is unfit to be the companion even of himself. We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.
When we cease to sympathize with and to be ​personally related to men, and begin to be universally related, then we are capable of inspiring others with the sentiment of love for us.
We hug the earth. How rarely we mount! How rarely we climb a tree! We might elevate ourselves. That pine would make us dizzy. You can see the mountains from it as you never did before.
Shall not a man have his spring as well as the plants?
Any reverence even for a material thing proceeds from an elevation of character. Layard, speaking of the reverence for the sun exhibited by the Yezidis, or Worshipers of the Devil, says, "They are accustomed to kiss the object on which the sun's first beams fall; and I have frequently, when traveling in their company at sunrise, observed them perform this ceremony. For fire, as symbolic, they have nearly the same reverence; they never spit into it, but frequently pass their hands through the flame, kiss them, and pass them over their right eyebrow, or sometimes over the whole face."
Who taught the oven-bird to conceal her nest? It is on the ground, yet out of sight. What cunning there is in Nature! No man could have arranged it more artfully for the purpose of concealment. Only the escape of the bird betrays it.
​June 9, 1851. Gathered the Linnæa borealis.
June 9, 1852. The buck-bean in Hubbard's meadow just going out of blossom. The yellow water ranunculus is an important flower in the river now, rising above the white lily pads, whose flower does not yet appear. I perceive that their petals washed ashore, line the sand conspicuously.
For a week past we have had washing days. The grass is waving, and the trees having leaved out, their boughs feel the effect of the breeze. Thus new life and motion is imparted to the trees. The season of waving boughs, and the lighter under-sides of the new leaves are exposed. This is the first half of June. Already the grass is not so fresh and liquid velvety a green, having much of it blossomed, and some even gone to seed, and it is mixed with reddish ferns and other plants, but the general leafiness, shadiness, and waving of grass and boughs characterize the season. The wind is not quite agreeable, because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. Meanwhile the crickets are strengthening their choir. The weather is very clear, and the sky bright. The river shines like silver. Methinks this is a traveler's month. The locust in bloom. The undulating rye. The deciduous trees have filled up the intervals between the evergreens, and the woods are bosky now.
​The priests of the Germans and Britons were Druids. They had their sacred oaken groves. Such were their steeple-houses. Nature was to some extent a fane to them. There was fine religion in that form of worship, and Stonehenge remains are evidence of some vigor in the worshipers, as the pyramids perchance of the vigor of the Egyptians, derived from the slime of the Nile. Evelyn says of the oaks, which he calls "these robust sons of the earth," "'T is reported that the very shade of this tree is so wholesome that the sleeping or lying under it becomes a present remedy to paralytics, and recovers those whom the mistaken malign influence of the walnut-tree has smitten." Which we may take for a metaphorical expression of the invigorating influence of rude, wild, robust nature compared with the effeminating luxury of civilized life. Evelyn has collected the fine exaggerations of antiquity respecting the virtues and habits of trees, and added some himself. He says, "I am told that those small young acorns which we find in the stock-doves craws are a delicious fare, as well as those incomparable salads of young herbs taken out of the maws of partridges at a certain season of the year, which gives them a preparation far exceeding all the art of cookery." His oft-repeated glorification of the forest from age to age smacks ​of religion, is even Druidical. Evelyn is as good as several old Druids, and his "Sylva," is a new kind of prayer-book, a glorifying of the trees and enjoying them forever, which was the chief end of his life.
A child loves to strike on a tin pan or other ringing vessel with a stick, because its ears being fresh, attentive, and percipient, it detects the finest music in the sound at which all Nature assists. Is not the very cope of the heavens the sounding-board of the infant drummer? So, clear and unprejudiced ears hear the sweetest and most soul-stirring melody in tinkling cowbells and the like (dogs baying the moon), not to be referred to association, but intrinsic in the sound itself; those cheap and simple sounds which men despise because their ears are dull and debauched. Ah, that I were so much a child that I could unfailingly draw music from a quart pot. Its little ears tingle with the melody. To it there is music in sound alone.
Evelyn speaks of mel-dews attracting bees. Can mildew be corrupted from this? He says that the alder laid under water "will harden like a very stone," and speaks of alders being used "for the draining of grounds by placing them in the trenches," which I have just seen done here under Clamshell Hill.
Peaches are the principal crop in Lincoln, and ​cherries a very important one, yet Evelyn says, "We may read that the peach was at first accounted so tender and delicate a tree as that it was believed to thrive only in Persia; and even in the days of Galen it grew no nearer than Egypt of all the Roman provinces, but was not seen in the city till about thirty years before Pliny's time;" but now it is the principal crop cultivated in Lincoln in New England, and it is also cultivated extensively in the West, and on lands not half a dozen years vacated by the Indians. Also, "It was six hundred and eighty years after the foundation of Rome ere Italy had tasted a cherry of their own, which, being then brought thither out of Pontus, did after one hundred and twenty years travel ad ultimos Britannos," and, I may add, Lincolnos. As Evelyn says, "Methinks this should be a wonderful incitement."
He well says, "a sobbing rain." Evelyn's love of his subject teaches him to use many expressive words. . . . He speaks of pines "pearling out into gums." He talks of modifying the air as well as the soil about plants, making "the remedy as well regional as topical." This suggests the propriety of Shakespeare's expression, "the region cloud," region meaning thus upper regions relatively to the earth. He speaks of a "dewie sperge or brush" to be used instead of ​a watering-pot which "gluts" the earth. He calls the kitchen-garden the "Olitory garden." In a dedication of his "Kalendarium Hortense" to Cowley, he inserts two or three good sentences or quotations, viz., "as the philosopher in Seneca desired only bread and herbs to dispute felicity with Jupiter." So of Cowley's simple, retired life. "Who would not, like you, cacher sa vie?" "delivered from the gilded impertinences of life."
June 9, 1853. 4.15 a. m. To Nashawtuck by boat. A prevalent fog, though not quite so thick as the last described. . . . Here and there deep valleys are excavated in it, as painters imagine the Red Sea for the passage of Pharaoh's host, wherein trees and houses appear, as it were, at the bottom of the sea. It is interesting to see the tops of the trees first and most distinctly before you see their trunks or where they stand on earth. Far in the northeast there is, as before, apparently a tremendous surf breaking on a distant shoal. It is either a real shoal, that is, a hill over which the fog breaks, or the effect of the sun's rays on it.
The first white lily bud. White clover is abundant and very sweet, on the common, filling the air, but not yet elsewhere as last year.
8 a. m. To Orchis Swamp. Well Meadow. Hear a goldfinch. This the second or third only ​that I have heard. White-weed now whitens the fields. There are many star flowers. I remember the anemone especially. The rue anemone is not yet all gone, lasting longer than the true one; above all, the trientalis, and of late the yellow Bethlehem star, and perhaps others.
I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. They have detected me, and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest. I find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there appears to be one only standing on the edge of the nest); resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak, I can see every wink and the color of its iris. It watches me more steadily than I it, now looking straight clown at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turning its head and looking with one eye. How its eye and its whole head express anger. Its anger is more in its eye than in its beak. It is quite hoary over the eye and under the chin. The mother meanwhile is incessantly circling about, and above its charge and me, farther or nearer, sometimes withdrawing a quarter of a mile, but occasionally coming to alight for a moment, almost within gun-shot, on the top of a tall white pine; but I hardly bring my glass fairly to bear on her, and get sight of her angry eye through the pine needles, before she circles away again. Thus for an hour that I lay there, screaming ​every minute, or oftener, with open bill, now and then pursued by a kingbird or a blackbird, who appear merely to annoy her by dashing down at her back. Meanwhile the male is soaring quite undisturbed at a great height above, evidently not hunting, but amusing or recreating himself in the thinner and cooler air, as if pleased with his own circles like a geometer, and enjoying the sublime scene. I doubt if he has his eye fixed on any prey on the earth. He probably descends to hunt.
Got two or three handfuls of strawberries on Fair Haven. They are already drying up. . . . It is natural that the first fruit which the earth bears should emit, and be, as it were, an embodiment of, that vernal fragrance with which the air has teemed. Strawberries are its manna, found ere long where that fragrance has filled the air. Little natural beds or patches on the sides of dry hills where the fruit sometimes reddens the ground. But it soon dries up, unless there is a great deal of rain. Well, are not the juices of early fruit distilled from the air? Prunella out. The meadows are now yellow with the golden senecio, a more orange-yellow mingled with the light, glossy yellow of the butter cup. The green fruit of the sweet fern now. The juniper repens appears (though now dry and effete) to have blossomed recently. The ​tall, white erigeron just out. I think it is strigosum, but tinged with purple sometimes.
The bull-frogs are in full blast to-night. I do not hear a toad from my window, only the crickets beside. The toads I have but rarely heard of late. So there is an evening for the toads, and another for the bull-frogs.
June 9, 1854. p. m. To Well Meadow. The summer aspect of the river begins, perhaps, when the utricularia vulgaris is first seen on the surface, as yesterday.
As I go along the railroad causeway I see, in the cultivated ground, a lark flashing his white tail, and showing his handsome yellow breast with its black crescent, like an Indian locket. For a day or two I have heard the fine seringo note of the cherry birds, and seen them flying past, the only? birds, methinks, that I see in small flocks now, except swallows.
Find the great fringed orchis out apparently two or three days, two are almost fully out, two or three only budded; a large spike of peculiarly delicate, pale purple flowers growing in the luxuriant and shady swamp, amid hellebores, ferns, golden senecio, etc. It is remarkable that this, one of the fairest of all our flowers, should also be one of the rarest, for the most part, not seen at all. . . . The village belle never sees this more delicate belle of the swamp. How little ​relation between our life and its! . . . The seasons go by, to us, as if it were not. A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell. Only the skunk or owl, or other inhabitant of the swamp, beholds it. It does not pine because man does not admire it. I am inclined to think of it as a relic of the past, as much as the arrowhead or the tomahawk.
The air is now pretty full of shad flies, and there is an incessant sound made by the fishes leaping for such as are struggling on the surface. It sounds like the lapsing of a swift stream sucking amid rocks. The fishes make a business of thus getting their evening meal, dimpling the river like large drops, as far as I can see, some times making a loud plashing. Meanwhile, the kingfishers are on the lookout for the fishes as they rise, and I saw one dive in the twilight and go off uttering his cr-r-ack-cr-r-rack.
Covered with disgrace, this State has sat down coolly, to try for their lives the men who at tempted to do its duty for it, and this is called justice! They who have shown that they can behave particularly well, they alone are put under bonds for their good behavior! It behoves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters. What is any political organization ​worth, when it is in the service of the Devil? While the whole military force of the State, if need be, is at the service of a slaveholder, to enable him to carry back a slave, not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped. Is this what all these arms, all this "training" has been for, these seventy-eight years past? . . . The marines and the militia, whose bodies were used lately, were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense, they were not men at all.
June 9, 1856. p. m. To Corner Spring. Without an umbrella, thinking the weather settled at last. There are some large cumuli with glowing, downy cheeks, floating about. Now I notice where an elm is in the shadow of a cloud, the black elm tops and shadows of June. It is a dark eyelash, which suggests a flashing eye beneath. It suggests houses that lie under the shade, the repose and siesta of summer noons, the thunder cloud, bathing, and all that belongs to summer. These veils are now spread here and there over the village. They suggest also the creak of crickets, a June sound now fairly begun, inducing contemplation and philosophic thought.
June 9, 1857. p. m. To Violet, Sorrel, and Calla Swamp. In the sproutland beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo bird, which chirps ​about me, as if it had a nest there. This is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. Glowing indigo. It flits from the top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. Wilson says it sings, not like most other birds, in the morning and evening chiefly, but also in the middle of the day. In this I notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plumaged bird. They seem to love the heat. It probably had its nest in one of these bushes.
I had said to P—— "It will be worth the while to look for other rare plants in Calla Swamp, for I have observed that where one rare plant grows, there will commonly be others." Carrying out that thought this p. m., I had not taken three steps at this swamp bare-legged, before I found the Naumburgia thyrsiflora in sphagnum and water, which I had not seen growing before. (C—— brought one to me from Hubbard's Great Meadow once.) It is hardly beginning yet. (In prime June 24th.)
June 9, 1860. 6 p. m. Paddle to Flint's Bridge. The water bugs begin to venture out on to the stream from the shadow of a dark wood, as at the Island. So soon as the dusk begins to settle on the river, they begin to steal out, and to extend their circling far amid the bushes and reeds over the channel of the river. ​They do not simply then, if ever, venture forth, but then invariably and at once, the whole length of the river, they one and all rally out, and begin to dimple its broad surface, as if it were a necessity so to do.
June 10, 1853. p. m. To Mason's Pasture, in Carlisle. Haying begins in front yards. Cool, but agreeable easterly winds. The streets now beautiful with verdure and the shade of elms, under which you look through an air, clear for summer, to the woods in the horizon. . . . As C—— and I go through the town, we hear the cool peep of the robin calling to its young now learning to fly. The locust bloom is now perfect, filling the street with its sweetness, but it is more agreeable to my eye than my nose. . . . The fuzzy seeds or down of the black willow is filling the air over the river, and, falling on the water, covers its surface. By the 30th of May, at least, white maple keys were falling. How early then they had matured their seed. The mountain laurel will begin to bloom to-morrow. The frost some weeks since killed most of the buds and shoots, except where they were protected by the trees or by themselves, and now new shoots have put forth, and grow four or five inches from the sides of what were the leading ones. It is a plant which plainly requires the protection of the wood. It is stunted in the open pasture.
​What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called? Many farmers have pastures there, and wood-lots and orchards. It consists mainly of rocky pastures. It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the Hog Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrook Place, the Old Lime Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also, the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark's. Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman's Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called? The old Carlisle road which runs through the middle of it is bordered on each side with wild apple pastures, where the trees stand without order, having, many or most of them, sprung up by accident or from pomace sown at random, and are, for the most part, concealed by birches and pines. These orchards are very extensive, and yet many of these apple trees, growing as forest trees, bear good crops of apples. It is a paradise for walkers in the fall. There are also boundless huckleberry pastures, as well as many blueberry swamps. Shall we call it the Easterbrook Country? It would make a princely estate in Europe. Yet it is owned ​by farmers who live by the labor of their hands and do not esteem it much. Plenty of huckleberries and barberries here.
A second great uninhabited tract is that on the Marlboro road, stretching westerly from Francis Wheeler's to the river, and beyond about three miles, and from Harrington's, on the north, to Dakm's, on the south, more than a mile in width.
A third, the Walden Woods.
A fourth, the Great Fields. These four are all in Concord.
There are one or two in the town who probably have Indian blood in their veins, and when they exhibit any unusual irascibility, the neighbors say they have got their Indian blood roused.
Now methinks the birds begin to sing less tumultuously, as the weather grows more constantly warm, with morning, noon, and evening songs, and suitable recesses in the concert.
High blackberries are conspicuously in bloom, whitening the sides of lanes.
Mention is made in the Town Records, as quoted by Shattuck, p. 33, under date of 1654, of "the Hogepen-walke about Annursnake," and reference is at the same time made to "the old hogepen." . . . There is some propriety in calling such a tract a walk, methinks, from the habit which hogs have of walking about with ​an independent air, and pausing from time to time to look about from under their flapping ears and snuff the air. The hogs I saw this afternoon, all busily rooting without holding up their heads to look at us, the whole field appearing as if it had been most miserably ploughed or scarified with a harrow, with their shed to retreat to in rainy weather, affected me as more human than other quadrupeds. They are comparatively clean about their lodgings.
June 10, 1856. p. m. To Dugan Desert.—I hear the huckleberry bird now add to its usual strain a-tea tea tea tea tea.
A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel track on the Marlboro' road. She paused at first, but I sat down within two feet, and she soon resumed her work, had excavated a hollow about five inches wide and six long in the moistened sand, and cautiously, with long intervals, she continued her work, resting always her fore feet on the same spot, and never looking round, her eye shut all but a narrow slit. Whenever I moved, perhaps to brush off a mosquito, she paused. A wagon approached, rumbling afar off, and then there was a pause till it had passed, and long after, a tedious, naturlangsam pause of the slow-blooded creature, a sacrifice of time such as those animals are up to which slumber half a year and live for ​centuries. It was twenty minutes before I discovered that she was not making the hole, but filling it up slowly, having laid her eggs. She drew the moistened sand under herself, scraping it along from behind with both feet brought together. The claws turned inward. In the long pauses the ants troubled her, as the mosquitoes, me, by running over her eyes, which made her snap or dart out her head suddenly, striking the shell. She did not dance on the sand, nor finish covering the hollow quite so carefully as the one observed last year. She went off suddenly, and quickly at first, with a slow but sure instinct through the wood toward the swamp.
In a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen inches deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. They utter their squeaking hiss whenever I cover the hole with my hand, apparently taking it for the approach of the mother.
June 10, 1857. . . . A striped snake (so-called) was running about in a yard this forenoon, and in the afternoon it was found to have shed its slough, leaving it half way out of a hole which probably it used to confine it in. It was about in its new skin. Many creatures, devil's needles, etc., cast their sloughs now. Can't I?
F—— tells me to-day, that he has seen a ​regular barn swallow, with forked tail, about his barn, which was black, not rufous.
June 10, 1858. . . . As we entered a rye field, I saw what I took to be a hawk fly up from the other end, though it may have been a crow. It was soon pursued by small birds. When I got there, I found an Emys insculpta on its back, with its head and feet drawn in and motionless, and what looked like the track of a crow on the sand. Undoubtedly the bird which I saw had been pecking at it, and perhaps they get many of their eggs.
June 10, 1859. Surveying. . . .
June 10, 1860. 2 p. m. To Anursnack. . . . There is much handsome interrupted fern in the Painted Cup Meadow, and near the top of one of the clumps we noticed something like a large cocoon, the color of the rusty cinnamon fern wool. It was a red bat, the New York bat, so-called. It hung suspended, head directly downward, with its little sharp claws or hooks caught through one of the divisions at the base of one of the pinnæ, above the fructification. It was a delicate rusty brown, in color very like the wool of the cinnamon fern, with the whiter bare spaces, seen through it early in the season. I thought at first glance it was a broad cocoon, then that it was the plump body of a monstrous emperor moth. It was rusty or reddish brown, ​white or hoary within, with a white, apparently triangular spot beneath, about the insertion of the wings. Its wings were very compactly folded up, the principal bones (dark or reddish) lying flat along the under side of its body, and a hook on each, meeting its opposite under the chin of the creature. It did not look like fur, but was like the plush of the ripe cat-tail head, though more loose, all trembling in the wind and with the pulsations of the animal. I broke off the top of the fern, and let the bat lie on its back in my hand. I held it and turned it about for ten or fifteen minutes, but it did not awake. Once or twice it opened its eyes a little, and even raised its old, baggish head, and opened its mouth, but soon drowsily dropped the head and fell asleep again. Its ears were nearly bare. It was more attentive to sounds than to motions. Finally by shaking it, and especially by hissing or whistling, I thoroughly awakened it, and it fluttered off twenty or thirty rods to the woods. I cannot but think that its instinct taught it to cling to the interrupted fern, since it might readily be mistaken for a mass of its fruit. . . . Unless it moved its head wide awake, it looked like a tender infant.
June 11, 1851. Last night, a beautiful summer night, not too warm, moon not quite full, after two or three rainy days. Walked to Fair ​Haven by railroad, returning by Potter's pasture and Sudbury road. I feared at first that there would be too much white light, like the pale remains of daylight, and not a yellow, gloomy, dreamier light; that it would be like a candlelight by day; but when I got away from the town and deeper into the night, it was better. I saw by the shadows cast by the inequalities of the clayey sand-bank in the Deep Cut, that it was necessary to see objects by moonlight as well as sunlight, to get a complete notion of them. This bank had looked much more flat by day, when the light was stronger, but now the heavy shadows revealed its prominences. The prominences are light, made more remarkable by the dark shadows they cast. . . . I hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air, now at nine o'clock, p. m., and occasionally, what I do not remember to have heard so late, their booming note. It sounds more as if under a cope than by day. The sound is not so fugacious, going off to be lost amid the spheres, but is echoed hollowly to earth, making the low roof of heaven vibrate. Such a sound is more confused and dissipated by day.
The whippoorwill suggests how wide asunder are the woods and the town. Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill-omen. Only the ​dwellers on the outskirts of the village hear it occasionally. It sometimes comes into their yards. But go into the woods in a warm night at this season, and it is the prevailing sound. I hear now five or six at once. It is no more of ill-omen, therefore, here, than the night and the moonlight are. It is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods. I hear some whippoorwills on hills, others in thick wooded vales, which ring hollow and cavernous, like an apartment or cellar, with their note, as when I hear the working of some artisan within an apartment. New beings have usurped the air we breathe, rounding nature, filling her crevices with sound. To sleep where you may hear the whippoorwill in your dreams.
I hear from this upland, whence I see Wachusett by day, a wagon crossing one of the bridges. I have no doubt that in some places to-night I should be sure to hear every carriage which crossed a bridge over the river, within the limits of Concord, for in such an hour and atmosphere the sense of hearing is wonderfully assisted, and asserts a new dignity. We become the Hearalls of the story. . . . The planks of a bridge, struck like a bell swung near the earth, emit a very resonant and penetrating sound. And then it is to be considered that the bell is in this instance hung over water, and that the night air, not only ​on account of its stillness, but perhaps on account of its density, is more favorable to the transmission of sound. If the whole town were a raised plank floor, what a din there would be!
I now descend round the corner of the grain field, through the pitch-pine wood, into a lower field, more inclosed by woods, and find myself in a colder, damp, and misty atmosphere, with much dew on the grass. I seem to be nearer to the origin of things. There is something creative and primal in the cool mist. This dewy mist does not fail to suggest music to me, unaccountably, fertility, the origin of things. An atmosphere which has forgotten the sun, where the ancient principle of moisture prevails. It is laden with the condensed fragrance of plants, as it were, distilled dews.
The woodland paths are never seen to such advantage as in a moonlight night, so embowered, still opening before you almost against expectation as you walk. You are so completely in the woods, and yet your feet meet no obstacles. It is as if it were not a path, but an open, winding passage through the bushes, which your feet find. Now I go by the spring, and when I have risen to the same level as before, find myself in the warmer stratum again. These warmer veins, in a cool evening like this, do not fail to be agreeable.
​The woods are about as destitute of inhabitants at night as the streets. In both there will be some night walkers. There are but few wild creatures to seek their prey. The greater part of its inhabitants have retired to rest.
Ah, that life that I have known! How hard it is to remember what is most memorable. We remember how we itched, not how our hearts beat. I can sometimes recall to mind the quality, the immortality of my youthful life, but in memory is the only relation to it.
I hear the night-warbler breaking out as in his dreams, made so from the first for some mysterious reason.
Our spiritual side takes a more distinct form now, like our shadow which we see accompanying us.
I do not know but I feel less vigor at night,—my legs will not carry me so far, as if the night were less favorable to muscular exertion, weakened us somewhat, as darkness turns plants pale,—but perhaps my experience is to be referred to my being already exhausted by the day; yet sometimes, after a hard day's work, I have found myself unexpectedly vigorous. I have never tried the experiment fairly.
Only the harvest and hunter's moons are famous, but I think that each full moon deserves to be, and has its own character, well-marked. One might be called the midsummer night moon.
​So still and moderate is the night. No scream is heard, whether of fear or joy. No great comedy, no tragedy is being enacted. The chirping of crickets is the most universal, if not the loudest sound. There is no French revolution in Nature, no excess. She is warmer or colder by a degree or two.
My shadow has the distinctness of a second person, a certain black companion bordering on the imp, and I ask who is this that I see dodging behind me as I am about to sit down on a rock. The rocks do not feel warm to-night, for the air is warmest, nor does the sand particularly.
No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the seasons. Hardly two nights are alike.
A book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season and out of doors, or in its own locality, wherever it may be.
When you get into the road, though far from the town, and feel the sand under your feet, it is as if you had reached your own gravel walk. You no longer hear the whippoorwill nor regard your own shadow, for here you expect a fellow traveler. You catch yourself walking merely. The road leads your steps and thoughts alike to the town. You see only the path, and your thoughts wander from the objects that are ​presented to your senses. You are no longer in place. It is like conformity, walking in the ways of men.
June 11, 1852.—It commonly happens that a flower is considered more beautiful that is not followed by fruit. It must culminate in the flower.
The red-eye sings now in the woods perhaps more than any other bird.
As I climbed the cliffs, when I jarred the foliage, I perceived an exquisite perfume which I could not trace to its source. Ah, those fugacious, universal fragrances of the meadows and woods! odors rightly mingled!
The shrub oaks on the plain are so covered with foliage that, when I look down on them from the cliffs, I am impressed as if I looked down on a forest of oaks.
The oven-bird and the thrasher sing. The last has a sort of chuckle. The crickets begin to sing in warm, dry places.
Lupines, their pods and seeds. First, the profusion of color, spikes of flowers rising above and prevailing over the leaves; then the variety in different clumps, rose? purple, blue, and white; then the handsome palmate leaf, made to hold dew. Gray says the name is from lupus, wolf, because they "were thought to devour the fertility of the soil." This is scurrilous.
​Under Fair Haven. First grew the Viola pedata here; then lupines, mixed with the delicate snapdragon. This soil must abound with the blue principle.
Utricularia vulgaris, common bladderwort, a dirty-conditioned flower, like a sluttish woman with a gaudy yellow bonnet.
Those spotted maple leaves, what mean their bright colors? Yellow, with a greenish centre and crimson border, on the green leaves, as if the great chemist had dropped some strong acid, by chance, from a phial designed for autumnal juice! Very handsome. Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shell-fish and the hectic glow of consumption.
June 11, 1853. The upland fields are already less green where the June grass is ripening its seed. They are greenest when only its blade is seen. In the sorrel fields, also, what lately was the ruddy, rosy cheek of health, now that the sorrel is ripening and dying, has become the tanned and imbrowned cheek of manhood.
Probably blackbirds were never less numerous along our river than in these years. They do not depend on the clearing of the woods and the cultivation of the orchards, etc. The streams and meadows in which they delight always existed. Most of the towns, soon after they were settled, were obliged to set a price upon their heads. ​In 1672, according to the town records of Concord, instruction was given to the selectmen, "That encouragement he given for the destroying of blackbirds and jaies." Shattuck, p. 45.
I remember Helen s telling me that John Marston, of Taunton, told her that he was aboard a vessel, during the Revolution, which met another vessel, and, as I think, one hailed the other. A French name being given could not be understood; whereupon a sailor, probably aboard his vessel, ran out on the bowsprit and shouted, "La Terrible" (the vessel in which John Adams was being brought back or carried out to France), and that sailor's name was Thoreau.
My father has an idea that he stood on the wharf and cried this to the bystanders. He tells me that when the war came on, my grandfather, being thrown out of business and being a young man, went a-privateering. I find from his Diary that John Adams set sail from Port Louis at L'Orient in the French frigate Terrible, Captain Chavagnes, June 17, 1779, the Bonhomme Richard, Captain Jones, and four other vessels, being in company at first, and the Terrible arrived at Boston the 2d of August. On the 13th of November following he set out for France again in the same frigate from Boston, and he says that a few days before the 24th, being at the last date on the Grand Bank of ​Newfoundland, we spoke an American privateer, the General Lincoln, Captain Barnes. If the above-mentioned incident occurred at sea, it was probably on this occasion.
June 11, 1855. When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street (not being inclined to change my dress) to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.
What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers. I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth for my friend. I expect to meet him at every turn, but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me. I am tired of frivolous society in which silence is forever the most natural and the best manners. I would fain walk on the deep waters, but my companions will only walk on shallows and puddles. I am naturally silent in the midst of twenty persons, from day to day, from year to year. I am rarely reminded of their presence. . . . One complains that I do not take his jokes. I took them before he had done uttering them, and went my way. One talks to me of his apples and pears, and I depart with my secret untold. His are not the apples that tempt me.
June 11, 1856. p. m. To Flint's Pond. It is very hot this p. m., and that peculiar stillness which belongs to summer noons now reigns in ​the woods. I observe and appreciate the shade, as it were the shadow of each particular leaf on the ground. I think that this peculiar darkness of the shade, of the foliage as seen between you and the sky, is not accounted for merely by saying that we have not yet got accustomed to clothed trees, but the leaves are rapidly acquiring a darker green, are more and more opaque, and, beside, the sky is lit with the intensest light. It reminds me of the thunder-cloud and the dark eyelash of summer. Great cumuli are slowly drifting in the intensest blue sky, with glowing white borders. The red-eye sings incessant, and the more indolent yellow-throated vireo, and the creeper, and perhaps the redstart? or else it is the parti-colored warbler.
I perceive that scent from the young, sweet fern shoots and withered blossoms, which made the first settlers of Concord to faint on their journey.
See a bream's nest, two and one fourth feet in diameter, laboriously scooped out, and the sur rounding bottom for a diameter of eight feet! comparatively white and clean, while all beyond is mud, leaves, etc., and a very large, green, and cupreous bream, with a red spot on the operculum, is poised over the centre, while half a dozen shiners are hovering about, apparently watching a chance to steal the spawn. ​A partridge with young in the saw-mill brook path. Could hardly tell what kind of a creature it was at first, it made such a noise and fluttering amid the weeds and bushes. Finally ran off, with its body flat and wings somewhat spread.
June 11, 1858. p. m. To Assabet Bath. . . . Saw a painted turtle on the gravelly bank, . . . and suspected that she had just been laying (it was mid p. m.), so, examining the ground, I found the surface covered with loose lichens, etc., about one foot behind her, and, digging, found five eggs just laid, one and one-half or two inches deep, under one side. It is remarkable how firmly they are packed in the soil, rather hard to extract, though but just laid. . . .
Saw half a dozen of the insculptæ preparing to dig now at mid p. m. (one or two had begun), at the most gravelly spot there, but they would not proceed while I watched, though I waited nearly half an hour, but either rested perfectly still, with their heads drawn partly in, or when a little further off, stood warily looking about, with their aiecks stretched out, turning their anxious-looking heads about. It seems a very earnest and pressing business they are upon. They have but a short season to do it in, and they run many risks.
Having succeeded in finding the Emys picta's ​eggs, I thought I would look for the Emys insculpta's at Abel Hosmer's rye field; so, looking carefully to see where the ground had been recently disturbed, I dug with my hand, and could directly feel the passage to the eggs. So I discovered two or three nests with their large and long eggs, five in one of them. It seems then, that if you look carefully soon after the eggs are laid in such a place, you can find the nests, though rain or even a dewy night might conceal the spot.
June 11, 1860. 10.30 a. m. Sail on the river. . . . The evergreens are now invested by the deciduous trees, and you get the full effect of their dark-green contrasting with the yellowish-green of the deciduous trees. . . .
I see from time to time a fish, scared by our sail, leap four to six feet through the air above the waves. . . .
Just within the edge of the wood, . . . I see a small painted turtle on its back, with its head stretched out as if to turn over. Surprised by the sight, I stooped to investigate the case. It drew in its head at once, bui I noticed that its shell was partially empty. I could see through it from side to side, as it lay, its entrails having been extracted through large openings just before the hind legs. The dead leaves were flattened for a foot around where it had been ​operated on, and were a little bloody. Its paunch lay on the leaves, and contained much vegetable matter, old cranberry leaves, etc. Judging by the striae, it was not more than five or six years old (or four or five). Its fore-parts were quite alive, its hind legs apparently dead, its inwards gone, apparently its spine perfect. The flies had entered it in numbers. What creature had done this which it would be difficult for a man to do? I thought of a skunk, weasel, mink, but I do not believe they could have got their snouts into so small a space as that in front of the hind legs, between the shells. The hind legs themselves had not been injured, nor the shell scratched. I thought it likely that this was done by some bird of the heron kind which has a long and powerful bill. This may account for the many dead turtles which I have found, and thought died from disease. Such is Nature, who gave one creature a taste or yearning for another's entrails as its favorite tid-bit! I thought the more of a bird, for just as we were shoving away from this isle, I heard a sound just like, a small dog barking hoarsely, and looking up saw it was made by a bittern (Ardea minor), a pair of which were flapping over the meadows, and probably had a nest in some tussock thereabouts. No wonder the turtle is wary, for notwithstanding its horny shell, when it comes forth to lay its ​eggs, it runs the risk of having its entrails plucked out. That is the reason that the box turtle, which lives entirely on the land, is made to shut itself up entirely within its shell, and I suspect that the mud tortoise only comes forth by night. What need the turtle has of some homy shield over those weaker parts, avenues to its entrails. I saw several of these painted turtles dead on the bottom.
Already I see those handsome fungi on the red maple leaves, yellow within, with a green centre, then the light red ring deepening to crimson.
On our way up, we eat our dinner at Eice's shore, and looked over the meadows covered there with waving sedge, light glaucous as it is bent by the wind, reflecting a grayish or light glaucous light from its under-side.
Looking at a hill-side of young trees, what various shades of green. The oaks generally are a light, tender, and yellowish-green. The white birches dark green now. The maples dark and silvery.
The white lily-pads, reddish, and showing their crimson under-sides from time to time, when the wind blows hardest.
June 12, 1851. Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.
There would be this advantage in traveling in ​your own country, even in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw. You would make fewer traveler s mistakes.
Is not he hospitable who entertains thoughts?
June 12, 1852. p. m. To Lupine Hill via Depot Field Brook. The meadows are yellow with golden senecio. Marsh speedwell, Veronica scutellata, lilac tinted, rather pretty. The mouse-ear forget-me-not, Myosotis laxa, has now extended its racemes? very much, and hangs over the edge of the brook. It is one of the most interesting minute flowers. It is the more beautiful for being small and unpretending; even flowers must be modest. The blue flag, Iris versicolor. Its buds are a dark, indigo-blue tip beyond the green calyx. It is rich, but hardly delicate and simple enough. A very handsome, sword-shaped leaf. The blue-eyed grass is one of the most beautiful of flowers.; It might have been famous from Proserpine down. It will bear to be praised by poets.
The blue flag, notwithstanding its rich furniture, its fringed, re-curved parasols over its anthers, and its variously streaked and colored petals, is loose and coarse in its habit. How completely all character is expressed by flowers. This is a little too showy and gaudy, like some women's bonnets. Yet it belongs to the meadow ​and ornaments it much. Ever it will be some obscure, small, and modest flower that will most please us.
How difficult, if not impossible, to do the things we have done, as fishing and camping out. They seem to me a little fabulous now. Boys are bathing at Hubbard's Bend, playing with a boat, I at the willows. The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water. As yet we have not man in Nature. What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his notebook, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties! A pale pink which the sun would soon tan. White man! There are no white men to contrast with the red and the black. They are of such colors as the weaver gives them. I wonder that the dog knows his master when he goes in to bathe, and does not stay by his clothes.
Small white-bellied (?) swallows in a row (a dozen) on the telegraph wire over the water by the bridge. This perch is little enough departure from unobstructed air to suit them. Pluming themselves. If you could furnish a perch aerial enough, even birds of paradise would alight. They do not alight on trees, methinks, unless on dead and bare boughs, but stretch a ​wire over water, and they perch on it. This is among the phenomena that cluster about the telegraph. The swallow has a forked tail, and wings and tail are of about the same length. . . .
Some fields are almost wholly covered with sheep's sorrel, now turned red, its valves (?). It helps thus agreeably to paint the earth, contrasting even at a distance with the greener fields, blue sky, and dark or downy clouds. It is red, marbled, watered, mottled, or waved with greenish, like waving grain, three or four acres of it. To the farmer or grazier it is a troublesome weed, but to the landscape viewer, an agreeable red tinge laid on by the painter. I feel well into summer when I see this red tinge. It appears to be avoided by the cows. The petals of the side-saddle flower, fully expanded, hang down. How complex it is, what with flowers and leaves! It is a wholesome and interesting plant to me, the leaf especially.
. . . The glory of Dennis's lupines is departed, and the white now shows in abundance beneath them. So I cannot walk longer in those fields of Enna in which Proserpine amused herself gathering flowers.
The steam whistle at a distance sounds even like the hum of a bee in a flower. So man's works fall into Nature. The flies hum at mid-afternoon, as if peevish and weary at the length ​of the days. The river is shrunk to summer width, on the sides smooth, whitish water, or rather it is the light from the pads; in the middle, dark blue or slate, rippled. The color of the earth at a distance where a wood has been cut off is a reddish brown. . . .
It is day, and we have more of that same light that the moon sent us, not reflected now, but shining directly. The sun is a fuller moon. Who knows how much lighter day there may be!
June 12, 1853. p. m. To Bear Hill. . . . The laurel probably by day after to-morrow.
The note of the wood-thrush answers to some cool, unexhausted morning vigor in the hearer. The leaf of the rattlesnake plantain now surprises the walker amid the dry leaves on cool hill-sides in the woods; of very simple form, but richly veined with longitudinal and transverse white veins. It looks like art.
Going up Pine Hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. She ran in dishabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than chickens just hatched, dispersed, flying along a foot or two from the ground, just over the bushes, for a rod or more. The mother kept close at hand to attract my attention, and mewed and clucked, and made a noise as when a hawk is in sight. She stepped about and held her head above the bushes, and clucked just like a ​hen. What a remarkable instinct, that which keeps the young so silent, and prevents their peeping and betraying themselves! This wild bird will run almost any risk to save her young. The young, I believe, make a fine sound at first, in dispersing, something like a cherry-bird.
Visited the great orchis which I am waiting to have open completely. It is emphatically a flower (within gunshot of the hawk's nest); its great spike, six inches by two, of delicate, pale purple flowers which begin to expand at bottom, rises above and contrasts with the green leaves of the hellebore, skunk-cabbage, and ferns (by which its own leaves are concealed), in the cool shade of an alder swamp. It is the more interesting for its variety and the secluded situations in which it grows, owing to which it is seldom seen, not thrusting itself upon the observation of men. It is a pale purple, as if from growing in the shade. It is not remarkable in its stalk and leaves, which, indeed, are commonly concealed by other plants.
A wild moss rose in Arethusa Meadow where are arethusas lingering still. The side-saddle flowers are partly turned up now, and make a great show with their broad red petals flapping like saddle ears (?). . . . I visited my hawk's nest, and the young hawk was perched now four or five feet above the nest, still in the shade. It ​will soon fly. So now in secluded pine woods the young hawks sit high on the edges of their nests, or on the twigs near by, in the shade, waiting for their pinions to grow, while their parents bring to them their prey. Their silence also is remarkable, not to betray themselves, nor will the old bird go to the nest while you are in sight. She pursues me half a mile when I withdraw.
The buds of young white oaks which have been frost-bitten are just pushing forth again. Are these such as were intended for next year, at the base of the leaf stalk?
June 12, 1854. p. m. To Walden. Clover now reddens the fields, grass in its prime. . . . With the roses now fairly begun, I associate summer heats. . . .
Hear the evergreen forest note, and see the bird on the top of a white pine, somewhat creeper-like along the boughs. A golden head, except a black streak from eyes, black throat, slate-colored back, forked tail, white beneath, er te, ter ter te. Another bird with yellow throat, near by, may have been of the other sex.
Scared a kingfisher, on a bough over Walden. As he flew off, he hovered two or three times thirty or forty feet above the pond, and at last dove and apparently caught a fish with which he flew off low over the water to a tree.
​Mountain laurel at the pond.
June 12, 1855. Down river to swamp east of Poplar Hill. I hear the toad still, which I have called spray frog falsely. He sits close to the edge of the water, and is hard to find. Hard to tell the direction though you may be within three feet. I detect him chiefly by the motion of the great swelling bubble on his throat. A peculiarly rich sprayey dreamer now at 2 p. m. How serenely it ripples over the water! What a luxury life is to him! I have to use a little geometry to detect him. Am surprised at my discovery at last, while C. sits by incredulous. Had turned our prow to shore to search. This rich sprayey note possesses all the shore. It diffuses itself far and wide over the water, and enters into every crevice of the noon, and you cannot tell whence it proceeds.
Young redwings now begin to fly feebly amid the button bushes, and the old ones chatter their anxiety.
In the thick swamp behind the hill I look at the vireo's nest which C. found. . . . He took one cow-bird's egg from it, and I now take the other which he left. There is no vireo's egg, and it is said they always desert their nest when there are two cow-bird's eggs laid in it.
Nuttall says of the cow-bird's egg: "If the egg be deposited in the nest alone, it is uniformly ​forsaken;"—has seen "sometimes two of these eggs in the same nest, but in this case one of them commonly proves abortive,"—"is almost oval, scarcely larger than that of the bluebird." He says it is " thickly sprinkled with points and confluent touches of olive brown, of two shades, somewhat more numerous at the greater end, on a white ground tinged with green. But in some of these eggs the ground is almost pure white, and the spots nearly black."
June 12, 1859. p. m. To Gowing's Swamp. I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now. What a wholesome red ! It is densest in parallel lines, according to the plowing or cultivation. There is hardly a more agreeable sight at this season.
​June 13, 1851. Walked to Walden last night (moon not quite full). I noticed night before last from Fair Haven how valuable was some water by moonlight, like the river and Fair Haven, though far away, reflecting the light with a faint glimmering sheen, as in the spring of the year. The water shines with an inward light, like a heaven on earth. The silent depth and serenity and majesty of water! Strange that men should distinguish gold and diamonds, when these precious elements are so common. I saw a distant river by moonlight, making no noise, yet flowing, as by day, still to the sea, like melted silver, reflecting the moonlight. Far away it lay encircling the earth. How far away it may look in the night! Even from a low hill, miles away down in the valley! As far off as Paradise and the delectable country! There is a certain glory attends on water by night. By it the heavens are related to the earth, undistinguishable from a sky beneath you. After I reached the road, I saw the moon suddenly reflected from a pool, the earth, as it were, dissolved beneath my feet. The magical moon, with attendant stars, suddenly looking up with mild lustre from a window in the dark earth. I observed also, the same night, a halo about my shadow in the moonlight, which I referred to the accidentally lighter color of the surrounding ​surface, but on transferring it to the darkest patches I saw the halo there equally. It serves to make the outline of the shadow more distinct.
But now for last night. A few fire-flies in the meadow. Do they shine, though invisibly, by day? Is their candle lighted by day?—It is not night-fall till the whippoorwills begin to sing.
As I entered the Deep Cut, I was affected by beholding the first faint reflection of genuine, unmixed moonlight on the eastern sand-bank, while the horizon, yet red with day, was tinging the western side. What an interval between these two lights! The light of the moon, in what age of the world does that fall upon the earth? The moonlight was as the earliest and dewy morning light, and the daylight tinge reminded me much more of the night. There were the old and new dynasties contrasted, and an interval between, not recognized in history, which time could not span. Nations have flourished in that light.
When I had climbed the sand-bank on the left, I felt the warmer current or stratum of air on my cheek, like a blast from a furnace.
The white stems of the pines which reflected the weak light, standing thick and close together, while their lower branches were gone, reminded me that the pines are only longer grasses, which ​rise to a chaffy head, and we the insects that crawl between them. They are particularly grass-like.
I heard the partridge drumming to-night as late as nine o'clock. What a singularly space-penetrating and filling sound! Why am I never nearer to its source?
We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our extremities with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so thaf the wave, the comber of each inspiration, shall break upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us. Might not a bellows assist us to breathe? . . . Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.
The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its own kind, which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need to be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life?
The tree-toad's, too, is a summer-sound. I hear, just as the night sets in, faint notes from time to time, from some sparrow (?) falling asleep, a vesper hymn; and later, in the woods, ​the chuckling, rattling sound of some unseen bird on the near trees.—The night-hawk booms wide awake.
As I approached the pond down Hubbard's path, after coming out of the woods into a warmer air, I saw the shimmering of the moon on its surface; and in the near, now flooded cove, the water bugs, now darting, circling about, made streaks or curves of light. The moon's inverted pyramid of shimmering light commenced about twenty rocls off, like so much micaceous sand. But I was startled to see midway in the dark water, a bright flame like more than phosphorescent light, crowning the crests of the wavelets, which at first I mistook for fire-flies. . . . It had the appearance of a pure smokeless flame, half a dozen inches long, rising from the water and bending flickeringly along its surface. I thought of St. Elmo's lights and the like. But coming near to the shore of the pond itself, these flames increased, and I saw that even this was so many broken reflections of the moon's disk, though one would have said they were of an intenser light than the moon herself. From contrast with the surrounding water they were. Standing up close to the shore and nearer the rippled surface, I saw the reflections of the moon sliding clown the watery concave, like so many lustrous burnished coins poured from a bag with ​inexhaustible lavishness, and the lambent flames on the surface were much multiplied, seeming to slide along a few inches with each wave before they were extinguished; and I saw from farther and farther off, they gradually merged in the general sheen, which in fact was made up of a myriad little mirrors reflecting the disk of the moon with equal brightness to an eye rightly placed. The pyramid or sheaf of light which we see springing from near where we stand is in fact only that portion of the shimmering surface which our eye takes in. To a myriad eyes suitably placed, the whole surface of the pond would be seen to shimmer, or rather it would be seen, as the waves turned up their mirrors, to be covered with those bright flame-like reflections of the moon's disk, like a myriad candles everywhere arising from the waves. . . .
As I climbed the hill again toward my old bean-field, I listened to the ancient, familiar, immortal, cricket sound under all others, hearing at first some distinct chirps. But when these ceased, I was aware of the general earth song which I had not before perceived, and amid which these were only taller flowers in a bed, and I wondered if behind or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal. Why do we not hear when this begins in the spring? and when it ceases in the fall? or is it ​too gradual?—After getting into the road I have no thought to record. All the way home the walk is comparatively barren.
June 13, 1852. 3 p. m. To Conantum. . . . The river has a summer mid-day look, smooth, with green shores, and shade from the trees on its banks.
What a sweetness fills the air now in low grounds or meadows, reminding me of times when I went strawberrying years ago. It is as if all meadows were filled with some sweet mint.
The Dracaena borealis (Bigelow), Clintonia borealis (Gray), amid the Solomon's-seals in Hubbard's Grove Swamp, a very neat and hand some liliaceous flower, with three large, regular, spotless green convallaria leaves, making a triangle from the root, and sometimes a fourth from the scape, linear, with four drooping, greenish-yellow, bell-shaped (?) flowers. It is a handsome and perfect flower, though not high-colored. I prefer it to some more famous. But Gray should not have named it from the Governor of New York. What is he to the lovers of flowers in Massachusetts? If named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. Rhode Island may as well name the flowers after her governors as New York. Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.
​The buckbean grows in Conant's meadow. Lambkill is out. I remember with what delight I used to discover this flower in dewy mornings. All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early opened, hopeful eyes.
Saw four cunning little woodchucks, about one-third grown, that live under Conant's old house, nibbling the short grass. Mistook one for a piece of rusty iron.
The Smilax herbacea, carrion flower, a rank green vine, with long peduncled umbels, small greenish or yellowish flowers, and tendrils, just opening, at the Miles swamp. It smells exactly like a dead rat in the wall, and apparently attracts flies like carrion. I find small gnats in it. A very remarkable odor. A single minute flower, in an umbel, open, will scent a whole room. Nature imitates all things in flowers. They are at once the most beautiful and the ugliest objects, the most fragrant, and the most offensive to the nostrils.
The great leaves of the bass attract one now, six inches in diameter.
The delicate maiden-hair fern forms a cup or dish, very delicate and graceful. Beautiful, too, its glossy black stem and its wave-edged, fruited leaflets.
I hear the feeble, plaintive note of young ​bluebirds, just trying their wings or getting used to them. Young robins peep.
I think I know four kinds of cornel beside the dogwood and bunchberry. One now in bloom, with rather small leaves, which have a smooth, silky feeling beneath, and a greenish gray spotted stem, old stocks all gray (Cornus alternifolia? or sericea?). The broad-leaved cornel in Laurel Glen, yet green in the bud (Cornus circinata?). The small-leaved cornel, with a small cyme or corymb as late as the last (Cornus paniculata), and the red osier by the river (Cornus stolonifera), which I have not seen this year.
June 13, 1853. 9 a. m. To Orchis Swamp.—I find that there are two young hawks. One has left the nest, and is perched on a small maple seven or eight rods distant. It appears much smaller than the former one. I am struck by its large naked head, so vulture-like, and large eyes, as if the vulture s were an inferior stage through which the hawk passed. Its feet, too, are large, remarkably developed, by which it holds to its perch securely, like an old bird, before its wings can perform their office. It has a buff breast, striped with dark brown. P——, when I told him of this nest, said he would like to carry one of his rifles down there. But I told him that I should be sorry to have ​them killed, I would rather save one of these hawks than have a hundred hens and chickens. It was worth more to see them soar, especially now that they are so rare in the landscape. It is easy to buy eggs, but not to buy hen-hawks. My neighbors would not hesitate to shoot the last pair of hen-hawks in the town to save a few of their chickens! But such economy is narrow and groveling. I would rather never taste chickens meat nor hens eggs than never to see a hawk sailing through the upper air again. The sight is worth incomparably more than a chicken soup or boiled egg. So we exterminate the deer and substitute the hog. It was amusing to observe the swaying to and fro of the young hawk's head to counterbalance the gentle action of the bough in the wind.
Violets appear to be about done generally. Four-leaved loosestrife just out; also, the smooth wild rose yesterday. The pogonia at Forget-me-not Brook.
What was that rare and beautiful bird in the dark woods under the Cliffs, with black above and white spots and bars, a large triangular blood-red spot on breast, and sides of breast and beneath, white? Note, a warble, like the oriole, but softer and sweeter. It was quite tame. Probably a rose-breasted grossbeak. At first I thought it was a chewink, as it sat ​sideways to me, and was going to call Sophia to look at it, but then it turned its breast full toward me, and I saw the large, triangular, blood-red spot occupying the greater part of it. . . . It is a memorable event to meet with so rare a bird. Birds answer to flowers, both in their abundance and their rareness. The meeting with a rare and beautiful bird like this is like meeting with some rare and beautiful flower, which you may never find again per chance, like the great purple-fringed orchis, at least. How much it enhances the wildness and the richness of the forest.
June 13, 1854. 2 p. m. By boat to Bittern Cliff, and so to Lee's Cliff. I hear the muttering of thunder and see a dark cloud in the horizon; am uncertain how far up stream I shall get.
Now in shallow places near the bends the large and conspicuous spikes of the broad-leaved potamogeton rise thickly above the water. . . .
I see the yellow water ranunculus in dense fields now in some places on the side of the stream, two or three inches above water, and many gone to seed.
The flowering fern is reddish and yellowish-green on the meadows.
It is so warm that I stop to drink wherever there is a spring.
​The little globular, drooping, reddish buds of the Chimaphila umbellata (pipsissewa) are now very pretty.
How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset, small ten-sided rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping, dry capsules of last year, and sometimes those of the year before, two inches lower.
When I have stayed out thus till late, many miles from home, and have heard a cricket beginning to chirp louder near me in the grass, I have felt that I was not far from home after all. Began to be weaned from my village home.
I see over the bream nests little schools of countless minute minnows (can they be young breams?), the breams being still in their nests.
It is surprising how thickly-strewn our soil is with arrow heads. I never see the surface broken in sandy places but I think of them. I find them on all sides, not only in corn, grain, potato, and bean fields, but in pastures and woods, by woodchucks holes and pigeon beds, and, as to-night, in a pasture where a restless cow had pawed the ground.
Is not the rosa lucida paler than the nitida?
June 13, 1860. 2 p. m. To Martial Miles's via Clamshell. I see at Martial Miles's two young woodchucks taken sixteen days ago, when ​they were perhaps a fortnight old. There were four in all, and they were dug out by the aid of a dog. The mother successively pushed out her little ones to the dog to save herself, and one was at once killed by the dog. These two are now nearly one third grown. They have found a hole within the house, into which they run, and whither they have carried shavings, etc., and made a nest. Thence they run out doors and feed close about the house, lurking behind barrels, etc. They eat yarrow, clover, catnip, etc., and are fed with milk and bread. They do not drink the milk like a dog or a cat, but simply suck it, taking the sharp edge of the shallow tin dish in their mouths. They are said to spit like a cat. They eat bread sitting upright on their haunches, and holding it in their forepaws just like a squirrel. That is their common and natural mode of eating. They are as gray (hoary) as the old, or grayer. Mrs. Miles says they sleep on their heads, i. e., curling their heads under them; also, that they can back as straight into their hole as if they went head foremost. I saw a full-grown one this p. m. which stood so erect and still (its paws hanging down and inobvious as its ears) that it might be mistaken for a short and very stout stake.
This p. m. the streets are strewn with the leaves of the button-wood, which are still ​falling. Looking up, I see many more half-formed leaves hanging wilted or withered. I think that the leaves of these trees were especially injured by the cold wind of the 10th, and are just now falling in consequence. I can tell when I am under a button-wood by the number of leaves on the ground. With the other trees it was mainly a mechanical injury, done rather by the wind than the cold, but the tender shoots of this tree were killed.
June 14, 1840.
"In glory and in joy, Behind his plough, upon the mountain side."
(Wordsworth.)
I seemed to see the woods wave on a hundred mountains, as I read these lines, and the distant rustling of their leaves reached my ear.
June 14, 1851. Full moon last night. Set out on a walk to Conantum at 7 p. m. A serene evening, the sun going down behind clouds. A few white or slightly-shaded piles of clouds floating in the eastern sky, but a broad, clear, mellow cope left for the moon to rise into. An evening for poets to describe. As I proceed along the back road I hear the lark still singing in the meadow, and the bobolink, the golden robin on the elms, and the swallows twittering about the barns. All Nature is in an expectant attitude. Before Goodwin's house at the ​opening of the Sudbury road, the swallows are diving at a tortoise-shell cat who cavorts rather awkwardly as if she did not know whether to be scared or not. And now, the sun having buried himself in the low cloud in the west and hung out his crimson curtain, I hear, while sitting by the wall, the sound of the stake-driver at a distance, like that made by a man pumping in a neighboring farm-yard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before his door on a frosty morning, and I can imagine it like driving a stake in a meadow. The pumper. I immediately went in search of the bird, but after going one third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer, and the two parts of the sound did not appear to proceed from the same place. What is the peculiarity of these sounds which penetrate so far on the key-note of Nature? At last I got near to the brook in the meadow behind Hubbard's wood, but I could not tell if it were farther or nearer than that. When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased, and I heard it no more. I suppose that I scared it. As before I was farther off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought. It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking or throwing out water with pump-like lungs. It was a sound as of gulping water.
​Where my path crosses the brook in the meadow there is a singularly sweet scent in the heavy air where the brakes grow, the fragrance of the earth, as if the dew were a distillation of the fragrant essences of Nature.
And now, as I enter the embowered willow cause way, my senses are captivated again by a sweet fragrance. I know not if it be from a particular plant, or all together, sweet-scented vernal grass, or sweet briar. Now the sun is fairly gone, I hear the dreaming toad (?), and the whippoorwill from some darker wood, and the cuckoo. It is not far from eight. The song-sparrows sing quite briskly among the willows as if it were spring again, the blackbird's harsher note resounds over the meadow, and the veery's comes up from the wood. Fishes are dimpling the surface of the river, seizing the insects which alight. A solitary fisherman in his boat inhabits the scene. As I ascended the hill, I found myself in a cool, fragrant, dewy, up-country, mountain, morning air. The moon was now seen rising over Fair Haven, and at the same time reflected in the river, pale and white, like a silvery cloud barred with a cloud. In Conant's orchard I hear the faint cricket-like song of a sparrow, saying its vespers, as if it were a link between the cricket and the bird. The robin sings now, though the moon shines silvery, and the veery jingles its trill.
​I hear the fresh and refreshing sound of falling water as I have heard it in New Hampshire. It is a sound we do not commonly hear.
How moderate, deliberate is Nature, how gradually the shades of night gather and deepen, giving man ample leisure to bid farewell to day, conclude his day s affairs, and prepare for slumber. The twilight seems out of proportion to the length of the day.
I see, indistinctly, oxen asleep in the fields, silent, in majestic slumber, reclining statuesque, Egyptian, like the Sphinx. What solid rest! How their heads are supported!
From Conant's summit I hear as many as fifteen whippoorwills, or whip-or-I-wills, at once, the succeeding cluck sounding strangely foreign, like a hewer at work elsewhere.
How sweet and encouraging it is to hear the sound of some artificial music from the midst of woods or from the top of a hill at night, borne on the breeze from some distant farm-house, the human voice, or a flute. That is a civilization one can endure, worth having. I could go about the world listening for the strains of music. Men use this gift but sparingly, nevertheless. What should we think of a bird which had the gift of song, but used it only once in a dozen years! like the plant which blossoms only once in a century.
​Peabody says that the night-hawk retires to rest about the time the whippoorwill begins its song. The whippoorwill begins now at half-past seven. I hear the night-hawk after nine o'clock. He says the latter flies low in the evening, but it also flies high, as it must needs do to make the booming sound.
Not much before ten o'clock does the moonlight night begin, when man is asleep and day fairly forgotten. Then is the beauty of moonlight seen upon lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. Then let me walk in a diversified country of hill and dale, with heavy woods on one side, and copses and scattered trees enough to give me shadows. As I return, a mist is on the river, which is thus taken into the bosom of Nature again.
June 14, 1852. Saw a wild rose from the cars in Weston. The early red roses are out in gardens at home.
June 14, 1853. p. m. To White's Pond. Heard the first locust from amid the shrubs by the roadside. He comes with heat.
Snake sloughs are found nowadays, bleached and whitish.
I observed the cotton of aphides on the alders yesterday and to-day. How regularly these phenomena appear, even the stains or spots or galls on leaves, as that bright yellow on blackberry ​leaves and those ring spots on maple leaves I see to-day, exactly the same pattern with last year's, and the crimson frosting on the black birch leaves I saw the other day. Then there are the huckleberry apples and the large green puffs on the panicled andromeda, and also I see now the very light or whitish solid and juicy apples on the swamp pink with a fungus-like smell when broken.
Erigeron strigosum. Some white, some purplish, common now, and daisy-like. I put it rather early on the 9th.
Instead of the white lily which requires mud or the sweet flag, here grows the blue flag in the water, thinly about the shore. The color of the flower harmonizes singularly with the water. With our boat's prow to the shore, we sat half an hour this evening, listening to the bull-frogs. What imperturbable fellows! One sits perfectly still behind some blades of grass while the dog is chasing others within two feet. Some are quite handsome, large, and spotted. We see here and there light-colored, greenish, or white spots on the bottom, where a fish—a bream, perhaps—has picked away all the dead wood and leaves for her nest over a space of eighteen inches or more. Young bream, from one to three inches long, light- colored and transparent, are swimming ​about, and here and there a leech in the shallow water, moving as serpents are represented to do. Large devil's needles are buzzing back and forth. They skim along the edge of the blue flags, apparently quite round this cove or further, like hen-harriers beating the bush for game. And now comes a humming-bird, humming from the woods, and alights on the blossom of a blue flag. The bull-frogs begin with one or two notes, and with each peal add another trill to their trump, er roonk—er-er-roonk—er-er-er-roonk, etc. I am amused to hear one after another, and then an unexpectedly deep and confident bass, as if he had charged himself with more wind than the rest. And now, as if by a general agreement, they all trump together, making a deafening noise. Sometimes one jumps up a foot out of water in the midst of these concerts. What are they about? Suddenly a tree-toad in the overhanging woods begins, and another answers, and another, with loud ranging notes, such as I never heard before, and in three minutes they are all silent again. A red-eye sings on a tree top, and a cuckoo is heard from the wood. These are the evening sounds.
As we look over the water now, the opposite woods are seen dimly through what appears not so much the condensing dew and mist as the dry ​haziness of the afternoon now settled and condensed. The woods on the opposite shore have not the distinctness they had an hour before, but perhaps a more agreeable dimness, a sort of gloaming, or settling and thickening of the haze over the water, which melts tree into tree, they being no longer bright and distinct, and masses them agreeably, a bluish mistiness. This appears to be an earlier gloaming before sunset. . . .
This seems the true hour to be abroad, sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. Then the dews begin to descend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities. Home is farther away than ever; here is home. The beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for ripples. The wood-thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain of pure, unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and ​another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say. There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood-thrush as between Thompson's "Seasons" and Homer. The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness.
June 14, 1854. Caught a locust, properly harvest fly, drumming on a birch, which —— and —— think like the septendecim, except that ours has not red eyes, but black ones. Harris says of the other kind, the dog-day cicada (canicularis) or harvest fly, that it begins to be heard invariably at the beginning of dog days; that he has heard it for many years in succession, with few exceptions, on the 25th of July.
June 14, 1857. [Plymouth.] B. M. W—— tells me that he learns from pretty good authority that Webster once saw the sea serpent. It seems it was first seen in the bay between Mauomet and Plymouth Beach by a perfectly reliable witness (many years ago) who was accustomed to look out on the sea with his glass every morning the first thing, as regularly as he ate his breakfast. One morning he saw this monster, with a head somewhat like a horse's, raised some six feet above the water, and his body, the size of a cask, trailing behind. He was ​careering over the bay, chasing the mackerel, which ran ashore in their fright, and were washed up and died in great numbers. The story is that Webster had appointed to meet some Plymouth gentlemen at Manomet and spend the day fishing with them. After the fishing was over he set out to return to Duxbury in his sail-boat with Peterson, as he had come, and on the way they saw the sea serpent, which answered to the common account of this creature. It passed directly across the bows only six or seven rods off, and then disappeared. On the sail homeward, Webster, having had time to reflect on what had occurred, at length said to Peterson, "For God's sake never say a word about this to any one, for if it should be known that I have seen the sea serpent, I should never hear the last of it, but, wherever I went, should have to tell the story to every one I met." So it has not leaked out till now.
W—— also tells me (and E. W—— confirms it, his father having probably been of the party) that many years ago a party of Plymouth gentlemen rode round by the shore to the Gurnet, and there had a high time. When they set out to return, they left one of their number, a General Winslow, asleep, and, as they rode along homeward, amused themselves with conjecturing what he would think when he waked up and found ​himself alone. When at length he awoke, he comprehended his situation at once, and, being somewhat excited by the wine he had drunk, he mounted his horse and rode along the shore to Saquish Head in the opposite direction. From here to Plymouth Beach is about a mile and a quarter, but, it being low tide, he waded his horse as far as the Beacon, north of the channel at the entrance to Plymouth Harbor, about three quarters of a mile, and then boldly swam him across to the end of Plymouth Beach, about half a mile further, notwithstanding a strong current. Having landed safely, he whipped up and soon reached the town, having come only about eight miles, and having ample time to warm and dry himself at the tavern before his companions arrived, who had at least twenty miles to ride about through Marshfield and Duxbury. When they found him sitting by the tavern fire, they at first thought it was his ghost.
June 14, 1859. p. m. To Flint's Pond.—Pout's nest with a straight entrance some twenty inches long and a simple round nest at end. The young, just hatched, all head, light colored, under a mass of weedy hummocks which is all under water.
The rose-breasted grossbeak is common now in the Flint's Pond woods. It is not at all shy, and our richest singer, perhaps, after the ​wood-thrush. The rhythm is very like that of the tanager, but the strain is perfectly clear and sweet. One sits on the bare dead twig of a chestnut high over the road at Gourgas wood, and over my head, and sings clear and loud at regular intervals, the strain about ten or fifteen seconds long, rising and swelling to the end with various modulations. Another, singing in emulation, regularly answers it, alternating with it, from a distance, at least a quarter of a mile off. It sings thus long at a time, and I leave it singing there, regardless of me.
June 14, 1860. p. m. To 2d Division. . . . The white water ranunculus is abundant in the brook, out, say a week, and well open in the sunshine. It is a pretty white flower, with yellow centre, seen above the dark-brown green leaves in the rapid water, its peduncle recurved so as to present the flower erect half an inch to an inch above the surface, while the buds are submerged.
June 15, 1840. I stood by the river to-day, considering the forms of the elms reflected in the water. For every oak and birch, too, growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, there is a graceful, ethereal, and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. Anxious Nature sometimes reflects from pools and puddles the objects which ​our groveling senses may fail to see relieved against the sky, with the pure ether for background.
It would be well if we saw ourselves as in perspective always, impressed with distinct outline on the sky, side by side with the shrubs on the river's brim. So let our life stand to heaven as some fair sun-lit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise be planted on some eastern hill to glisten in the first rays of the dawn.
June 15, 1851. Saw the first wild rose to-day. The white weed has suddenly appeared, the clover gives whole fields a rich and florid appearance. The rich red and the sweet-scented white. The fields are blushing with the red as the western sky at evening.
The blue-eyed grass, well-named, looks up to heaven, and the yarrow, with its persistent dry stalks and heads, is now ready to blossom again. The dry stems and heads of last year's tansy stand high above the new green leaves.
I sit in the shade of the pines to hear a wood-thrush at noon; the ground smells of dry leaves; the heat is oppressive. The bird begins in a low strain, i. e., it first delivers a strain on a lower key, then, a moment after, another a little higher, then another still varied from the others, no two successive strains alike, but either ascending or descending. He confines himself to his few ​notes in which he is unrivaled, as if his kind had learned this and no more, anciently.
I perceive, as formerly, a white froth dripping from the pitch pines just at the base of the new shoots. It has no taste.
The polly wogs in the pond are now full-tailed. The hickory leaves are blackened by a recent frost, which reminds me that this is near their northern limit.
The rapidity with which the grass grows is remarkable. The 25th of May I walked to the hills in Wayland, and when I returned across lots do not remember that I had much occasion to think of the grass, or to go round any fields to avoid treading on it. But just a week afterward, at Worcester, it was high and waving in the fields, and I was to some extent confined to the road, and the same was the case here. Apparently in a month you get from fields which you can cross without hesitation, to haying time. It has grown you hardly know when, be the weather what it may, sunshine or storm.
I start up a solitary woodcock in the shade of some copse; it goes off with a startled, rattling, hurried note.
After walking by night several times, I now walk by day, but I am not aware of any crowning advantage in it. I see small objects better, but it does not enlighten me any. The day is more trivial.
​What a careful gardener Nature is! She does not let the sun come out suddenly with all his intensity after rain and cloudy weather, but graduates the change to suit the tenderness of plants.
I see the tall crowfoot now in the meadows, Ranunculus acris; with a smooth stem. I do not notice the bulbosus which was so common a fortnight ago. The rose-colored flowers of the Kalmia angustifolia, lambkill, just opened and opening. The Convallaria bifolia growing stale in the woods. The Hieracium venosum, veiny-leaved hawk-weed, with its yellow blossoms, in the woodland path. The Hypoxis erecta, yellow Bethlehem star, where there is a thick wiry grass in open paths, might well be called yellow-eyed grass. The Pyrola asarifolia, with its pagoda-like stem of flowers, i. e., broad-leaved wintergreen. The Trientalis Americana, like last, in the woods, with its star-like white flower and pointed, whorled leaves. The prunella, too, is in blossom, and the rather delicate Thesium umbellatum, a white flower. The Solomon's-seal, with a greenish, drooping raceme of flowers at the top, I do not identify.
I find I postpone all actual intercourse with my friends to a certain real intercourse which takes place commonly when we are actually at a distance from one another.
​June 15, 1852. Yesterday we smelt the sea strongly. The sea breeze alone made the day tolerable. This morning, a shower. The robin only sings, the louder for it. He is inclined to sing in foul weather.
To Clematis Brook. 1.30 p. m.
Very warm. This melting weather makes a stage in the year. The crickets creak louder and more steadily. The bull-frogs croak in ear nest. The dry z-ing of the locust is heard. The drouth begins. Bathing cannot be omitted. The conversation of all boys in the streets is whether they will or will not, or who will, go in a-swimming. . . . You lie with open windows and hear the sounds in the streets. The seringo sings now at noon on a post, has a light streak over eye. The autumnal dandelion. Leontodon or Apargia. Erigeron integrifolium or strigosum, i. e., narrow-leaved daisy fleabane of Gray, very common, like a white aster.
Men are inclined to be amphibious, to sympathize with fishes now. I desire to get wet, saturated with water. The North River, Assabet, by the old stone bridge, affords the best bathing-place I think of,—a pure, sandy, uneven bottom, with a swift current, a grassy bank, and over hanging maples, transparent water, deep enough, where you can see every fish in it. Though you stand still, you feel the rippling current about you.
​Young robins, dark-speckled, and the pigeon woodpecker flies up from the ground and darts away.
The farm-houses under their shady trees look as if their inhabitants were taking their siesta at this hour. I pass Baker's in the rear through the open pitch-pine wood. . . . No scouring of tubs or cans now. They eat and all are gone to sleep preparing for an early tea, excepting the in defatigable, never-resting hoers in the cornfield, who have carried a jug of molasses and water to the field, and will wring their shirts to-night. I shall ere long hear the horn blow for their early tea. The wife or the hired Irish woman steps to the door and blows the long tin horn, a cheering sound to the laborers in the field.
The motive of the laborer should be not to get his living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work. A town must pay its engineers so well that they shall not feel they are working for low ends, as for a livelihood mainly, but for scientific ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him. who does it for love, and pay him well.
On Mount Misery, panting with heat, looking down the river. The haze an hour ago reached to Wachusett; now it obscures it.
Methinks there is a male and female shore to the river, one abrupt, the other flat and ​meadowy. Have not all streams this contrast more or less,—on the one hand eating into the bank, on the other depositing their sediment?
The year is in its manhood now. The very river looks warm, and there is none of that light celestial blue seen in far reaches in the spring.
I see fields a mile distant reddened with sorrel.
The very sight of distant water is refreshing, though a bluish steam appears to rise on it. How refreshing the sound of the smallest waterfall in hot weather. I sit by that on Clematis Brook, and listen to its music. The very sight of this half stagnant pond-hole drying up and leaving bare mud, with the pollywogs and turtles making off in it, is agreeable and encouraging to behold, as if it contained the very seeds of life, the liquor, rather, boiled down. The foulest water will bubble purely. They speak to our blood, even these stagnant, slimy pools. Even this water has, no doubt, its falls nobler than Montmorenci, grander than Niagara, in the course of its circulations.
Cattle walk along now in a brook or ditch for coolness, lashing their tails, and browse the edges; or they stand concealed for shade amid thick bushes. How perfectly acquainted they are with man.
I hear the scream of a great hawk sailing ​with a ragged wing against the high wood side, apparently to scare his prey, and so detect it, shrill, harsh, fitted to excite terror in sparrows, and to issue from his split and curved bill, spit with force from his mouth with an undulatory quaver imparted to it from his wings or motion as he flies. I see his open bill the while against the sky. A hawk's ragged wing will grow whole again, but so will not a poet's.
Here at Well Meadow head I see the fringed purple orchis, unexpectedly beautiful, though a pale lilac purple, a large spike of purple flowers. I find two [of the same species], the grandiflora of Bigelow and fimbriata of Gray. Bigelow thinks it the most beautiful of all the orchises. . . . Why does it grow there only, far in a swamp, remote from public view? It is some what fragrant, reminding me of the lady's slipper. Is it not significant that some rare and delicate and beautiful flowers should be found only in unfrequented wild swamps? . . . Yet I am not sure but this is a fault in the flower. It is not quite perfect in all its parts. A beautiful flower must be simple, not spiked. It must have a fair stem and leaves. The stem is rather naked, and the leaves are for shade and moisture. It is fairest seen rising from amid brakes and hellebore, its lower part, or rather naked stein, concealed. Where the most beautiful wild ​flowers grow, there man's spirit is fed and poets grow. It cannot be high-colored, growing in the shade. Nature has taken no pains to exhibit it, and few that bloom are ever seen by mortal eyes.
There are few really cold springs. How few men can be believed when they say one is cold. I go out of my way to the Boiling Spring. It is as cold as the coldest well water. What a treasure is such a spring! Who divined it?
8 p. m. On river. No moon. A deafening sound from toads, and intermittingly from bull frogs. What I have thought to be frogs prove to be toads, sitting by thousands along the shore, and trilling short and loud, not so long a quaver as in the spring. Arid I have not heard them in those pools, now indeed mostly dried up, where I heard them in the spring. (I do not know what to think of my midsummer frog now.) The bull-frogs are very loud, of various degrees of baseness and sonorousness, answering each other across the river with two or three grunting croaks. They are not now so numerous as the toads. It is candle light. The fishes leap. The meadows sparkle with the coppery light of fire-flies. The evening star, multiplied by undulating water, is like bright sparks of fire continually ascending. The reflections of the trees are generally indistinct. There is a low mist slightly enlarging the river, through ​which the arches of the stone bridge are just visible, as in a vision. The mist is singularly bounded, collected here while there is none there, close up to the bridge on one side and none on the other, depending apparently on currents of air. . . . There is a low crescent of northern light, and shooting stars from time to time. . . . I paddle with a bough, the Nile boatman's oar, which is rightly pliant, and you do not labor much.
June 15, 1853. p. m. To Trillium Woods. Clover now in its prime. What more luxuriant than a clover field. The poorest soil that is covered with it looks incomparably fertile. This is perhaps the most characteristic feature of June, resounding with the hum of insects, such a blush on the fields. The rude health of the sorrel cheek has given place to the blush of clover. Painters are wont, in their pictures of Paradise, to strew the field too thickly with flowers. There should be moderation in all things. Though we love flowers we do not want them so thick under our feet that we cannot walk without treading on them. But a clover field in bloom is some excuse for them. . . .
Here are many wild roses northeast of Trillium Woods. We are liable to underrate this flower, on account of its commonness. Is it not ​the queen of our flowers? How ample and high-colored its petals, glancing half concealed from its own green bowers. There is a certain noble and delicate civility about it, not wildness. It is properly the type of the rosaceæ, or flowers, among others, of most wholesome fruits. It is at home in the garden, as readily cultivated as apples. It is the pride of June. In summing up its attractions I should mention its rich color, size, and form, the rare beauty of its bud, its fine fragrance and the beauty of the entire shrub, not to mention the almost innumerable varieties it runs into. I bring home the buds ready to expand, put them into a pitcher of water, and the next morning they open, and fill my chamber with fragrance. This found in the wilderness must have reminded the Pilgrim of home.
For a week past I have heard the cool, watery-note of the goldfinch, from time to time, as it twittered past.
June 15, 1854. I think the birds sing some what feebler now-a-days. The note of the bobolink begins to sound somewhat rare.
June 15, 1858. That coarse grass in the Island Meadow which grows in full circles, as in the Great Meadows, is wool grass. Some is now fairly in bloom. Many plants have a similar habit of growth. The Osmunda ​regalis growing in very handsome hollow circles, or sometimes only crescents, or arcs of circles, is now generally of a peculiarly tender green, but some has begun to go to seed and look brown; hollow circles one or two feet to a rod in diameter. These two are more obvious when, as now, all the rest of the meadow is covered with water.
June 16, 1852. 4.30 a. m. A low fog on the meadows. The scattered cloud wisps in the sky, like a squadron thrown into disorder, at the approach of the sun. The sun now gilds an eastern cloud, giving it a broad, bright, coppery-golden edge, fiery bright, notwithstanding which the protuberances of the cloud cast dark shadows ray-like up into the day. The earth looks like a debauchee after the sultry night. Birds sing at this hour as in the spring. The white lily is budded. Paddle down from the ash tree to the swimming-place. The farther shore is crowded with polygonum and pontederia leaves. There seems to have intervened no night. The heat of the day is unabated. You perspire before sunrise. The bull-frogs boom still. No toads now. The river appears covered with an almost imperceptible blue film. The sun is not yet over the bank. What wealth in a stagnant river! There is music in every sound in the morning atmosphere. As I look up over the ​bay I see the reflection of the meadow, woods, and Hosmer Hill, at a distance, the tops of the trees cut off by a slight ripple. Even the pine groves on the near bank are distinctly reflected. Owing to the reflections of the distant woods and hills you seem to be paddling into a vast hollow country, doubly novel and interesting. Thus the voyageur is lured onward to fresh pastures. The melting heat begins again as soon as the sun gets up. The bull-frog lies on the very surface of the pads, showing his great yellow throat (color of the yellow breeches of the old school), and protuberant eyes, his whole back out, revealing a vast expanse of belly, his eyes like ranunculus, or yellow lily buds, winking from time to time, and showing his large, dark-bordered tympanum, imperturbable looking. His yellow throat swells up like a small moon at a distance over the pads when he croaks.
The floating pond-weed, Potamogeton natans, with the oblong oval leaf floating on the surface, now in bloom. The yellow water ranunculus still yellows the river in the middle where shallow, in beds many rods long. It is one of the capillary leaved plants.
By and by the Bidens (marigold) will stand in the river as now the ranunculus. The spring yellows are faint, cool, innocent as the saffron morning compared with the blaze of noon. The ​autumnal, methinks, are the fruit of the dog days, heats of manhood or age, not youth. The former are pure, transparent, crystalline, viz., the willow catkins and the early cinquefoils. This ranunculus, too, standing two or three inches above the water, is of a light yellow, especially at a distance. This I think is the rule with respect to spring flowers, though there are exceptions.
9 p. m. Down railroad. Heat lightning in the distance; a sultry night. The sound of a flute from some villager. How rare among men so fit a thing as the sound of a flute at evening!—Have not the fire-flies in the meadow relation to the stars above, étincelant. When the darkness comes we see stars beneath also.—The sonorous note of the bull-frog is heard a mile off in the river, the loudest sound this evening. Ever and anon the sound of his trombone comes over the meadows and fields.
Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like the fire-flies? There are northern lights, shooting high up, withal.
June 16, 1853. 4 a. m. To Nashawtuck, by boat. Before 4 a. m. or sunrise, the sound of chip-birds, robins, blue-birds, etc., is incessant. It is a crowing on the roost, I fancy, as the cock crows before he goes abroad. They do not sing deliberately as at evening, but greet the morning ​with an incessant twitter. Even the crickets seem to join the concert. Yet I think it is not the same every morning, though it may be fair. An hour or two later there is comparative silence. The awaking of the birds, a tumultuous twittering.
At sunrise a slight mist curls along the surface of the water. When the sun falls on this, it looks like a red dust.
As seen from the top of the hill, the sun just above the horizon, red and shorn of beams, is somewhat pear-shaped, owing to some irregularity in the refraction of the lower strata of the air, produced, as it were, by the dragging of the lower part, and then it becomes a broad ellipse, the lower half a dun red, owing to the greater grossness of the air there.
The distant river is like molten silver at this hour. It reflects merely the light, not the blue. What shall I name that small cloud that at tends the sun s rising, that hangs over the portals of the day, like an embroidered banner, and heralds his coming, though sometimes it proves a portcullis which falls and cuts off the new day in its birth.
Found four tortoises nests on the high bank just robbed, and the eggs devoured, one not emptied of its yolk. Others had been robbed some days. Apparently about three eggs to ​each. Presently I saw a skunk making off with an undulating motion, a white streak above and a parallel and broader black one below; undoubtedly the robber.
A sweet brier, apparently yesterday.
Coming along I heard a singular sound as of a bird in distress amid the bushes, and turned to relieve it. Next thought of a squirrel in an apple-tree barking at me. Then found that it came from a hole in the ground under my feet, a loud sound between a grunting and a wheezing, yet not unlike the sound a red squirrel sometimes makes, though louder. Looking down the hole, I saw the tail and hind quarters of a wood-chuck which seemed to be contending with another farther in. Reaching down carefully I took hold of the tail, and though I had to pull very hard indeed, I drew him out between the rocks, a bouncing, great fat fellow, and tossed him a little way down the hill. As soon as he recovered from his bewilderment he made for the hole again, but I barring the way, he ran elsewhere.
p. m. To Baker Farm by boat.
Was that a smaller bittern or a meadow-hen that we started from out the button-bushes? What places for the mud-hen beneath the stems of the button-bushes along the shore, all shaggy with rootlets, as if all the weeds the river ​protected, all the ranunculus at least, had drifted and lodged against them. Their stems are so nearly horizontal near the mud and water that you can clamber along on them over the water many rods. It is one of the wildest features in our scenery. There is scarcely any firm footing on the ground except where a musk-rat has made a heap of clam shells. Picture the river at a low stage of the water, the pads, shriveled in the sun, hanging from the dark brown stems of the button-bushes which are all shaggy with masses of dark rootlets, an impenetrable thicket, and a stake-driver or Ardea minor sluggishly winging his way up the stream.
The breams nests, like large, deep milk pans, are left high and dry on the shore. They are not only deepened within, but have raised edges. In some places they are as close together as they can be, with each a great bream in it whose waving fins and tail are tipped with a sort of phosphorescent luminousness.
We sailed all the way back from Baker Farm, though the wind blew very nearly at right angles with the river much of the way. By sitting on one side of the boat we made its edge serve for a keel, so that it would mind the helm. The dog swam for long distances behind us. Each time we passed under the lee of a wood, we were becalmed, and then met with contrary and flawy ​winds till we got fairly beyond its influence. But you can always sail either up or down the river, for the wind inclines to blow along the channel, especially where the banks are high. We taste at each cool spring with which we are acquainted in the bank, making haste to reach it before the dog, who otherwise is sure to be found cooling himself in it. We sometimes use him to sit in the stern and trim the boat while we both row, for he is heavy, and otherwise we sink the bow too much in the water. But he has a habit of standing too near the rower, and at each stroke receiving a fillip from the rower's fists; so at last he tumbles himself overboard and takes a riparian excursion. We are amused to see how judiciously he selects his points for crossing the river from time to time, in order to avoid long circuits made necessary on land by bays and meadows, and keep as near us as possible.
Found at Bittern Cliff the Potentilla arguta, crowded cinquef oil, our only white one, stem and leaves somewhat like the Norvegica, but more woolly; a yellowish white.
June 16, 1854. 5 a. m. Up railroad. As the sun went down last night round and red in a damp, misty atmosphere, so now it rises in the same manner, though there is no dense fog.
Observed yesterday the erigeron with a purple tinge. I cannot tell whether this which seems in ​other respects the same with the white is the strigosum or the annuum.
Nymphœa odorata. Again I scent the white lily, and a season I had waited for has arrived. How indispensable all these experiences to make up the summer. It is the emblem of purity, and its scent suggests it. Growing in stagnant and muddy water, it bursts up so pure and fair to the eye and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in and can be extracted from the slime and muck of earth. It is the resurrection of virtue. It is these sights and sounds and fragrances that convince us of our immortality. No man believes against all evidence. Our external senses consent with our internal. This fragrance assures me that though all other men fall, one shall stand fast, though a pestilence sweep over the earth, it shall at least spare one man. The Genius of Nature is unimpaired. Her flowers are as fair and as fragrant as ever.
As for birds, I think that their choir begins to be decidedly less full and loud. . . . The bobolink, full strains, but farther between.
The Rosa nitida grows along the edge of the ditches, the half open flowers showing the deepest rosy tints, so glowing that they make an evening or twilight of the surrounding afternoon, seeming to stand in the shade or twilight. ​Already the bright petals of yesterday's flowers are thickly strewn along on the black sand at the bottom of the ditch.
The Rosa nitida, the earlier (?), with its narrow, shiny leaves and prickly stem, and its moderate-sized rose-pink petals.
The Rosa lucida, with its broader and duller leaves, but larger and perhaps deeper-colored and more purple petals, perhaps yet higher scented, and its great yellow centre of stamens.
The smaller, lighter, but perhaps more delicately tinted Rosa rubiginosa. One and all drop their petals the second day. I bring home the buds of the three ready to expand at night, and the next day they perfume my chamber. Add to these the white lily just begun, also the swamp pink, and the great orchis, and mountain laurel, now in prime, and perhaps we must say that the fairest flowers are now to be found, or say a few days later. The arethusa is disappearing.
It is eight days since I plucked the great orchis. One is perfectly fresh still in my pitcher. It may be plucked when the spike is only half opened, and will open completely and keep perfectly fresh in a pitcher more than a week. Do I not live in a garden, in Paradise? I can go out each morning before breakfast,—I do,—and gather these flowers with which to perfume my chamber where I read and write all day.
​The note of the cherry-bird is fine and ringing, but peculiar and very noticeable. With its crest it is a resolute and combative looking bird.
Meadow-sweet to-morrow.
June 16, 1855. See young and weak striped squirrels now-a-days with slender tails, asleep on horizontal boughs above their holes, or moving feebly about. Might catch them.
June 16, 1858. How agreeable and whole some the fragrance of the low blackberry blossoms, reminding one of all the rosaceous, fruit-bearing plants, so near and dear to our humanity. It is one of the most deliciously fragrant flowers, reminding of wholesome fruits.
June 16, 1860. . . . It appears to me that the following phenomena occur simultaneously, say June 12, viz.: Heat about 85° at 2 p. m. True summer.
Hylodes cease to peep.
Purring frogs (Rana palustris) cease.
Lightning bugs first seen.
Bull-frogs trump generally.
Afternoon showers almost regular.
Turtles fairly and generally begin to lay.
June 17, 1840. Our lives will not attain to be spherical by lying on one or the other side forever, but only so far as we resign ourselves to the law of gravity in us, will our axis become ​coincident with the celestial axis, and by revolving incessantly through all circles, shall we acquire a perfect sphericity. . . .
Even the motto "business before friends" admits of a high interpretation. No interval of time can avail to defer friendship. The concerns of time must be attended to in time. I need not make haste to explore the whole secret of a star. If it were vanished quite out of the firmament so that no telescope could longer discover it, I should not despair of knowing it entirely one day.
We meet our friend with a certain awe, as if he had just lighted on the earth, and yet as if we had some title to be acquainted with him by our old familiarity with sun and moon.
June 17, 1852. 4 a. m. To Cliffs. No fog this morning. At early dawn, the windows being open, I hear a steady, breathing, cricket-like sound from the chip-bird (?) ushering in the day. Perhaps these mornings are the most memorable in the year, after a sultry night and before a sultry day, when especially the morning is the most glorious season of the day, when its coolness is most refreshing and you enjoy the glory of the summer, gilded or silvered with dews, without the torrid summer s sun or the obscuring haze. The sound of the crickets at dawn after these first sultry nights seems like the dreaming ​of the earth still continued into the day-light. I love that early twilight hour when the crickets still creak right on with such dewy faith and promise, as if it were still night, expressing the innocence of morning, when the creak of the cricket is fresh and bedewed. While it has that ambrosial sound, no crime can be committed. It buries Greece and Rome past resurrection. The earth song of the cricket! Before Christianity was, it is. Health! health! health! is the burden of its song. It is, of course, that man refreshed with sleep is thus innocent and healthy and hopeful. When we hear that sound of the crickets in the sod, the world is not so much with us.
I hear the universal cock-crowing with surprise and pleasure, as if I never heard it before. What a tough fellow! How native to the earth! Neither wet nor dry, cold nor warm kills him.
The prudent farmer improves the early morning to do some of his work before the heat becomes too oppressive, while he can use his oxen. As yet no whetting of the scythe. . . . Ah, the refreshing coolness of the morning, full of all kinds of fragrance!—What is that little olivaceous, yellowish bird, whitish beneath, that followed me cheeping under the bushes? The birds sing well this morning, well as ever. The brown thrasher drowns the rest. The lark, and in the ​woods, the red-eye, veery, chewink, oven-bird, wood-thrush.
The cistus is well open now, with its broad cup-like flower, one of the most delicate yellow flowers, with large spring-yellow petals, and its stamens laid one way. It is hard to get home fresh; caducous and inclined to droop. The yellow Bethlehem-star is of a deeper yellow than the cistus, a very neat flower, grass-like.
p. m. On the river, by Hubbard's Meadow. Looking at a clump of trees and bushes on the meadow, which is commonly flooded in the spring, I saw a middling-sized rock concealed by the leaves, lying in the midst, and perceived that this had obtained a place, had made good the locality for the maples and shrubs which had found a foothold about it. Here the weeds and tender plants were detained and protected. The bowlder dropped once on a meadow makes at length a clump of trees there, and is concealed by the beneficiaries it had protected.
June 17, 1853. The pogonias, adder s tongue arethusas I see now-a-days, are getting to be numerous; they are far too pale to compete with the Arethusa bulbosa, and then their snake-like odor is much against them.
There have been three ultra reformers, lecturers on slavery, temperance, the church, etc., in and about our house and Mrs. B———'s, the last ​three or four days. Though one of them was a stranger to the others, you would have thought them old and familiar cronies. They happened here together by accident. They addressed each other constantly by their Christian names, and rubbed you continually with the greasy cheek of their kindness. I was awfully pestered with the benignity of one of them, feared I should get greased all over with it past restoration, tried to keep some starch in my clothes. He wrote a book called "A Kiss for a Blow," and he behaved as if I had given him a blow, was bent on giving me the kiss when there was neither quarrel nor agreement between us. I wanted that he should straighten his back, smooth out those ogling wrinkles of benignity about his eyes, and with a healthy reserve pronounce something in a downright manner. . . . He addressed me as "Henry" within one minute from the time I first laid eyes on him; and when I spoke, he said with drawling, sultry sympathy, "Henry, I know all you would say, I understand you perfectly, you need not explain anything to me," and to another, "I am going to dive into Henry's inmost depths." I said, "I trust you will not strike your head against the bottom." He could tell in a dark room, with his eyes blinded, and in perfect stillness, if there was one there whom he loved. One of the most attractive things ​about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. The truly beautiful and noble puts its lover, as it were, at an infinite distance, while it attracts him more strongly than ever. . . . What a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy, reserved tone.
The dense fields of blue-eyed grass now blue the meadows, as if, in this fair season of the year, the clouds that envelope the earth were dispersing, and blue patches begin to appear answering to the blue sky. The eyes pass from these blue patches into the surrounding green as from the patches of clear sky into the clouds.
One of the night-hawk's eggs is hatched. The young is unlike any that I have seen, exactly like a pinch of rabbit's fur, or down of that color, dropped on the ground, not two inches long, with a dimpling, somewhat regular arrangement of minute feathers in the middle, destined to become the wings and tail. Yet it even half opened its eye, and peeped, if I mistake not. Was ever bird more completely protected, both by the color of its eggs, and of its own body that sits on them, and of the young bird just hatched? Accordingly the eggs and young are rarely discovered. There was one egg still, and by the side of it this little pinch of down flattened out and not observed at first.
A foot down the hill had rolled half the egg ​it came out of. There was no callowness as in the young of most birds. It seemed a singular place for a bird to begin its life, this little pinch of down, and lie still on the exact spot where the egg lay, a flat exposed shelf on the side of a bare hill, with nothing but the whole heavens, the broad universe above, to brood it when its mother was away.
The huckleberry apple is sometimes a red shoot, with tender and thick red leaves and branchlets, in all three inches long. It is, as it were, a monstrous precocity, and what should have waited to become fruit is a merely bloated or puffed up flower, a child with a great dropsical head, and prematurely bright, in a huckleberry apple. The really sweet and palateable huckleberry is not matured before July, and runs the risk of drying up in drouth, and never attaining its proper size.
There are some fine large clusters of lambkill close to the shore of Walden, under the Peak, fronting the south. They are early, too, and large, apparently, both on account of the warmth and the vicinity of the water. These flowers are in perfect cylinders, sometimes six inches long by two wide, and three such raying out or upward from one centre, that is, three branches clustered together. Examined close by, I think this handsomer than the mountain laurel. The ​color is richer, but it does not show so well at a little distance, and the corymbs are somewhat concealed by the green shoot and leaves rising above them, and also by the dry remains of last year's flowers.
The mountain laurel by Walden in its prime. It is a splendid flower, and more red than that in Mason's pasture. Its dry, dead-looking, brittle stems lean, as it were, over other bushes or each other, bearing at the ends great dense corymbs five inches in diameter, of rose or pink (?) tinged flowers, without an interstice between them, overlapping each other, each of more than an inch in diameter. A single flower would be esteemed very beautiful. It is a highlander wandered down into the plain.
June 17, 1854. 5 a. m. To Hill. A cold fog. These mornings those who walk in grass are thoroughly wet above mid-leg. All the earth is dripping wet. I am surprised to feel how warm the water is by contrast with the cold, foggy air. . . . The dewy cobwebs are very thick this morning, little napkins of the fairies spread on the grass. . . .
From the Hill I am reminded of more youthful mornings, seeing the dark forms of the trees eastward in the low grounds, partly within and against the shining white fog, the sun just risen over it. The mist fast rolls away eastward from ​them, their tops at last streaking it and dividing it into vales, all beyond a submerged and unknown country, as if they grew on the sea-shore. Why does the fog go off always towards the sun, seen in the east when it has disappeared in the west? The waves of the foggy ocean divide and flow back for us Israelites of a day to march through.
Saw the sun reflected up from the Assabet to the hill-top through the dispersing fog, giving to the water a peculiarly rippled, pale golden hue, "gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy."
p. m. To Walden and Cliffs. . . . It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days. We live in a grosser element, getting deeper into the mists of earth. Even the birds sing with less vigor and vivacity. The season of hope and promise is past. Already the season of small fruits has arrived. The Indian marked the midsummer as the season when berries were ripe. We are a little saddened because we begin to see the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment. The prospect of the heavens is taken away, and we are presented only with a few small berries.
Before sundown I reached Fair Haven Hill and gathered strawberries. I find beds of large and lusty strawberry plants in sproutlands, but ​they appear to run to leaves and bear very little fruit, having spent themselves in leaves by the time the dry weather arrives. It is those still earlier and more stinted plants which grow on dry uplands that bear the early fruit, formed before the droughts. But the meadows produce both leaves and fruit.
I begin to see the flowering fern at a distance in the river meadows.
The sun goes down red again, like a high-colored flower of summer; as the white and yellow flowers of spring are giving place to the rose, and will soon to the red lily, etc., so the yellow sun of spring has become a red sun of June drought, round and red like a midsummer flower, production of torrid heats.
June 18, 1840. I am startled when I consider how little I am actually concerned about the things I write in my journal.
A fair land, indeed, do books spread open to us, from the Genesis down,—but, alas! men do not take them up kindly into their own being, and breathe into them a fresh beauty, knowing that the grimmest of them belongs to such warm sunshine and still moonlight as the present.
June 18, 1852. The hornet s nest is built with many thin layers of his paper, with an interval of about one eighth of an inch between them, so that his wall is one or two inches thick. ​This probably for warmth, dryness, and lightness. So the carpenter has learned to sometimes build double walls.
7 p. m. To Cliffs. . . . Pyrolas are beginning to blossom. The four-leaved loosestrife. The longest days in the year have now come. The sun goes down now (this moment) behind Watatic, from the Cliffs. St. John's-wort is beginning to blossom.
I hear a man playing a clarionet far off. Apollo tending the herds of Admetus. How cultivated, how sweet and glorious is music! Men have brought this art to great perfection, the art of modulating sound, by long practice, since the world began. What superiority over the rude harmony of savages! There is something glorious and flower-like in it. What a contrast this evening melody with the occupations of the day. It is perhaps the most admirable accomplishment of man.
June 18, 1853. 4 a. m. By boat to Nashawtuck, to Azalea or Pinxter Spring. . . . Almost all birds appear to join the early morning chorus before sunrise on the roost, the matin hymn. I hear now the robin, the chip-bird, the blackbird, the martin, etc., but I see none flying, or at least only one wing in the air not yet illumined by the sun. As I was going up the hill, I was surprised to see rising above the June ​grass, near a walnut, a whitish object, like a stone with a white top, or a skunk erect, for it was black below. It was an enormous toadstool, or fungus, a sharply conical parasol in the form of a sugar loaf, slightly turned up at the edges, which were rent half an inch for every inch or two. The whole length was sixteen inches. The pileus, or cap, was six inches long by seven in width at the rim, though it appeared longer than wide. . . . The stem was about one inch in diameter and naked. The top of the cap was quite white within and without, not smooth, but with a stringy kind of scales turned upward at the edge. These declined downward into a coarse hoariness, as if the compact white fibres had been burst by the spreading gills. It looked much like an old felt hat pushed up into a cone, its rim all ragged, with some meal shaken upon it. It was almost big enough for a child's head. It was so delicate and fragile that its whole cap trembled at the least touch, and as I could not lay it down without injuring it, I was obliged to carry it home all the way in my hand, erect, while I paddled my boat with one hand. It was a wonder how its soft cone ever broke through the earth. Such growths ally our age to those earlier periods which geology reveals. I wondered if it had not some relation to the skunk, though not in odor, yet in its color and the ​general impression it made. It suggests a vegetative force which may almost make man tremble for his dominion. It carries me back to the era of the formation of the coal measures, the age of the Saurus and the Pliosaurus, and when bull-frogs were as big as bulls. Its stem had something massy about it, like an oak, large in proportion to the weight it had to support (though not perhaps to the size of the cap), like the vast hollow columns under some piazzas, whose caps have hardly weight enough to hold their tops together. It made you think of pictures of parasols of Chinese mandarins, or it might have been used by the great fossil bullfrog in his walks. What part does it play in the economy of the world? . . . I have just been out (7.30 a. m.) to show my fungus. . . . It is so fragile I was obliged to walk at a funereal pace for fear of jarring it. It is so delicately balanced that it falls to one side on the least inclination. It is rapidly curling up on the edge, and the rents increasing, until it is completely fringed, and is an inch wider there. It is melting in the sun and light, black drops and streams falling on my hand, and fragments of the black-fringed rim falling on the sidewalk. Evidently such a plant can only be seen in perfection in the early morning. It is a creature of the night, like the great moth. . . . It is ​to be remarked that this grew not in low and damp soil, but high up on the open side of a dry hill . . . in the midst of, and rising above, the thin June grass. The last night was warm, the earth was very dry, and there was a slight sprinkling of rain.
I think the blossom of the sweetbrier, eglantine (now in prime), is more delicate and interesting than that of the common wild roses, though smaller and paler, and without their spicy fragrance. But its fragrance is in its leaves all summer, and the form of the bush is handsomer, curving over from a considerable height in wreaths sprinkled with numerous flowers. They open out flat soon after sunrise. Flowers whitish in middle, then pinkish rose, inclining to purple toward the edges.
How far from our minds now the early blossoms of the spring, the willow catkins, for example.
I put the parasol fungus in the cellar to preserve it, but it went on rapidly melting and wasting away from the edges upward, spreading as it dissolved, till it was shaped like a dish-cover. By night, though left in the cellar all the day, there was not more than two of the six inches of the height of the cap left, and the barrel-head beneath it and its own stem looked as if a large bottle of ink had been broken ​there. It defiled all it touched. The next morning the hollow stem was left perfectly bare, and only the hoary apex of the cone, spreading about two inches in diameter, lay on the ground beneath. Probably one night produced it, and in one day, with all our pains, it wasted away. Is it not a giant mildew or mould? In the warm, muggy night the surface of the earth is mildewed. The mould which is the flower of humid darkness and ignorance. The pyramids and other monuments of Egypt are a vast mildew or toad-stool which have met with no light of day sufficient to waste them away. Slavery is such a mould and superstition which are most rank in the warm and humid portions of the globe. Luxor sprang up one night out of the slime of the Nile. The humblest, puniest weed that can endure the sun is thus superior to the largest fungus, as is the peasant s cabin to those foul temples. . . . All things flower, both vices and virtues, but one is essentially foul, an other fair. In hell, toad-stools should be represented as overshadowing men. The priest is the fungus of the graveyard, of the tomb. In the animal world there are toads and lizards.
p. m. To Island by boat.
The first white lily to-day perhaps. It is the only bud I have seen. The river has gone down and left it nearly dry. On the Island, where a ​month ago plants were so fresh and early, it is now parched and crisp under my feet. I feel the heat reflected from the ground and perceive the dry scent of grass and leaves. So universally on dry and rocky hills, where the spring was earliest, the autumn has already commenced. . . .
At the Flower Exhibition saw the rhododendron plucked yesterday in Fitzwilliam, N. H. It was the earliest to be found there, and only one bud was fully open. They say it is in perfection there the 4th of July, nearer Monadnock than the town.
The unexpected display of flowers culled from the gardens of the village suggests how many virtues also are cultivated by the villagers more than meet the eye.
Saw to-night ——'s horse, which works on the sawing-machine at the depot, now let out to graze along the road. At each step he lifts his hind legs convulsively from the ground, as if the whole earth were a treadmill continually slipping away from under him while he climbed its convex surface. It was painful to witness, but it was symbolical of the moral condition of his master and of all artisans in contradistinction from artists, all who are engaged in any routine, for to them also the whole earth is a treadmill, and the routine results instantly in a similar ​painful deformity. The horse may bear the mark of his servitude in the muscles of his legs, the man on his brow.
8.30 p. m. To Cliffs. Moon not quite full. There is no wind. The greenish fires of lightning bugs are already seen in the meadow. I almost lay my hand on one amid the leaves as I get over the fence at the brook. I hear the whippoorwills on different sides. White flowers alone show much at night, as white clover and white weed. The day has gone by with its wind like the wind of a cannon ball, and now far in the west it blows. By that dun-colored sky you may track it. There is no motion nor sound in the woods (Hubbard's Grove) along which I am walking. The trees stand like great screens against the sky. The distant village sounds are the barking of dogs, that animal with which man has allied himself, and the rattling of wagons, for the farmers have gone into town a shopping this Saturday night. The dog is the tamed wolf, as the villager is the tamed savage. Near at hand the crickets are heard in the grass chirping from everlasting to everlasting. The humming of a dor-bug drowns all the noise of the village, so roomy is the universe. The moon comes out of the mackerel cloud, and the traveler rejoices. How can a man write the same thoughts by the light of the moon, resting his book on a rail by ​the side of a remote potato field, that he does by the light of the sun at his study table. The light is but a luminousness. My pencil seems to move through a creamy, mystic medium. The moonlight is rich and somewhat opaque, like cream, but the daylight is thin and blue, like skimmed milk. I am less conscious than in the presence of the sun, my instincts have more influence.
The farmer has improved the dry weather to burn his meadow. I love the smell of that burning, as a man may his pipe. It reminds me of a new country offering sites for the hearths of men. It is cheering as the scent of the peat fire of the first settler.
At Potter's sand bank, the sand, though cold on the surface, begins to be warm two inches beneath, and the warmth reaches at least six inches deeper. The tortoise buries her eggs just deep enough to secure this greatest constant warmth.
I passed into and along the bottom of a lake of cold and dewy evening air. Anon, as I rise higher, here comes a puff of warm air, trivially warm, a straggler from the sun's retinue, now buffeted about by the vanguard night breezes.
Before me, southward toward the moon, on higher land than I, but springy, I saw a low film of fog, like a veil, reflecting the moonlight, though none on lower ground which was not ​springy, and up the river beyond, a battalion of fog rising white in the moonlight in ghost-like wisps, or like a flock of scared covenanters in a recess amid the hills. . . .
It is worth while to walk thus in the night after a warm or sultry day, to enjoy the fresh, up-country, brake-like, spring-like scent in low grounds. At night the surface of the earth is a cellar, a refrigerator, no doubt wholesomer than those made with ice by day. Got home at 11.
June 18, 1854. p. m. To Climbing Fern. The meadows, like this Nut Meadow, are now full of the latter grasses just beginning to flower, and the graceful columns of the rue (thalictrum) not yet generally in flower, and the large tree or shrub-like Archangelica with its great umbels now fairly in bloom along the edge of the brook. . . .
I discover that Dugan found the eggs of my snapping turtle of June 7th, apparently the same day. It is perhaps five or six rods from the brook, in the sand near its edge. The surface had been disturbed over a foot and a half in diameter, and was slightly concave. The nest commenced five inches beneath, and at its neck was two and a half inches across, and from this nearly four inches deep, and swelled out below to four inches in width, shaped like a short, rounded bottle with a broad mouth, and the ​surrounding sand was quite firm. I took out forty-two eggs closely packed, and Dugan says he had previously taken one. They are dirty, white and spherical, a little more than one and a six teenth of an inch in diameter, soft-shelled so that my finger left a permanent dimple in them. It was now ten days since they had been laid, and a little more than half of each was darker colored (probably the lower half) and the other, white and dry-looking. I opened one, but could detect no organization with the unarmed eye. The halves of the shell, as soon as emptied, curled up as we see them where the skunks have sucked them. They must all have been laid at one time. If it were not for the skunks and probably other animals, we should be overrun with them. Who can tell how many tortoise eggs are buried in this small desert.
Often certain words or syllables which have suggested themselves remind one better of a bird's strain than the most elaborate and closest imitation.
June 18, 1855. To Hemlocks. . . . At 3 p. m., as I walked up the bank by the Hemlocks, I saw a painted tortoise just beginning its hole. Then another a dozen rods from the river on the bare, barren field near some pitch pines, where the earth was covered with cladonias, cinquefoil, sorrel, etc. Its hole was about two thirds done. ​I stooped down over it, and to my surprise, after a slight pause, it proceeded in its work directly under and within eighteen inches of my face. I retained a constrained position for three quarters of an hour or more, for fear of alarming it. It rested on its fore-legs, the front part of its shell about an inch higher than the rear, and this position was not changed, essentially, to the last. The hole was oval, broadest behind, about an inch wide and one and three quarters long, and the dirt already removed was quite wet or moistened. It made the hole and removed the dirt with its hind legs only, not using its tail or shell, which last, of course, could not enter the hole, though there was some dirt on it. It first scratched two or three times with one hind foot, then took up a pinch of the loose sand and deposited it directly behind that leg, pushing it backward to its full length, and then deliberately opening it and letting the dirt fall. Then the same with the other hind foot. This it did rapidly, using each leg alternately with perfect regularity, standing on the other one the while, and thus tilting up its shell each time, now to this side, then to that. There was half a minute or a minute between each change. The hole was made as deep as the feet could reach, or about two inches. It was very neat about its work, not scattering the dirt about more than was ​necessary. The completing of the hole occupied perhaps five minutes. It then, without any pause, drew its head completely into its shell, raised the rear a little, and protruded and dropped a wet, flesh-colored egg into the hole, one end foremost. Then it put out its head again a little slowly, and placed the egg one side with one hind foot. After a delay of about two minutes it again drew in its head and dropped another, and so on to the fifth, drawing in its head each time, and pausing somewhat longer between the last. The eggs were placed in the hole without any particular care, only well down flat, and each out of the way of the next. I could plainly see them from above.
After ten minutes or more, without pause or turning, it began to scrape the moist earth into the hole with its hind legs, and, when it had half filled it, carefully pressed the earth down with the edges of its hind feet, dancing on these alternately for some time, as on its knees, tilting from side to side, pressing by the whole weight of the rear of its shell. When it had drawn in thus all the earth that had been moistened, it stretched its hind legs further back and to each side, and drew in the dry and lichen-clad crust, and then danced upon and pressed that down, still not moving the rear of its shell more than one inch to right or left all the while, or ​changing the position of the forward part at all. The thoroughness with which the covering was done was remarkable. It persevered in drawing in and dancing on the dry surface which had never been disturbed, long after you thought it had done its duty, but it never moved its fore-feet, nor once looked round, nor saw the eggs it had laid. There were frequent pauses throughout the whole, when it rested, or ran out its head and looked about circumspectly at any noise or motion. These pauses were especially long during the covering of its eggs, which occupied more than half an hour. Perhaps it was hard work.
When it had done, it immediately started for the river at a pretty rapid rate (the suddenness with which it made these transitions was amusing), pausing from time to time, and I judged it would reach it in fifteen minutes. It was not easy to detect that the ground had been disturbed there. An Indian could not have made his cache more skillfully. In a few minutes all traces of it would be lost to the eye.
The object of moistening the earth was perhaps to enable it to take it up in its hands (?), and also to prevent its falling back into the hole. Perhaps it also helped to make the ground more compact and harder when it was pressed down. [September 10. I can find no trace of the ​tortoise eggs of June 18th, though there is no trace of their having been disturbed by skunks. They must have been hatched earlier.]
June 18, 1859. p. m. Sail up river. Rain again, and we take shelter under a bridge, and again under our boat, and again under a pine-tree. It is worth while to sit or lie through a shower thus under a bridge, or under a boat on the bank, because the rain is a much more interesting and remarkable phenomenon under these circumstances. The surface of the stream betrays every drop from the first to the last, and all the variations of the storm, so much more expressive is the water than the comparatively brutish face of earth. We no doubt often walk between drops of rain falling thinly, without knowing it, though if on the water we should have been advertised of it. At last the whole surface is nicked with the abounding drops, as if it rose in little cones to accompany or meet the drops, till it looks like the back of some spiny fruit or animal, and yet the differently colored currents, light and dark, are seen through it all. Then, when it clears up, how gradually the surface of the water becomes more placid and bright, the dimples becoming fewer and finer till the prolonged reflections of trees are seen in it, and the water is lit up with a joy in sympathy with our own, while the earth is comparatively dead.
​I saw swarms of little gnats, light-winged, dancing over the water in the midst of the rain, though you would say any drop might end one's days.
June 19, 1852. 8.30 a. m. To Flag Hill, on which Stow, Acton, and Boxboro corner, with C——. A fine, clear June morning, comfortable and breezy, no dust, a journey day. . . . The traveler now has the creak of the cricket to encourage him on all country routes, out of the fresh sod, still fresh as in the dawn, not interrupting his thoughts. Very cheering and refreshing to hear, so late in the day, this morning sound. The white-weed colors some meadows as completely as the frosting does a cake. The waving June grass shows watered colors like grain. No mower s scythe is heard. The farmers are hoeing their corn and potatoes. . . . The clover is now in its glory, whole fields are rosed with it, mixed with sorrel, and looking deeper than it is. It makes fields look luxuriant which are really thinly clad. The air is full of its fragrance. I cannot find the Linnæa at Loring's, perhaps because the woods are cut down. Perhaps I am too late. The robins sing more than usual, may be because of the coolness. Buttercups and geraniums cover the meadows, the latter appearing to float on the grass, of various tints. It has lasted long, this rather tender flower. . . . The ​light of June is not golden but silvery, not torrid, but somewhat temperate. I see it reflected from the bent grass and the under-sides of leaves. Also I perceive faint, silvery, gleaming ripples where there is a rapid in the river (from railroad bridge at D——'s) without sun on it.
The mullein out with a disagreeable scent, and the dogsbane with a quite handsome, bell-shaped flower, beautifully striped with red (rose red?) within.
Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samarœ, tinged with his expectation. O may my words be verdurous and sempiternal as the hills. Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds.
The river has a June look; dark, smooth, reflecting surfaces in shade. The sight of the water is refreshing, suggesting coolness. The shadows in and under elms and other trees have not been so rich hitherto. It is grateful to look forward half a mile into some dark, umbrageous elm or ash.
The grape in bloom, an agreeable perfume to many; not so to me. This is not the meadow fragrance then which I have perceived.
May be the huckleberry bird best expresses the season, or the red-eye. What subtile differences between one season and another.
​The veiny-leaved hawk-weed out. A large swelling pasture hill with hickories left for shade, and cattle now under them. The bark is rubbed smooth and red with their hides. Pleasant to go over the hills, for there most air is stirring, but you must look out for bulls in the pastures. Saw one here reclining in the shade amid the cows. His short sanguineous horns betrayed him, and we gave him a wide berth, for they are not to be reasoned with. On our right is Acton, on our left is Stow, and forward, Boxboro. Thus King Richard sailed the Ægean, and passed kingdoms on his right and left. We are on one of the breezy hills that make the western horizon from Concord, from which we see our familiar Concord hills much changed and reduced in height and breadth. We are in a country very different from Concord, of swelling hills and long vales on the bounds of these three towns, more up-countryish. It requires considerable skill in crossing a country to avoid the houses and too cultivated parts, somewhat of the engineer's or gunner's skill so to pass a house (if you must go near it through high grass), pass the enemy's lines where houses are thick, as to make a hill or wood screen you, to shut every window with an apple-tree, for that route which most avoids the houses is not only the one in which you will be least molested, but it is by far ​the most agreeable. It is rare that you cannot avoid a grain-field or piece of English mowing by skirting a corn-field or nursery near by, but if you must go through high grass, then step lightly and in each other's tracks.
We soon fell into a dry swamp filled with high bushes and trees, and beneath, tall ferns, one with a large pinnate leaf five or six feet high and one foot broad, making a dense undergrowth in tufts at bottom, spreading every way. There were two species of this size, one more compound than the other. These we opened with our hands, making a path through, completely in the cool shade. I steered by the sun, though it was so high now at noon that I observed which way my short shadow fell before I entered the swamp (for in it we could see nothing of the country around), and then by keeping it on a particular side of me, I steered surely, standing still sometimes till the sun came out of a cloud, to be sure of our course. Came out at length on a side hill very near the South Acton line or Stow. . . .
The orchis keeps well. One put in my hat this morning and carried all day will last fresh a day or two at home. These are peculiar days when you find the purple orchis and the arethusa, too, in the meadows.
The fields a walker loves best to strike into ​are bare, extended, rolling, bordered by copses, with brooks and meadows in sight, sandy be neath the thin sod where now blackberries and pinks grow, erst rye or oats, perchance these and stony pastures where is no high grass, nor grain, nor cultivated ground, nor houses near.
Flag Hill is about eight miles by the road from Concord. We went much farther both going and returning. But by a how much nobler road! Suppose you were to drive to Boxboro, what then? You pass a few teams with their dust, drive past many farmers barn-yards, see where Squire Tuttle lives and barrels his apples, bait your horse at White s tavern, and so return with your hands smelling of greasy leather and horse hair, and the squeak of a chaise body in your ears, with no new flower nor agreeable experience. But going as we did, before you got to Boxboro line, you often went much farther, many times ascended New Hampshire hills, taking the noble road from hill to hill across swamps and valleys, not regarding political courses and boundaries, many times far west in your thoughts. It is a journey of a day and a picture of human life.
June 19, 1853. p. m. To Flint's Pond. I see large patches of blue-eyed grass in the meadow across the river from my window. The pine woods at Thrush Alley emit that hot, dry ​scent, reminding me even of days when I used to go a blackberrying. . . . The wood-thrush sings as usual far in the wood. A blue jay and a tanager come dashing into the pine under which I stand. The first flies directly away screaming with suspicion or disgust, but the latter, more innocent, remains. The cuckoo is heard, too, in the depths of the wood. Heard my night warbler on a solitary white pine in the Heywood clearing by the Peak. Discovered it at last looking like a small piece of black bark curving partly over the limb. No fork to its tail. It appeared black beneath; was very shy, not bigger than a yellow bird and more slender. . . .
The strain of the bobolink now sounds a little rare. It never again fills the air as in the first week after its arrival.
June 19, 1854. p. m. Up Assabet. A thunder shower in the north. Will it strike us? How impressive this artillery of the heavens! It rises higher and higher. At length the thunder seems to roll quite across the sky and all round the horizon, even where there are no clouds, and I row homeward in haste. How by magic the skirts of the cloud are gathered about us, and it shoots forward over our head, and the rain comes at a time and place which baffles all our calculations. Just before it the swamp ​white oak in Merrick's pasture was a very beautiful sight, with its rich shade of green, its top, as it were, incrusted with light. Suddenly comes the gust, and the big drops slanting from the north. The birds fly as if rudderless, and the trees bow and are wrenched. It comes against the windows like hail, and is blown over the roofs like steam or smoke. The lightning runs down the large elm at Holbrook's and shatters the house near by. Soon the sun shines in silver puddles in the streets.
Men may talk about measures till all is blue and smells of brimstone, and then go home and sit down and expect their measures to do their duty for them. The only measure is integrity and manhood.
June 19, 1859. To Heywood Meadow and Well Meadow. A flying squirrel's nest . . . in a covered hollow in a small old stump . . . covered with fallen leaves and a portion of the stump. Nest apparently of dry grass. Saw three young run out after the mother, and up a slender oak. The young half grown, very tender looking and weak-tailed. Yet one climbed quite to the top of an oak twenty-five feet high, though feebly. Their claws must be very sharp and early developed. The mother rested quite near on a small projecting stub, big as a pipe stem, curled crosswise on it. They have a more rounded head and ​snout than our other squirrels. The young in danger of being picked off by hawks.
Scare up young partridges the size of chickens; just hatched, yet they fly. The old one in the woods near makes a chuckling sound just like, a red squirrel's bark, also mewing.
June 19, 1860. Let an oak be hewed and put into the frame of a house where it is sheltered, and it will last several centuries. Even as a sill it may last one hundred and fifty years. But let it be simply cut down and lie, though in an open pasture, and it will probably be thoroughly rotten in twenty-five years. There is the oak cut down at Clam Shell some twenty years ago, the butt left on the ground. It has about two thirds wasted away, and is hardly fit for fuel.
I follow a distinct fox path amid the grass and bushes for some forty rods, beyond Brittan's Hollow, leading from the great fox hole. It branches on reaching the peach orchard. No doubt by these routes they oftenest go and return. As broad as a cart wheel, and at last best seen when you do not look too hard for it.
June 20, 1840. Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dew drops, lakes, and diamonds. A spring is a cynosure in the fields. All Muscovy glitters in the minute particles of mica at its bottom, and the ​ripples cast their shadows flickeringly on the white sand as the clouds which flit across the landscape.
Something like the woodland sounds will be heard to echo through the leaves of a good book. Sometimes I hear the fresh, emphatic note of the oven-bird, and am tempted to turn many pages; sometimes the hurried chuckling sound of the squirrel, when he dives into the wall.
If we only see clearly enough how mean our lives are, they will be splendid enough. Let us remember not to strive upwards too long, but sometimes drop plumb down the other way. From the deepest pit we may see the stars. Let us have presence of mind enough to sink when we can't swim. At any rate, a carcass had better lie on the bottom than float an offense to all nostrils. It will not be falling, for we shall ride wide of the earth's gravity as a star, and always be drawn upward still (semper cadendo nunquam cadit), and so, by yielding to universal gravity, at length become fixed stars.
Praise begins when things are seen partially, or when we begin to feel a thing needs our assistance.
When the heavens are obscured to us, and nothing noble or heroic appears, but we are oppressed by imperfection and shortcoming on all hands, we are apt to suck our thumbs and decry ​our fates, as if nothing were to be done in cloudy weather. If you cannot travel the upper road, then go by the lower; you will find that they equally lead to heaven. Sometimes I feel so cheap that I am inspired, and could write a poem about it, but straightway I cannot, for I am no longer mean. Let me know that I am ailing and I am well. We should not always beat off the impression of trivialness, but make haste to welcome and cherish it. Water the weed till it blossoms; with cultivation it will bear fruit. There are two ways to victory, to strive bravely, or to yield. How much pains the last will save, we have not yet learned.
June 20, 1852. 7 p. m. To Hubbard bathing-place. The blue-eyed grass is shut up. When does it open? Some blue flags are quite a red purple, dark wine color. Identified the Iris prismatica, Boston iris, with linear leaves and round stem.
The stake driver is at it in his favorite meadow. I followed the sound, and at last got within two rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing you, like a will-o'-the-wisp, farther away into the meadows. When thus near, I heard some lower sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump or a stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes fit to come from a meadow. This was just within the ​blueberry and other bushes, and when the bird flew up alarmed, I went to the place, but could see no water, which makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach water where it is dry on the surface. It sounds more like wood chopping or pumping because you seem to hear the echo of the stroke or the reverse motion of the pump handle. After the warm weather has come, both morning and evening you hear the bittern pumping in the fens. It does not sound loud near at hand, and it is remarkable that it should be heard so far. Perhaps it is pitched on a favorable key. Is it not a call to its mate? Methinks that in the resemblance of this note to rural sounds, to sounds made by farmers, the security of the bird is designed.
Dry fields have now a reddish tinge from the seeds of the grass. Lying with my window open these warm, even sultry nights, I hear the sonorously musical trump of the bull-frogs from time to time from some distant shore of the river, as if the world were given up to them. . . . When I wake thus at midnight, and hear this sonorous trump from far in the horizon, I need not go to Dante for an idea of the infernal regions. . . . I do not know for a time in what world I am. It affects my morals, and all questions take a new aspect from this sound. It is the ​snoring music of nature at night. How allied to the pad in place and color is this creature! His greenish back is the leaf, and his yellow throat, the flower, even in form, with his sesquipedality of belly. Through the summer he lies on the pads or with his head out, and in the winter buries himself at their roots(?). The bull paddock! His eyes like the buds of the Nuphar Kalmiana. I fancy his skin would stand water, without shrinking, forever. Gloves made of it for rainy weather, for trout fishers!
Frogs appear slow to make up their minds, but then they act precipitately. As long as they are here, they are here, and express no intention of removing. But the idea of removing fills them instantaneously, as Nature, abhorring, fills a vacuum. Now they are fixed and imperturbable like the sphinx, and now they go off with short, squatty leaps over the spatterdock on the irruption of the least idea.
June 20, 1853. . . . Meadow-sweet out probably yesterday. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower. . . . The bosky bank shows bright roses from its green recesses. . . . Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, perfectly fresh and pure before the insects have ​discovered it. How admirable its purity! How innocently sweet its fragrance! How significant that the rich black mud of our dead stream produces the water lily! Out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity. It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematic of purity should grow in the mud. There is also the exquisite beauty of the small sagittaria which I find out, may be a day or two. Three transparent crystalline white petals with a yellow eye, and as many small purplish calyx leaves, four or five inches above the same mud. Coming home at twelve I see that the white lilies are nearly shut.
8 p. m. Up North River to Nashawtuck.
The moon full. Perhaps there is no more beautiful scene than that on the North River seen from the rock this side the hemlocks. As we look up stream we see a crescent-shaped lake completely embowered in the forest. There is nothing to be seen but the smooth black mirror of the water on which there is now the slightest discernible bluish mist a foot high, and thickset alders and willows and the green woods without an interstice, sloping steeply upward from its very surface, like the sides of a bowl. The river is here for half a mile completely shut in by the forest.
Saw a little skunk coming up the river bank in the woods at the white oak, a funny little ​fellow, about six inches long and nearly as broad. It faced me and actually compelled me to retreat before it for five minutes. Perhaps I was be tween it and its hole. Its broad black tail, tipped with white, was erect like a kitten's. It had what looked like a broad white band drawn tight across its forehead or top-head, from which two lines of white ran down one on each side of its back, and there was a narrow white line down its snout. It raised its back, sometimes ran a few feet forward, sometimes backward, and repeatedly turned its tail to me, prepared to discharge its fluid, like the old ones. Such was its instinct, and all the while it kept up a fine grunting like a little pig or a squirrel. It reminded me that the red squirrel, the woodchuck, and the skunk all make a similar sound.
The leafy columned elms planted by the river at foot of P——'s field are exceedingly beautiful, the moon being behind them. . . . Their trunks look like columns of a portico wreathed with evergreens on the evening of an illumination for some great festival. They are the more rich because in this creamy light you cannot distinguish the trunk from the verdure that drapes it.
June 21, 1840. A man is never inspired unless his body is also. It, too, spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think while they strive with their minds ​that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. The body is the first proselyte the soul makes. Our life is but the soul made known by its fruits, the body. The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line. Make to yourself a perfect body.
June 21, 1852. 7 p. m. To Cliffs via Hubbard bathing-place. Cherry birds I have not seen, though I think I have heard them before, their fine seringo note, like a vibrating spring in the air. They are a handsome bird with their crest and chestnut breasts. There is no keeping the run of their comings and goings, but they will be ready for the cherries when they shall be ripe.
The adder's-tongue arethusa smells exactly like a snake. How singular that in Nature, too, beauty and offensiveness should be thus combined. In flowers as well as persons we demand a beauty pure and fragrant which perfumes the air. The flower which is showy but has no odor, or an offensive one, expresses the character of too many mortals.
Nature has looked uncommonly bare and dry to me for a day or two. With our senses applied to the surrounding world we are reading our physical and corresponding moral revolutions. Nature was shallow all at once. I did not know what had attracted me all my life. I ​was therefore encouraged when, going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple-tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test.
I see the tephrosia out through the dusk, a handsome flower. What rich crops this dry hillside has yielded! First I saw the Viola pedata here. Then the lupines, and then the snapdragon covered it, and now that the lupines are done, and their pods are left, the tephrosia has taken their place. This small, dry hillside is thus a natural garden. I omit other flowers which grow here, and name only those which, to some extent, cover or possess it. No eighth of an acre in a cultivated garden could be better clothed or with a more pleasing variety from month to month, and while one flower is in bloom you little suspect that which is to succeed and perchance eclipse it. It is a warmly placed, dry hillside beneath a wall, very thinly clad with grass, a natural flower-garden. Of this succession I hardly know which to admire most. It would be pleasant to write the history of such a hillside for one year. First and last you have the colors of the rainbow and more, and the various fragrances which it has not. The blackberry, rose, and dogsbane, also, are now in bloom here.
I hear the sound of distant thunder, though ​no cloud is obvious, muttering like the roar of artillery. . . . Thunder and lightning are remarkable accompaniments to our life, as if to remind us that there always is or should be a kind of battle raging. They are signal guns to us.
June 21, 1853. 4.30 a. m. Up river for lilies. . . .
The few lilies begin to open about five.
The morning-glory still fresh at 3 p. m. A fine, large, delicate bell, with waved border, some pure white, some reddened. The buds open perfectly in a vase. I find them open when I wake at 4 a. m. . . .
For the last two or three days it has taken me all the forenoon to wake up.
June 21, 1854. p. m. To Walden, etc. Mitchella in Deep Cut Woods probably a day or two. Its scent is agreeable and refreshing, between the may-flower and rum-cherry bark, or like peach-stone meats. . . .
When I see the dense, shady masses of weeds about water, already an unexplorable maze, I am struck with the contrast between this and the spring when I wandered about in search of the first faint greenness along the borders of the brooks. Then an inch or two of green was something remarkable and obvious afar. Now there is a dense mass of weeds along the ​waterside, where the muskrats bask, and overhead a canopy of leaves conceals the birds and shuts out the sun. It is hard to realize that the seeds of all this growth were buried in that bare, frozen earth. . . .
In the little meadow pool or bog in Hubbard's shore I see two old pouts tending their countless young close to the shore. The former are slate-colored, the latter are about half an inch long, and very black, forming a dark mass from eight to twelve inches in diameter. The old one constantly circles around them, over, and under, and through, as if anxiously endeavoring to keep them together, from time to time moving off five or six feet to reconnoitre. The whole mass of the young, and there must be a thousand of them at least, is incessantly moving, pushing forward and stretching out. They are often in the form of a great pout, apparently keeping together by their own instinct chiefly, now on the bottom, now rising to the top. The old, at any rate, do not appear to be very successful in their apparent efforts to communicate with and direct them. Alone they might be mistaken for pollywogs. At length they break into four parts.
The Indians say this fish hatches its young in a hole in the mud, and that they accompany her for some time afterwards. Yet in Ware's ​Smellie it is said that fishes take no care of their young. I think also that I see the young breams in schools hovering over their nests while the old ones are still protecting them.
Rambled up the grassy hollows in the sproutlands north (?) of Goose Pond. I felt a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance. Here in the midst of extensive sproutlands are numerous open hollows, more or less connected, where, for some reason, perhaps frosts, the wood does not spring up, and I was glad of it, filled with a fine, wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom round the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries struggling down into them. The woodchuck loves such places, and now wabbles off with a peculiar loud squeak like the sharp bark of a red squirrel, then stands erect at the entrance of his hole, ready to dive into it as soon as you approach. As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored west or east. The quarter of a mile of sproutlands which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth. Your horizon is there all your own. . . .
Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose, half open in the grass, all glowing with rosy light.
June 21, 1856. A very hot day, as was ​yesterday, 99° at 3 p. m. . . . Saw the nighthawks fly low and touch the water like swallows, at Walden.
June 21, 1860. Having noticed the pine pollen washed up on the shore of three or four ponds in the woods lately, at Ripple Lake, a dozen rods from the nearest pine, also having seen the pollen carried off visibly half a dozen rods from a pitch pine which I had jarred, and rising all the while when there was very little wind, it occurred to me that the air must be full of this fine dust at this season, that it must at times be carried to great distances, and that its presence might be detected remote from pines by examining the edges of pretty large bodies of water where it would be collected on one side by winds and waves from a large area. So I thought over all the small ponds in the township in order to select one or more most remote from the woods or pines, whose shores I might examine and thus test my theory. I could think of none more-favorable than this little pond only four rods in diameter, . . . in John Brown's pasture, which has but few pads in it. It is a small round pond at the bottom of a hollow in the midst of a perfectly bare, dry pasture. The nearest wood of any kind is just thirty-nine rods distant northward, and across a road from the edge of a pond. Any other wood ​in other directions is five or six times as far. I knew it was a bad time to try my experiment just after such heavy rains and when the pines are effete,–a little too late. The wind was now blowing quite strong from the northeast, whereas all the pollen I had seen hitherto had been collected on the northeast sides of ponds by a southwest wind. I approached the pond from the northeast, and looking over it, and carefully along the shore there, could detect no pollen. I then proceeded to walk round it, but still could detect none. I then said to myself, if there was any here before the rain and northeast wind, it must have been on the northeast side, and then have been washed over quite to or on the shore. I looked there carefully, stooping down, and was gratified to find after all a distinct yellow line of pollen dust, about half an inch wide, or washing off to two or three times that width, quite on the edge, and some dead twigs which I took up from the wet shore were completely coated with it as with sulphur. This yellow line reached half a rod along the southwest side, and I then detected a little of the dust slightly graying the surface for two or three feet out there. When I thought I had failed, I was much pleased to detect after all this distinct yellow line revealing unmistakably the presence of pines in the neighborhood, and thus ​confirming my theory. As chemists detect the presence of ozone in the atmosphere by exposing to it a delicately prepared paper, so the lakes detect for us thus the presence of the pine pollen in the atmosphere. They are our pollenometers. How much of this invisible dust must be floating in the atmosphere, and be inhaled and drunk by us at this season! Who knows but the pollen of some plants may be unwholesome to inhale, and produce the diseases of the season, and but it may be the source of some of the peculiar fragrances in the atmosphere which we cannot otherwise account for.
Of course a large pond will collect the most, and you will find most at the bottom of very deep bays into which the wind blows. I do not believe there is any part of this town into which the pollen of the pine may not fall. The time to examine the ponds this year was, I should say, from the 15th to the 20th of this month. I find that the pines are now effete, especially the pitch-pine. The sterile flowers are turned reddish. The flower of the white pine is lighter colored, and all but a very little indeed is effete. In the white pine there is a dense cluster of twenty or thirty little flowers about the base of this year's shoot. I did not expect to find any pollen, the pond was so small and distant from any wood, but thought I would examine.
​June 22, 1839. I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure, uncompromising spirit that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. Some persons carry about them the air and conviction of virtue, though they themselves are unconscious of it, and are even backward to appreciate it in others. Such it is impossible not to love. Still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near, it is like an invisible presence which at tends you.
That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another's. We see so much only as we possess.
June 22, 1840. When we are shocked at vice we express a lingering sympathy with it. Have no affinity for what is shocking.
Do not present a gleaming edge to ward off harm, for that will oftenest attract the lightning, but rather be the all-pervading ether which the lightning does not strike, but purify. Then will the rudeness or profanity of your companion be like a flash across the face of your sky, lighting up and revealing its serene depths. Earth cannot shock the heavens; but its dull vapor and foul smoke make a bright cloud-spot in the ether, and anon the sun, like a cunning artificer, will ​cut and paint it, and set it for a jewel in the breast of the sky.
June 22, 1851. The birch is the surveyor's tree. It makes the best stake to look at through the sights of a compass, except when there is snow on the ground. Its white bark was not made in vain. In surveying wood-lots I have frequent occasion to say this is what it was made for.
We are enabled to criticise others only when we are different from, and, in a given particular, superior to, them ourselves. By our aloofness from men and their affairs we are enabled to overlook and criticise them. There are but few men who stand on the hills by the roadside. I am sure only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do not take the foolish view of things which is commonly taken, when I do not live for the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom is not common. To what purpose have I senses if I am thus absorbed in affairs. My pulse must beat with Nature. After a hard day s work without a thought, turning my very brain into a mere tool, only in the quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket which in fact has been chirping all day. In my better hours I am conscious of the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom which partly–unfits and, if I yielded to it ​more reinemberingly, would wholly, unfit—me for what is called the active business of life, for that furnishes nothing on which the eye of reason can rest. What is that other kind of life to which I am continually allured? which alone I love? Is it a life for this world? Can a man feed and clothe himself gloriously who keeps only the truth steadily before him? who calls in no evil to his aid? Are there duties which necessarily interfere with the serene perception of truth? Are our serene moments mere foretastes of heavenly joys gratuitously vouchsafed to us as a consolation? or simply a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our lives?—There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch. So is it with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, . . . not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal, and, without an effort, our depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. Such clarity! obtained by such pure means, by simple living, by honest purpose. We live and rejoice. I awoke to a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it? The luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things? I feel ​my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. . . . It is hot noon. . . . I am threading an open pitch and white pine wood, easily traversed where the pine needles redden all the ground, which is as smooth as a carpet. Still the blackberries love to creep over this floor, for it is not many years since it was a blackberry field. I hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood-thrushes whetting their steel-like notes. Such keen singers! It takes a fiery heat, the dry pine needles adding to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again, saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood-thrush discharges his song. It is delivered like a piece of jingling steel.
The domestic ox has his horns tipped with brass. This and his shoes are the badges of servitude which he wears, as if he would soon get to jacket and trowsers. I am singularly affected when I look over a herd of reclining oxen in their pasture, and find that every one has these brazen balls on his horns. They are partly humanized so. It is not pure brute. There is art added. . . . The bull has a ring in his nose.
​The Lysimachia quadrifolia exhibits its small yellow blossoms now in the wood path.
The Utricularia vulgaris or bladder-wort, a yellow pea-like flower, has blossomed in stagnant pools.
June 22, 1852. 8 p. m. Up the Union turnpike. We have had a succession of thunder showers to-day, and at sunset, a rainbow. How moral the world is made! This bow is not utilitarian. Men, I think, are great in proportion as they are moral. After the rain he sets his bow in the heavens! The world is not destitute of beauty. Ask the skeptic who inquires "Cui bono?" why the rainbow was made. While men cultivate flowers below, God cultivates flowers above, he takes charge of the pastures in the heavens. Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face? How glorious should be the life of man passed under this arch!
Near the river thus late I hear the peet-weet with white barred wings. The scent of the Balm of Gilead leaves fills the road after the rain. There are the amber skies of evening, the colored skies of both morning and evening. Nature adorns these seasons.
Unquestionable truth is sweet, though it were the announcement of our dissolution.
The fire-flies in the meadows are very numerous, as if they had replenished their lights from ​the lightning. The far-retreated thunder-clouds low in the south-east horizon and in the north, emitting low flashes which reveal their forms, appear to lift their wings like fire-flies, or it is a steady glare like the glow-worm. Wherever they go, they make a meadow.
June 22, 1853. I do not remember a warmer night than the last. In my attic under the roof, with all windows and doors open, there was still not a puff of the usual coolness of the night. It seemed as if the heat which the roof had absorbed during the day were being brought down upon me. It was far more intolerable than by day. All windows being open I heard the sounds made by pigs and horses in the neighborhood, and of children who were partially suffocated by the heat. It seemed as if it would be something to tell of, the experience of that night, as of the Black Hole of Calcutta in a degree, if one survived it.
The sun down, and I am crossing Fair Haven Hill, sky overcast, landscape dark and still. I see the smooth river in the north reflecting two shades of light, one from the water, another from the surface of the pads which broadly border it on both sides, and the very irregular waving or winding edge of the pads, especially perceptible in this light, makes a very agreeable border, the edge of the film which seeks to bridge over and ​inclose the river wholly. These pads are to the smooth water between like a calyx to its flower. The river at such an hour, seen half a mile away, perfectly smooth and lighter than the sky, reflecting the clouds, is a paradisaical scene. What are the rivers around Damascus to this river sleeping around Concord? Are not the Musketaquid and the Assabet, rivers of Concord, fairer than the rivers of the plain? And then the rich warble of the blackbird may occasionally be heard. As I come over the hill, I hear the wood-thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy, and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. . . . It is a medicative draught to my soul, an elixir to my eyes, and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation. This bird is chief musician of my court. He sings in a time, a heroic age with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all. So there is something in the music of the cow-bell sweeter and more nutritious than the milk which the farmers drink. The thrush's song is a ranz des vâches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put ​my foot through, woods where the wood-thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes, a New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen. All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood-thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.
The strawberries may perhaps be considered a fruit of the spring, for they have depended chiefly on the freshness and moisture of spring, and on high lands are already dried up; a soft fruit, a sort of manna which falls in June, and in the meadows they lurk at the shady roots of the grass. Now the blueberry, a somewhat firmer fruit, is beginning. Nuts, the firmest, will be the last.
Is not June the month in which all trees and shrubs do the greatest part of their growing? Will the shoots add much to their length in July?
June 22, 1856. R. W. E. imitates the wood-thrush by "He willy willy–ha willy willy–O willy O."
​The song sparrow is said to be imitated in New Bedford thus: "Maids, maids, maids–hang on your tea kettle–ettle, ettle, ettle, ettle."
June 22, 1860. . . . R——— tells me that he saw, in a mud-hole near the river in Sudbury, about a fortnight ago, a pout protecting her ova. They were in a ball about as big as an apple, under which she swam, all exposed, not at all hatched, I think he said on a stick.
Hear the peculiar peep of young golden robins on the elms this morning.
June 23, 1840. We Yankees are not so far from right, who answer one question by asking another. Yes and No are lies. A true answer will not aim to establish anything, but rather to set all well afloat. All answers are in the future, and day answereth to day. Do we think we can anticipate them? In Latin, to respond is to pledge one's self before the gods to do faithfully and honorably, as a man should, in any case. This is good.
How can the language of the poet be more expressive than Nature? He is content that what he has already read in simple characters or in differently in all be translated into the same again.
He is the true artist whose life is his material. Every stroke of the chisel must enter his own flesh and bones, and not grate dully on marble.
​What is any man s discourse to me, if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of the crickets? In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and cheered in their discourse as it were by the flux of sparkling streams.
I cannot see the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity. My eye penetrates as far into the ether as that depth is inward from which my contemporary thought springs.
Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment and childlike mirthfulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.
June 23, 1851. It is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and booming of the night-hawks flying over high, open fields in the woods. They fly like butterflies, not to avoid birds of prey, but apparently to secure their own insect prey. . . . Often you must look a long while before you can detect the mote in the sky from which the note proceeds.
The common cinquefoil, Potentilla simplex, greets me with its simple and unobtrusive yellow flower in the grass. The Potentilla argentea, hoary cinquefoil, also is now in blossom. ​Pointilla sarmentosa, running cinquefoil, we had common enough in the spring.
June 23. 1852. 5 a. m. To Laurel Glen. The bobolink still sings, though not as in May. . . .
The pretty little Mitchella repens, with its twin flowers, spots the ground under the pines, its downy-petaled. cross-shaped flowers, and its purplish buds.
The grass is not nearly so wet after thunder showers in the night as after an ordinary dew. Apparently the rain falls so swiftly and hard that it does not rest on the leaves, and then there is no more moisture to be deposited in dew.
The mountain laurel in bloom in cool and shady woods reminds one of the vigor of Nature. It is perhaps a first-rate flower, considering its size and its evergreen leaves. The flower, curiously folded in a ten-angled, pyramidal form, is remarkable. A profusion of flowers with an innocent fragrance. It reminds me of shady mountain-sides where it forms the underwood.
I hear my old Walden owl. Its first note is almost like the somewhat peevish scream or squeal of a child shrugging its shoulders. Then succeed two more moderate and musical ones.–The wood-thrush sings at all hours. I associate it with the cool morning, the sultry noon, and ​the serene evening. At this hour it suggests a cool vigor!
p. m. To the mountain laurel in Mason's pasture. It is what I call a washing day, such as we sometimes have when buttercups first appear in the spring, an agreeably cool, clear, and breezy day, when all things appear as if washed bright, and shine, and at this season especially the sound of the wind rustling the leaves is like the rippling of a stream. You see the light-colored under-side of the still fresh foliage, and a sheeny light is reflected from the bent grass in the meadow. Haze and sultriness are far off. The air is cleared and cooled by yesterday's thunder-storms. The river, too, has a fine, cool, silvery sparkle or sheen on it. You can see far into the horizon, and you hear the sound of the crickets with such feelings as in the cool morning.
These are very agreeable pastures to me, no house in sight, no cultivation. I sit under a large white oak upon its swelling instep, which makes an admirable seat, and look forth over these pleasant rocky and bushy pastures, where for the most part there are not even cattle grazing, but patches of huckleberry bushes, birches, pitch-pines, barberry bushes, creeping juniper in great circles, its edges curving upward, wild roses spotting the green with red, numerous tufts ​of indigo weed, and above all, great gray boulders lying about, far and near, with some barberry bush perchance growing half way up them, and, between all, the short sod of the pasture here and there appears.
The beauty and fragrance of the wild rose are wholly agreeable and wholesome, and wear well. I do not wonder much that men have given the preference to this family of flowers notwithstanding their thorns. It is hardy and more complete in its parts than most flowers, its color, buds, fragrance, leaves, the whole bush, frequently its stem in particular, and finally its red or scarlet hips. Here is the sweet briar in blossom, which to a fragrant flower adds more fragrant leaves. . . .
As I walk through these old deserted wild or chards, half pasture, half huckleberry field, the air is filled with fragrance from I know not what source.
I sit on one of these boulders and look south to Ponkawtasset. Looking west, whence the wind comes, you do not see the under-sides of the leaves, but looking east, every bough shows its under-side. Those of the maples are particularly white. All leaves tremble like aspen leaves.
Two or three large boulders, fifteen or twenty feet square, make a good foreground in the ​landscape, for the gray color of the rock contrasts well with the green of the surrounding and more distant hills and woods and fields. They serve instead of cottages for a wild landscape, as perches or points d'appui for the eye.
The red color of cattle also is agreeable in a landscape, or let them be what color they may, red, black, white, mouse-color, or spotted, all which I have seen this afternoon. The cows which, confined to the barn or barnyard all winter, were covered with filth, after roaming in flowery pastures possess now clean and shining coats, and the cowy odor is without alloy. . . .
It seems natural that rocks which have lain under the heavens so long should be gray, as it were an intermediate color between the heavens and the earth. The air is the thin paint in which they have been dipped and brushed with the wind. Water, which is more fluid and like the sky in its nature, is still more like it in color. Time will make the most discordant materials harmonize. . . .
This grassy road now dives into the wood, as if it were entering a cellar or bulkhead, the shadow is so deep. . . . And now I scent the pines. I plucked a blue geranium near the Kibbe place, which appeared to me remarkably fragrant, like lilies and strawberries combined. . . . The sweet fragrance of the swamp pink ​fills all the swamps, and when I look down, I see commonly the leaf of the gold-thread. . . .
June 23, 1853. . . . p. m. To White Pond. . . . After bathing, I paddled to the middle in the leaky boat. The heart-leaf, which grows thinly here, is an interesting plant, sometimes floating at the end of a solitary, almost invisible, thread-like stem, more than six feet long, and again many purplish stems intertwined into loose ropes, or like large skeins of silk, abruptly spreading at top, of course, into a perfectly flat shield, a foot or more in diameter, of small heart-shaped leaves, which rise or fall on their stems as the water is higher or lower. This perfectly horizontal disposition of the leaves in a single plane is an interesting and peculiar feature in water plants of this kind. Leaves and flowers made to float on the dividing line between two elements. . . .
In the warm noons now-a-days I see the spotted, small, yellow eyes of the four-leaved loose strife looking at me from under the birches and pines springing up in sandy, upland fields. . . . The other day I saw what I took to be a scarecrow in a cultivated field, and noting how unnaturally it was stuffed out here and there, and how ungainly its arms and legs were, I thought to myself, "Well, it is thus they make these things, they do not stand much about it," but ​looking round again, after I had gone by, I saw my scarecrow walking off with a real live man in it.
I was just roused from my writing by the engine s whistle, and, looking out, saw shooting through the town two enormous pine sticks, stripped of their bark, just from the northwest, and going to Portsmouth Navy Yard, they say. . . . Not a tree grows now in Concord to compare with them. They suggest what a country we have to back us up that way. A hundred years ago or more perchance the wind wafted a little winged seed out of its cone to some favorable spot, and this is the result. In ten minutes they were through the township, and perhaps not half a dozen Concord eyes rested on them during their transit.
June 23, 1854. . . . Disturbed three different broods of partridges in my walk this p. m. in different places. In one, they were as big as chickens ten days old, and went flying in various directions a rod or two into the hillside.
In another, the young were two and a half inches long only, not long hatched, making a fine peep. Held one in my hand, where it squatted without winking. . . . Thus we are now in the very midst of them. The young broods are being led forth. The old bird will return mewing, and walk past within ten feet.
​June 23, 1856. To New Bedford with R——. . . . Bay wings sang morning and evening about R——'s house, often resting on a bean-pole, and dropping down and running and singing on the bare ground amid the potatoes. Their note somewhat like–"Come, here-here, there-there, –[then three rapid notes] quick-quick-quick,–or I'm gone."
June 24, 1840. When I read Cudworth I find I can tolerate all, atomists, pneumatologists, atheists, and theists, Plato, Aristotle, Leueippus, Democritus, and Pythagoras. It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication, which charms me. It is so rare to find a man musing. But between them and their commentators there is an endless dispute. If it come to that, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it is, each takes me up into the serene heavens, and paints earth and sky. Any sincere thought is irresistible. It lifts us to the zenith, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest.
Dr. Cudworth does not consider that the belief in a deity is as- great a heresy as exists. Epicurus held that the gods were "of human form, yet were so thin and subtile as that, comparatively with our terrestrial bodies, they might be called incorporeal; they having not so much carnem as quasi-carnem, nor sanguinem as ​quasi-sanguinem, a certain kind of aerial or ethereal flesh and blood." This, which Cudworth pronounces "romantical," is plainly as good doctrine as his own, as if any sincere thought were not the best sort of truth.
There is no doubt but the highest morality in the books is rhymed or measured, is in form, as well as substance, poetry. Such is the scripture of all nations. If I were to compile a volume to contain the condensed wisdom of mankind, I should quote no rhythmless line.
Not all the wit of a college can avail to make one harmonious line. It never happens. It may get so as to jingle. But a jingle is akin to a jar–jars regularly recurring.
So delicious is plain speech to my ears, as if I were to be more delighted by the whistling of the shot than frightened by the flying of the splinters. I am content, I fear, to be quite battered down and made a ruin of. I out general myself when I direct my enemy to my vulnerable points.
Sympathy with what is sound makes sport of what is unsound. The loftiest utterance of love is perhaps sublimely satirical.
Cliffs. Evening. Though the sun set a quarter of an hour ago, his rays are still visible, darting half way to the zenith. That glowing morrow in the west flashes on me like ​a faint presentiment of morning when I am falling asleep. A dull mist comes rolling from the west, as if it were the dust which day has raised. A column of smoke is rising from the woods yonder to uphold heaven's roof till the light comes again. The landscape, by its patient resting there, teaches me that all good remains with him that waiteth, and that I shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west.
Morning and evening are as like as brother and sister. The sparrow and thrush sing, and the frogs peep, for both.
The woods breathe louder and louder behind me. With what hurry-scurry night takes place! The wagon rattling over yonder bridge is the messenger which day sends back to night, but the despatches are sealed. In its rattle, the village seems to say, "This one sound and I have done."
Red, then, is day's color; at least, it is the color of his heel. He is "stepping westward." We only notice him when he comes and goes.
With noble perseverance the dog bays the stars yonder. I, too, like thee, walk alone in this strange, familiar night, my voice, like thine, beating against its friendly concave, and barking. I hear only my own voice; 10 o'clock.
June 24, 1852. p. m. To White Pond.—
​The drifting, white downy clouds are to the landsman what sails on the sea are to him who dwells by the shore, objects of a large, diffusive interest. When the laborer lies on the grass or in the shade for rest, they do not too much tax or weary his attention. They are unobtrusive. I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one's eyes ache. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bounds no man has visited. They are like all great themes, always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects, or near and low they smite us with their lightnings and deafen us with their thunder. We know no Ternate or Tidore grand enough whither we can imagine them bound. There are many mares'-tails to-day, if that is the name. What could a man learn by watching the clouds? These objects which go over our heads unobserved are vast and indefinite. Those clouds which have the most distinct and interesting outlines are commonly below the zenith, somewhat low in the heavens, seen on one side. They are among the most glorious objects in Nature. A sky without clouds is a meadow without flowers, a sea without sails. Some days we have the mackerel fleet. But our devilishly industrious laborers rarely lie in the shade. How much better if ​they were to take their nooning like the Italians, relax and expand and never do any work in the middle of the day,–enjoy a little sabbath then. I still perceive that wonderful fragrance from the meadow (?) on the Corner causeway, intense as ever. It is one of those effects whose cause it is best not to know perchance.
White Pond very handsome to-day. The shore alive with pollywogs of large size, which ripple the water on our approach. There is a fine sparkle on the water, though not equal to the fall one quite. The water is very high, so that you cannot walk round it, but it is the more pleasant while you are swimming to see how the trees actually rise out of it on all sides. It bathes their feet. The dog worried a woodchuck half-grown, which did not turn its back and run into its hole, but backed into it, and faced him and us, gritting its teeth and prepared to die. Even this little fellow was able to defend himself against the dog with his sharp teeth. That fierce gritting of their teeth is a remarkable habit with these animals.
The Linnæa borealis just going out of bloom. I should have found it long ago. Its leaves densely cover the ground.
June 24, 1853. . . . It is surprising that so many birds find hair enough to line their nests with. If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass ​sights, I must go to the stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.
June 24, 1856. [New Bedford.] To Sassacowen Pond and to Long Pond. Lunched by the spring on the Brady Farm in Freetown, and there it occurred to me how to get clear water from a spring when the surface is covered with dust or insects. Thrust your dipper down deep in the middle of the spring, and lift it up quickly, straight and square. This will heap up the water in the middle so that the scum will run off.
June 24, 1857. . . . Went to Farmer's Swamp to look for the screech-owl's nest which he had found. . . . I found it at last near the top of a middling-sized white pine, about thirty feet from the ground. As I stood by the tree, the old bird dashed by within a couple of rods, uttering a peculiar mewing sound which she kept up amid the bushes, a blackbird in close pursuit of her. I found the nest empty on one side of the main stem, but close to it, resting on some limbs. It was made of twigs rather less than an eighth of an inch thick, and was almost flat above, only an inch lower in the middle than at the edge, about sixteen inches in diameter and six or eight inches thick. With the twigs in the midst and beneath was mixed sphagnum and sedge from the swamp beneath, and the lining or flooring was coarse strips of grape-vine bark. The whole ​pretty firmly matted together. How common and important a material is grape-vine bark for birds' nests! Nature wastes nothing. There were white droppings of the young on the nest, and one large pellet of fur and small bones two and a half inches long. In the meanwhile the old bird was uttering that hoarse, worried note from time to time, somewhat like a partridge's, flying past from side to side, and alighting amid the trees or bushes. When I had descended, I detected one young one, two thirds grown, perched on a branch of the next tree about fifteen feet from the ground, which was all the while staring at me with its great yellow eyes. It was gray, with gray horns and a dark beak. As I walked past near it, it turned its head steadily, always facing me, without moving its body, till it looked directly the opposite way over its back, but never offered to fly. Just then, I thought surely that I heard a puppy faintly barking at me four or five rods distant amid the bushes, having tracked me into the swamp, what-what, what-what-what. It was exactly such a noise as the barking of a very small dog or perhaps a fox. But it was the old owl, for I presently saw her making it. . . . She was generally reddish brown or partridge-colored, the breast mottled with dark brown and fawn color . . . and had plain fawn-colored thighs.
​June 24, 1860. . . . Saw young blue-birds fully grown yesterday, but with a feeble note and dull colors.
June 25, 1840. Let me see no other conflict but with prosperity. If my path run on before me level and smooth, it is all a mirage. In reality it is steep and arduous as a chamois pass. I will not let the years roll over me like a Juggernaut car.
We will warm us at each other s fire. Friendship is not such a cold refining process as a double sieve, but a glowing furnace in which all impurities are consumed. Men have learned to touch before they scrutinize, to shake hands and not to stare.
June 25, 1852. Just as the sun was rising this morning under clouds, I saw a rainbow in the western horizon, the lower parts quite bright.
"Rainbow in the morning Sailors take warning, Rainbow at night Sailors delight."
A few moments after, it rained heavily and continued to do so for half an hour, and it has continued cloudy as well as cool most of the clay.
I observe that young birds are usually of a duller color and more speckled than old ones, as if for their protection in their tender state. They have not yet the markings and the beauty ​which distinguish their species, and which betray it often, but by their color are merged in the variety of colors of the season.
To Cliffs. 4 p. m. It is cool and cloudy weather in which the crickets still heard remind you of the fall, a clearer ring to their creak. Also the prunella, cool in the grass, and the Johnswort make you think it late in the year. Maruta cotula or Mayweed. Why so named? Just begins, with its strong-scented leaf. It has taken up its position by the roadside close to the ruts–in bad taste. . . .
The bobolink and golden robin are occasionally heard now-a-days.
The Convolvulus sepium, bind-weed. Morning glory is the best now. It always refreshes me to see it. . . . "In the morning and cloudy weather," says Gray. I associate it with holiest morning hours. It may preside over my morning walks and thoughts. There is a flower for every mood of the mind.
Methinks roses oftenest display their bright colors which invariably attract all eyes and betray them, against a dark ground, as the dark green or the shady recesses of other bushes and copses, where they show to best advantage. Their enemies do not spare the open flower for an hour. Hence, if for no other reason, their buds are most beautiful. Their promise of ​perfect and dazzling beauty, when their buds are just beginning to expand, beauty which they can hardly contain, as in most youths, commonly surpasses the fulfillment of their expanded flowers. The color shows fairest and brightest in the bud. The expanded flower has no higher or deeper tint than the swelling bud exposed. This raised a dangerous expectation. The season when wild roses are in bloom should have some preeminence, I think.
Linaria vulgaris, butter-and-eggs, toad-flax, on Fair Haven. Was seen the 19th. It is rather rich colored, with a not disagreeable scent. It is called a troublesome weed. Flowers must not be too profuse and obtrusive, else they acquire the reputation of weeds. It grows almost like a cotton-grass so above and distinct from its leaves, in wandering patches higher and higher up the side of the hill.
One man lies in his words and gets a bad reputation, another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.
The air is clear as if a cool, dewy brush had swept the meadows of all haze. A liquid coolness invests them, as if their midnight aspect were suddenly revealed to midday. The mountain outline is remarkably distinct and the intermediate earth appears more than usually scooped out like a vast saucer sloping upward to its sharp ​mountain rim. The mountains are washed in air. The sunshine now seen far away on fields and hills in the northwest looks cool and wholesome like the yellow grass in the meadows. I am too late for the white-pine flowers. The cones are half an inch long and green, and the male flowers effete. The sun now comes out bright, though westering, and shines on Fair Haven, which, rippled by the wind, is of an unusual clay-muddy color. . . . There are little recesses a rod or two square in bosky woods which have not grown fast, where a fine wiry grass invites to lie down in the shade, under the shrub-oaks on the edge of the, well-meadow-head field.
8.30 p. m. To Conantum. Moon half full. Fields dusky. The evening star and one other bright one near the moon. It is a cool, but pretty still night. Methinks I am less thoughtful than I was last year at this time. The flute I now hear from the Depot field does not find such caverns to echo and resound in within me, no such answering depths. Our minds should echo at least as many times as a mammoth cave to every musical sound. It should awaken reflections in us.
Now his day's work is done, the laborer plays his flute, only possible at this hour. Contrasted with his work, what an accomplishment! Some drink and gamble. He plays some well-known ​march. But the music is not in the tune; it is in the sound. It does not proceed from the trading nor the political world. He practices this ancient art. . . .
I hear the bull-frog's trump from far. Now I turn down the Corner road. At this quiet hour the evening wind is heard to moan in the hollows of your face, mysterious, spirit-like, conversing with you. . . . The whippoorwill sings. I hear a laborer going home coarsely singing to himself. Though he has scarcely had a thought all day, killing weeds, at this hour he sings or talks to himself. His humble, earthly contentment gets expression. It is kindred in its origin with the notes or music of many creatures. A more fit and natural expression of his mood this humming than conversation is wont to be.–The fire-flies appear to be flying, though they may be stationary on the grass stems, for their perch and the nearness of the ground are obscured by the darkness, and now you see one here and then another there, as if it were one in motion. Their light is singularly bright and glowing to proceed from a living creature. Nature loves variety in all things, and so she adds glow-worms to fireflies, though I have not noticed any this year.–The great story of the night is the moon's adventures with the clouds. What innumerable encounters she has had with them! When I ​enter on the moonlit causeway where the light is reflected from the glistening alder leaves, and their deep, dark, liquid shade beneath strictly bounds the firm, damp road and narrows it, it seems like autumn. The rows of willows completely fence the way, and appear to converge in perspective as I had not noticed by day.–The bull-frogs are of various tones. Some horse in a distant pasture whinnies. Dogs bark. There is that dull dumping sound of frogs, as if a bubble containing the lifeless, sultry air of day burst on the surface, a belching sound. When two or more bull-frogs trump together, it is a ten-pound-ten note.–In Conant's meadow I hear the gurgling of unwearied water, the trill of a toad, and go through the cool, primordial, liquid air that has settled there. As I sit on the great door step, the loose clapboards on the old house rattle in the wind weirdly, and I seem to hear some wild mice running about on the floor, sometimes a loud crack from some weary timber trying to change its position. How distant day and its associations! The night wind comes cold and whispering, murmuring weirdly from distant mountain tops. No need to climb the Andes or Himalayas; for brows of lowest hills are highest mountain tops in cool, moonlight nights. Is it a cuckoo s chuckling note I heard? Occasionally there is something enormous and ​monstrous in the size and distance of objects. A rock is it, or an elephant asleep? Are these trees on an upland or a lowland, or do they skirt a sea beach? When I get there, shall I look off on the sea?–The white weed is the only obvious flower. I see the tops of the rye wave, and grain fields are more interesting than by day. The water is dull-colored, hardly more light than a rye field.
You may not suspect that the milk of the cocoanut, which is imported from the other side of the world, is mixed. So pure do some truths come to us, I trust.
What a mean and wretched creature is man. By and by some Dr. Morton may be filling your cranium with white mustard-seed to learn its internal capacity. Of all ways invented to come at a knowledge of a living man, this seems to me the worst, as it is the most belated. You would learn more by once paring the nails of the living subject. There is nothing out of which the spirit has more completely departed, and in which it has left fewer significant traces.
June 25, 1853. p. m. To Assabet bathing-place. Found an unusual quantity of Amelanchier berries. I think of the two common kinds, one a taller bush twice as high as my head, with thinner and lighter colored leaves, and larger, or at least somewhat softer, fruit, the other, a ​shorter bush, with more rigid and darker leaves, and dark, blue berries, with often a sort of wooliness on them. Both these are now in their prime. These are the first berries after strawberries, or the first and, I think, the sweetest bush berries, somewhat like high blueberries, but not so hard. Much eaten by insects, worms, etc., as big as the largest blueberries or peas. These are the "service berries" which the Indians of the north and the Canadians use "la poire" of the latter. They, by a little, precede the early blueberry (though H——— brought two quarts of the last, day before yesterday), being now in their prime, while blueberries are but just beginning. I never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agreeable surprise. I hear the cherry-birds and others about me, no doubt attracted by this fruit. It is owing to some peculiarity of the season that they bear fruit. I have picked a quart of them for a pudding. I felt all the while I was picking them, in the low, light, waving, shrubby wood they make, as if I were in a foreign country. Several old farmers say, "Well, though I have lived seventy years, I never saw nor heard of them." I think them a delicious berry. No doubt they require only to be more abundant every year to be appreciated.
I think it must be the purple finch with the crimson head and shoulders which I see and ​hear singing so sweetly and variedly in the garden once or twice to-day. It sits on a bean pole or fence pick, It has a little of the martin warble and of the canary bird.
June 25, 1854. A green bittern apparently, awkwardly alighting on the trees, and uttering its hoarse zarry note, zskeow – xskeow – xskeow.
Through June the song of the birds is gradually growing fainter.
June 25, 1858. p. m. To Conantum.–Sitting on the Conantum House sill still left, I see two and perhaps three young striped squirrels, two thirds grown, within fifteen or twenty feet, one or more on the wall, another on the ground. Their tails are rather imperfect as well as their bodies. They are running about, yet rather feebly, nibbling the grass, etc., or sitting upright, looking very cunning. The broad, white line above and below the eye make it look very long as well as large, and the black and white stripe on its sides, curved as it sits, are very conspicuous and pretty. Who striped the squirrel's side? Several times I saw two approach each other, and playfully, and as it were affectionately, put their paws and noses to each other's faces. This was done very deliberately. There was no rudeness nor excessive activity in the sport. At length the old one appears, larger ​and much more bluish. She is shy, and with a sharp cluck or chip calls the others gradually to her, and draws them off along the wall, they from time to time frisking ahead of her, then she ahead of them. The hawks must get many of these inexperienced creatures.
June 26, 1840. The best poetry has never been written, for when it might have been, the poet forgot it, and when it was too late, remembered it.
The highest condition of art is artlessness.
Truth is always paradoxical.
He will get to the goal first who stands stillest.
By sufferance you may escape suffering.
He who resists not at all will never surrender.
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Say "Not so," and you will outcircle the philosophers.
Stand outside the wall, and no harm can reach you; the danger is that you be walled in with it.
June 26, 1851.–Visited a menagerie this afternoon. I am always surprised to see the same spots and stripes on wild beasts from Africa and Asia, and also from South America, on the Brazilian tiger and the African leopard, and their general similarity. All these wild animals, lions, ​tigers, chetas, leopards, etc., have one hue, tawny commonly, and spotted or striped, what you may call pard color, a color and marking which I had not associated with America. These are wild animals (beasts). What constitutes the difference between a wild beast and a tame one? How much more human the one than the other! Growling, scratching, roaring, with whatever beauty and gracefulness, still untamable, this royal Bengal tiger or the leopard. They have the character and the importance of another order of men. The majestic lion, the king of beasts, he must retain his title.
I was struck by the gem-like, changeable, greenish reflections from the eyes of the grizzly bear, so glassy that you never saw the surface of the eye. They are quite demonic. Its claws, though extremely large and long, look weak and made for digging or pawing the earth and leaves. It is unavoidable, the idea of transmigration; not merely a fancy of the poets, but an instinct of the race.
June 26, 1852. I have not put darkness, duskiness enough into my night and moonlight walks. Every sentence should contain some twilight or night. At least the light in it should be the yellow or creamy light of the moon, or the fine beams of stars, and not the white light of day. The peculiar dusky serenity of the ​sentences must not allow the reader to forget that it is evening or night, without my saying that it is dark. Otherwise he will, of course, presume a daylight atmosphere.
The earliest water surfaces, as I remember, as soon as the ice is melted, present as fair and matured scenes, as soft and warm, reflecting the sky through the clear atmosphere, as in midsummer, far in advance of the earth. The earliest promise of the summer, is it not in the smooth reflecting surface of woodland lakes in which the ice is just melted? Those liquid eyes of Nature, blue, or black, or even hazel, deep or shallow, clear or turbid, green next the shore, the color of their iris.
p. m. By boat up the Assabet.
The Nymphœa odorata, sweet water lily, pond lily, in bloom. A superb flower, our lotus, queen of the waters. Now is the solstice in still waters. How sweet, innocent, wholesome its fragrance, how pure its white petals, though its root is in the mud. It must answer in my mind for what the orientals say of the lotus flower. Probably the first a day or two since. To-morrow, then, will be the first Sabbath when the young men, having bathed, will walk slowly and soberly to church, in their best clothes, each with a lily in his hand or bosom, with as long a stem as he could get. At least I used to see ​them go by and come into church, when I used to go myself, smelling a pond lily, so that the flower is to some extent associated with bathing on Sabbath mornings and going to church, its odor contrasting with and atoning for that of the sermon. We have roses on the land and lilies on the water. Both land and water have done their best, now just after the longest day. Nature says, You behold the utmost I can do. And the young women carry their finest roses on the other hand. Roses and lilies. The floral days. The red rose, with the intense color of many suns concentrated, spreads its tender petals perfectly fair, its flower not to be overlooked, modest, yet queenly, on the edges of shady copses and meadows, against its green leaves, surrounded by blushing buds, of perfect form, not only beautiful, but rightfully commanding attention, unspoiled by the admiration of gazers. And the water lily floats on the surface of slow waters, amid rounded shields of leaves, bucklers red beneath, which simulate a green field, perfuming the air. Each instantly the prey of the spoiler, the rose-bug and water insects. How transitory the perfect beauty of the rose and the lily. The highest, intensest color belongs to the land; the purest, perchance, to the water. The lily is perhaps the only flower which all are eager to pluck. It may be partly ​because of its inaccessibility to most. The farmers sons will frequently collect every bud that shows itself above the surface within half a mile. They are so infested by insects, and it is so rare you get a perfect one which has opened itself (though these only are perfect), that the buds are commonly plucked and opened by hand. I have a faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking dried lily stems, before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. I have never smoked anything more noxious. I used to amuse myself with making the yellow, drooping stamens rise and fall by blowing through the pores of the long stem.
I see the nests of the bream, each with its occupant, scooped out in the sunny water, and partly shaded by the leaves of the limnanthemum or floating heart now in blossom and the Potamogeton natans, or pondweed.–Under the cool, glossy green leaves of small swamp white oaks, and leaning against their scaly bark near the water, you see the wild roses five or six feet high looking forth from the shade, but almost every bush and copse near the river or in low land which you approach these days, emits the noisome odor of the carrion-flower, so that you would think that all the dead dogs had drifted to that shore. All things, both beautiful and ugly, agreeable and offensive, are expressed in ​flowers, all kinds and degrees of beauty, and all kinds of foulness. For what purpose has Nature made a flower to fill the low lands with the odor of carrion. Just so much beauty and virtue as there is in the world, and just so much ugliness and vice, you see expressed in flowers. Each human being has his flower which expresses his character. In them nothing is concealed, but everything published. Many a villager whose garden bounds on the river, when he approaches the willows and cornels by the river's edge, thinks that some carrion has lodged on his shore, when it is only the carrion-flower he smells. . . .
All shadows or shadowlets on the sandy bottom of the river are interesting. All are circular, almost lenticular, for they appear to have thickness. Even the shadows of grass blades are broken into several separate circles of shade. Such is the fabulous or Protean character of the water light. A skater insect casts seven flat or lenticular shades, four smaller in front, two larger behind, and the smallest of all in the centre. From the shadow on the bottom you cannot guess the form on the surface. Everything is transmuted by the water. The shadow, however small, is black within, edged with a sunny halo, corresponding to the day s twilight, and a certain liquidness is imparted to the whole by the incessant motion from the undulation of the surface. The oblong ​leaves of the Potamogeton hybridus (?) now in seed, make a circular shadow also, somewhat coin-like, a halo produced by the thick atmosphere which the water is. These bright, sparkling brook and river bottoms are the true gold washings, where the stream has washed the pebbly earth so long.
It is pleasant to walk in sproutlands now in June; there is so much light reflected from the underside of the new foliage. The rich meadows, too, reflect much of the bluish light from the bent grass. We land on the south side opposite Barrett's.—There are some interesting, retired natural meadows here, concealed by the woods near the river bank, which are never cut, long, narrow, and winding, full of a kind of stiff, dry, cut grass and tender meadow-sweet and occasional cranberry patches now in bloom, with a high border, almost as high as the meadows are wide, of maples, birches, swamp white oaks, alders, etc. The flashing, silvery light from the under-sides of the maple leaves, high, rippling, washing towers far and near,—this cool, refreshing, breezy, flashing light is very memorable. When you think you have reached the end of such a winding meadow, you pass between two alders where the copses meet, and emerge into another meadow beyond. I suppose that these meadows are as nearly in their primitive state as any that ​we see. So this country looked, in one of its aspects, a thousand years ago. What difference to the meadow-sweet, or the swamp white oak, or to the silver flashing maple leaves a thousand years ago or to-day! . . . The prevalence of the meadow-sweet at least distinguishes these meadows from the ordinary ones.
Forded the river with our clothes on our heads. The rounded heaps of stones, whether made by the suckers or lamprey-eels, are among the curiosities of the river. From the sand bank we looked at the arched bridge while a traveler, in a simple carriage with a single pair of wheels, went over it. It interested me because the stratum of earth beneath him was so thin that he appeared quite in the air. While he sat with his elbows on his knees entertaining all earthly thoughts, or thoughtless, we looked directly beneath him through much air to a fair and distant landscape beyond. C—— says that is what men go to Italy to see. I love to see the firm earth mingled with the sky, like the spray of the sea tossed up. Is there not always, wherever an arch is constructed, a latent reference to its beauty. The arch supports itself like the stars, by gravity. "Semper cadendo nunquam cadit." By always falling it never falls.
June 26, 1853. At Cliffs. The air warmer, but wonderfully clear after the hail-storm. I do ​not remember when I have seen it more clear. The mountains and horizon outlines on all sides are distinct and near. Nobscot has lost all its blue, is only a more distant hill-pasture, and the northwest mountains are too terrestrial a blue and too firmly defined to be mistaken for clouds. Billerica is as near as Bedford commonly. I see new spires far in the south, and on every side the horizon is extended many miles. It expands me to look so much farther over the rolling surface of the earth. Where I had seen or fancied only a hazy forest outline, I see successive swelling hills and remote towns. So often to the luxurious and hazy summer in our minds, when, like Fletcher's "Martyrs in Heaven," we,
"estranged from all misery As far as Heaven and Earth discoasted lie, Swelter in quiet waves of immortality,"
some great chagrin succeeds, some chilling cloud comes over. But when it is gone, we are surprised to find that it has cleared the air, summer returns without its haze, we see infinitely farther into the horizon on every side, and the boundaries of the world are enlarged.
A beautiful sunset about half-past seven; just clouds enough in the west (we are on Fair Haven hill); they arrange themselves about the western gate. And now the sun sinks out of sight just on the north side of Watatic, and the ​mountains north and south are at once a dark indigo blue, for they had been darkening an hour or more. Two small clouds are left on the horizon between Watatic and Monadnock, their sierra edges all on fire. Three minutes after the sun is gone, there is a bright and memorable afterglow in his path, and a brighter and more glorious light falls on the clouds above the portal. His car borne farther round brings us into the angle of excidence. Those little sierra clouds look like two castles on fire, and I see the fire through the windows. The low western horizon glows now, five or six minutes after sunset, with a delicate salmon color tinged with rose, deepest where the sun disappeared, and fading off upward. North and south are deep blue cloud islands in it. When I invert my head those delicate salmon-colored clouds look like a celestial Sahara, sloping gently upward, a plane inclined upward, to be traveled by caravans bound heavenward, with blue oases in it.
June 26, 1856. [New Bedford.] Rode to Sconticut Neck or Point, in Fair Haven, five or six miles. . . . Heard of and sought out the hut of Martha Simons, the only pure-blooded Indian left about New Bedford. She lives alone on the narrowest part of the Neck, near the shore, in sight of New Bedford. Her hut stands some twenty-five rods from the road on a small tract ​of Indian land, now wholly hers. It was formerly exchanged by a white man for some better land, then occupied by Indians at Westport, which he wanted. So said a Quaker minister, her neighbor. The squaw was not at home when we first called. It was a little hut, not so big as mine. No garden, only some lettuce amid the thin grass in front, and a great pile of clam and quahog shells one side. Ere long she came from the seaside and we called again. We knocked and walked in, and she asked us to sit down. She had half an acre of the real tawny Indian face, broad with high cheek bones, black eyes, and straight hair, originally black, but now a little gray, parted in the middle. Her hands were several shades darker than her face. She had a peculiarly vacant expression, perhaps characteristic of the Indian, and answered our questions listlessly, without being interested or implicated, mostly in monosyllables, as if hardly present there. To judge from her physiognomy, she might have been King Philip's own daughter. Yet she could not speak a word of Indian, and knew nothing of her race, said she had lived with the whites, gone out to service to them when seven years old. Had lived part of her life at Squaw Betty's Neck, Assawanipsett Pond. . . . She said she was sixty years old, but was probably nearer seventy. She sat with her ​elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, and that peculiar vacant stare, perhaps looking out the window between us, not repelling us in the least, but perfectly indifferent to our presence. She was bom on that spot. Her grandfather also lived on the same spot, though not in the same house. He was the last of her race who could speak Indian. She had heard him pray in Indian, but could only understand "Jesus Christ." Her only companion was a miserable tortoise-shell kitten, which took no notice of us. She had a stone chimney, a small cook ing stove without fore-legs, and set up on bricks within it, and a bed covered with dirty bed clothes. Said she hired out her field as pasture; better for her than to cultivate it. . . . The question she answered with most interest was, "What do you call that plant?" and I reached her the aletris from my hat. She took it, looked at it a moment, and said, "That's husk-root. It's good to put into bitters for a weak stomach." The last year's light-colored and withered leaves surround the present green star like a husk. This must be the origin of the name. Its root is described as intensely bitter. I ought to have had my hat full of plants.
June 27, 1856. [New Bedford.] p. m. Went with R—— and his boys in the steamer Eagle's Wing, with a crowd and band of music, to the ​northeast end of Naushon . . . some fifteen miles from New Bedford. About two hours going. Saw all the Elizabeth Isles, going and coming. They are mostly bare, except the east end of Naushon. This island is some seven miles long by one to two wide. I had some two and a half hours there. I was surprised to find such a noble, primitive wood, chiefly beech, such as the English poets celebrate, and oak (black oak, I think), large and spreading, like pasture oaks with us, though in a wood. The ground under the beeches was covered with the withered leaves, and peculiarly free from vegetation. On the edge of a swamp I saw great tupelos running up particularly tall, without lower branches, two or three feet in diameter, with a rough, light-colored bark. Saw a common wild grape-vine running over a beech which was apparently flattened out by it, which vine measured at six feet from the ground twenty-three inches in circumference. It was larger below where it had already forked. At five feet from the ground it divided into three great branches. It did not rise directly, but with a great half spiral sweep. . . . No sight could be more primeval. It was partly or chiefly dead. This was in the midst of the woods by a path side. Just beyond we started up two deer.
June 27, 1840. . . . A dull, cloudy day; no ​sun shining. The clink of the smith's hammer sounds feebly over the roofs, and the wind is sighing gently as if dreaming of cheerfuller days. The farmer is ploughing in yonder field, craftsmen are busy in the shops, the trader stands behind the counter, and all works go steadily forward. But I will have nothing to do, will tell Fortune that I play no game with her, and she may reach me in my Asia of serenity and indolence, if she can.
For an impenetrable shield stand inside yourself.
He was no artist, but an artisan, who first made shields of brass.
Unless we meet religiously, we profane one another. What was the consecrated ground around the temple we have used as no better than a domestic court. Our friend's is as holy a shrine as any God's, to be approached with sacred love and awe. Veneration is the measure of love. Our friend answers ambiguously, and sometimes before the question is propounded, like the oracle of Delphi. He forbears to ask explanation, but doubts and surmises darkly with full faith, as we silently ponder our fates. In no presence are we so susceptible to shame. Our hour is a sabbath; our abode, a temple; our gifts, peace offerings; our conversation, a communion; our silence, a prayer. In profanity we ​are absent; in holiness, near; in sin, estranged; in innocence, reconciled.
June 27, 1852. p. m. To Bear Hill, Lincoln. The epilobium, spiked willow herb, shows its pale purple spikes (pinkish?). I will set it down to the 20th. Epilobium angustifolium, one of the most conspicuous flowers at this season, on dry, open hillsides in the woods, sproutlands. . . . I still perceive that ambrosial sweetness from the meadows in some places. Give me the strong, rank scent of ferns in the spring for vigor, just blossoming late in the spring. A healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape. As long as the bodily vigor lasts, man sympathizes with Nature.
Looking from Bear Hill I am struck by the yellowish green of meadows, almost like an ingrained sunlight. Perhaps they have that appearance, because the fields generally incline now to a reddish-brown green. The freshness of the year in most fields is already past. The tops of the early grass are white, killed by the worms.
It is somewhat hazy, yet I can just distinguish Monadnock. It is a good way to describe the density of a haze to say how distant a mountain can be distinguished through it, or how near a hill is obscured by it.
​Saw a very large white-ash tree, three and a half feet in diameter, . . . which was struck by lightning the 22d. The lightning apparently struck the top of the tree and scorched the bark and leaves for ten or fifteen feet downward, then began to strip off the bark and enter the wood, making a ragged, narrow furrow or crack, till reaching one of the upper limbs it apparently divided, descending on both sides and entering deeper and deeper into the wood. At the first general branching it had got full possession of the tree in its centre, and tossed off the main limbs, butt foremost, making holes in the ground where they struck, and so it went down in the midst of the trunk to the earth, where it apparently exploded, rending the trunk into six segments, whose tops, ten or twenty feet long, were rayed out on every side at an angle of about 30° from a perpendicular, leaving the ground bare directly under where the tree had stood, though they were still fastened to the earth by their roots. The lightning appeared to have gone off through the roots, furrowing them as it had furrowed the branches, and through the earth, making a furrow like a plow, four or five rods in one direction, and in another passing through the cellar of the neighboring house, about thirty feet distant, scorching the tin milk-pans, and throwing dirt into the milk, ​and coming out the back side of the house in a furrow, splitting some plsnks there. The main body of the tree was completely stripped of bark, which was cast in every direction, two hundred feet, and large pieces of the inside of the tree were hurled, with tremendous force, in various directions,—one into the side of a shed, smashing it, another burying itself in a wood pile. The heart of the tree lay by itself. Probably a piece as large as a man s leg could not have been sawed out of the trunk, which would not have had a crack in it, and much of it was very finely splintered. The windows in the house were broken and the inhabitants knocked down by the concussion. All this was accomplished in an instant by a kind of fire out of the heavens called lightning or a thunderbolt, accompanied by a crashing sound. For what purpose? The ancients called it Jove's bolt, with which he punished the guilty, and we moderns understand it no better. There was displayed a Titanic force, some of that force which made and can unmake the world. The brute forces are not yet wholly tamed. Is this of the character of a wild beast? or is it guided by intelligence and mercy? If we trust our natural impressions, it is a manifestation of brutish force, or vengeance more or less tempered with justice. Yet it is our consciousness ​of sin probably which suggests the idea of vengeance, and to a righteous man it would be merely sublime without being awful. This is one of those cases in which a man hesitates to refer his safety to his prudence, as the putting up of a lightning-rod. There is no lightning-rod by which the sinner can avert the avenging Nemesis. Though I should put up a rod, if its utility were satisfactorily demonstrated to me, yet, so mixed are we, I should feel myself safe or in danger quite independently of the senseless rod. There is a degree of faith and righteousness in putting up a rod as well as in trusting without one, though the latter, which is the rarer, I feel to be the more effectual rod of the two. It only suggests that impunity in respect to all forms of death or disease, whether sickness or casualty, is only to be attained by moral integrity. It is the faith with which we take medicine that cures us. Otherwise we may be cured into greater disease. In a violent tempest we both fear and trust. We are ashamed of our fear, for we know that a righteous man would not suspect danger, nor incur any. Wherever a man feels fear, there is an avenger. The savage's and the civilized man's instincts are right. Science affirms too much. Science assumes to show why the lightning strikes a tree, but it does not show us the moral why any better ​than our instincts did. It is full of presumption. Why should trees be struck? It is not enough to say, Because they are in the way. Science answers, "Non scio, I am ignorant." All the phenomena of Nature need to be seen from the point of view of wonder and awe, like lightning; and, on the other hand, the lightning itself needs to be regarded with serenity, as are the most innocent and familiar phenomena. There runs through the righteous man's spinal column a rod with burnished points to heaven, which conducts safely away into the earth the flashing wrath of Nemesis so that it merely clarifies the air. This moment the confidence of the righteous man erects a sure conductor within him; the next, perchance, a timid staple diverts the fluid to his vitals. If a mortal be struck with a thunderbolt cœlo sereno, it is naturally felt to be more awful and vengeful. Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science. Some places are thought to be particularly exposed to lightning, some oaks on hill tops, for instance.
I meet the partridge with her brood in the woods, a perfect little hen. She spreads her tail into a fan and beats the ground with her wings fearlessly, within a few feet of me, to attract my attention while her young disperse. ​But they keep up a faint, wiry kind of peep which betrays them, while she mews and squeaks as if giving them directions.—Chestnut trees are budded.—I picked a handful or two of blueberries. These and huckleberries deserve to be celebrated, such simple, wholesome, universal fruits, food for the gods and for aboriginal men. They are so abundant that they concern our race much. Tournefort called some of this genus at least, Vitis-Idœa, which apparently means the vine of Mount Ida. I cannot imagine any country without this kind of berry. Berry of berries, on which men live like birds, still covering our hills as when the red men lived here. Are they not the principal wild fruit?
June 27, 1853. 4.30 a. m. To Island by river. . . . Saw a little pickerel with a minnow in its mouth. It was a beautiful little silver-colored minnow, two inches long, with a broad stripe down the middle. The pickerel held it crosswise near the tail, as he had seized it, and as I looked down on him, he worked the minnow along in his mouth toward the head, and then swallowed it head foremost. Was this instinct?
June 27, 1859. . . . p. m. To Walden. . . . I find an Attacus Luna half hidden under a skunk cabbage leaf, with its back to the ground and motionless, on the edge of a swamp. The ​underside is a particularly pale, hoary green. It is somewhat greener above, with a slightly purplish brown border on the front edge of its front wings, and a brown, yellowish, and whitish eye-spot in the middle of each wing. It is very sluggish, and allows me to turn it over and cover it up with another leaf, sleeping till the night comes. It has more relation to the moon by its pale, hoary green color, and its sluggishness by day, than by the form of its tail.
June 28, 1840. The profane never hear music; the holy ever hear it. It is God's voice, the divine breath audible. Where it is heard, there is a Sabbath. It is omnipotent. All things obey it, as they obey virtue. It is the herald of virtue. It passes by sorrow, for grief hangs its harp on the willows.
June 28, 1854. Tall anemone. Pontederia to-morrow.
June 28, 1857. . . . I hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young golden robins which have recently left their nests, and apparently indicate their locality to their parents by thus incessantly peeping all day long.
June 28, 1860. . . . I meet to-day with a wood-tortoise which is eating the leaves of the early potentillas, and soon after another . . . deliberately eating sorrel. It was evidently ​quite an old one, its back being worn quite smooth, and its motions peculiarly sluggish. It continued to eat when I was within a few feet, holding its head high and biting down at it, each time bringing away a piece of the leaf. It made you think of an old and sick tortoise eating some salutary herb to cure itself with, and reminded me of the stories of the ancients, who, I think, made the tortoises thus cure themselves with dittany or origanum when bitten by a venomous snake. It impressed me as if it must know the virtues of herbs well, and could select the one best suited to the condition of its body. When I came nearer, it at once drew in its head. Its back was smooth and yellowish, a venerable tortoise. When I moved off, it at once withdrew into the woods.
June 29, 1840. Of all phenomena my own race are the most mysterious and undiscoverable. For how many years have I striven to meet one, even on common, manly ground, and have not succeeded!
June 29, 1851. There is a great deal of white clover this year. In many fields where there has been no clover seed sown, for many years at least, it is more abundant than the red, and the heads are nearly as large. Also pastures which are close cropped, and where I think there was little or no clover last year, are spotted white ​with an humbler growth. And everywhere by roadsides, garden borders, etc., even where the sward is trodden hard, the small white heads on short stems are sprinkled. As this is the season for the swarming of bees, and this clover is very attractive to them, it is probably the more difficult to secure them; at any rate it is more important, now that they can make honey so fast. It is an interesting inquiry why this year is so favorable to the growth of clover.
Swamp pink I see for the first time this sea son.
How different is day from day! Yesterday the air was filled, with a thick, fog-like haze, so that the sun did not once shine with ardor, and everything was so tempered under this thin veil that it was a luxury merely to be out doors. You were the less out for it. The shadows of the apple trees even early in the afternoon were remarkably distinct. The landscape wore a classical smoothness. Every object was as in picture with a glass over it. I saw some hills on this side the river looking from Conantum, on which the grass being of a yellow tinge, though the sun did not shine out on them, they had the appearance of being shone upon peculiarly. It was merely an unusual yellow tint of the grass. The mere surface of the water was an object for the eye to linger on.
​I thought that one peculiarity of my "Week" was its hypœthral character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might have been written wholly, as in fact it was to a great extent, out of doors. It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or led a domestic life. I trust it does not smell so much of the study and library, even of the poet's attic, as of the fields and woods, that it is a hypæthral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether, and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.
At a distance in the meadow I hear still, at long intervals, the hurried commencement of the bobolink's strain, the bird just dashing into song, which is as suddenly checked, as it were, by the warder of the seasons, and the strain is left incomplete forever. [P. S.] I have since heard some complete strains.
The voice of the crickets, heard at noon from deep in the grass, allies day to night. It is unaffected by sun and moon. It is a midnight sound heard at noon, a midday sound heard at midnight.
I observed some mulleins growing on the ​western slope of the sandy railroad embankment, in as warm a place as can easily be found, where the heat was reflected oppressively from the sand at three o'clock p. m. this hot day. Yet the green and living leaves felt rather cool than otherwise to the hand, but the dead ones at the root were quite warm. The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest exposure, as if it kept a cellar below from which cooling liquors were drawn up.
How awful is the least unquestionable meanness, when we cannot deny that we have been guilty of it. There seem to be no bounds to our unworthiness.
June 29, 1852. p. m. On the North River. . . . The Rana halecina? shad-frog is our handsomest; bronze, striped with brown spots edged and intermixed with bright green. . . . The frogs and tortoises striped and spotted for concealment. The painted tortoise s throat held up above the pads, streaked with yellowish, makes it the less obvious. The mud turtle is the color of the mud; the wood frog and the hylodes, of the dead leaves; the bull-frog, of the pads; the toad, of the earth, etc.; the tree-toad, of the bark.
In my experience nothing is so opposed to poetry, not crime, as business. It is a negation of life.
​The wind exposes the red under-sides of the white lily pads. This is one of the aspects of the river now. The bud-bearing stem of this plant is a little larger, but otherwise like the leaf stem, and coming like it from the long, large root. It is interesting to pull up the lily roots with flowers and leaves attached, and see how it sends its buds upward to the light and air to expand and flower in another element. How interesting the bud's progress from the water to the air! So many of these stems are leaf-bearing, and so many, flower-bearing. Then consider how defended these plants against drought, at the bottom of the water, at most their leaves and flowers floating on its surface. How much mud and water are required to support their vitality! It is pleasant to remember those quiet Sabbath mornings by remote stagnant rivers and ponds where pure white water lilies just expanded, not yet infested by insects, float on the waveless water and perfume the atmosphere. Nature never appears more serene and innocent and fragrant. A hundred white lilies open to the sun rest on the surface smooth as oil amid their pads, while devil's needles are glancing over them. It requires some skill so to pull a lily as to get a long stem.
The great yellow lily, the spatterdock, expresses well the fertility of the river.
​One flower on a spike of the Pontederia cordata just ready to expand.
Children bring you the early blueberry to sell now. It is considerably earlier on the tops of hills which have been recently cut off than in the plains or in vales. The girl that has Indian blood in her veins and picks berries for a living will find them out as soon as they turn.
The Anemone virginiana, tall anemone, looking like a white buttercup, on Egg Rock, cannot have been long in bloom.
I see the columbine lingering still.
June 29, 1859. I see two chestnut-sided warblers hopping and chipping a long time, as if they had a nest within six feet of me. No doubt they are breeding near. Yellow crown with a fine, dark, longitudinal line, reddish chestnut sides, black triangle on side of head. White beneath.
June 30, 1840. I sailed from Fair Haven last evening as gently and steadily as the clouds sail through the atmosphere. The wind came blowing blithely from the southwest fields, and stepped into the folds of our sails like a winged horse, pulling with a strong and steady impulse. The sail bends gently to the breeze as swells some generous impulse of the heart, and anon flutters and flaps with a kind of human suspense. I could watch the motions of a sail forever, they ​are so rich and full of meaning. I watch the play of its pulse as if it were my own blood beating there. The varying temperature of different atmospheres is graduated on its scale. It is a free, buoyant creature, the bauble of the heavens and the earth. A gay pastime the air plays with it. If it swells and tugs, it is because the sun lays his windy finger on it. The breeze it plays with has been out doors so long, so thin is it, and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least serviceable. So am I blown by God's breath, so flutter and flap, and fill gently out with the breeze.
In this fresh evening, each blade and leaf looks as if it had been dipped in an icy liquid greenness. Let eyes that ache come here and look, the sight will be a sovereign eye-water, or else wait and bathe them in the dark.
We go forth into the fields, and there the wind blows freshly onward, and still on, and we must make new efforts not to be left behind. What does the dogged wind intend, that like a wilful cur it will not let me to turn aside to rest or content? Must it always reprove and provoke me, and never welcome me as an equal?
The truth shall prevail and falsehood discover itself as long as the wind blows on the hills.
A man's life should be a stately march to a ​sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier measure, or his nicer ear hurry him into a thousand symphonies and concordant variations. There will be no halt ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the melody runs into such depth and wildness as to be no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. He will take a false step never, even in the most arduous times, for the music will not fail to swell into greater sweetness and volume, and itself rule the movement it inspired.
Value and effort are as much coincident as weight and a tendency to fall. In a very wide but true sense, effort is the deed itself, and it is only when these sensible stuffs intervene, that our attention is distracted from the deed to the accident. It is never the deed men praise, but some marble or canvas which are only a staging to the real work.
June 30, 1851. Haying has commenced. I see the farmers in distant fields cocking their hay now at six o'clock. The day has been so oppressively warm, that some workmen have lain by at noon, and the haymakers are mowing now at early twilight. The blue flag, Iris versicolor, enlivens the meadow, and the lark sings there at ​sundown afar off. It is a note which belongs to a New England summer evening. Though so late I hear the summer hum of a bee in the grass, as I am on my way to the river . . . to bathe. After hoeing in a dusty garden all this warm afternoon, so warm that the baker says he never knew the like, and expects to find his horses dead in the stable when he gets home, it is very grateful to wend one's way at evening to some pure and cool stream, and bathe there. . . .
What I suppose is the Aster miser, small-flowered aster, like a small many-headed white-weed, has now for a week been in bloom, a humble weed, but one of the earliest of the asters.
I first observed about ten days ago that the fresh shoots of the fir-balsam, Abies balsamifera, found under the tree wilted, or plucked and kept in the pocket or in the house a few days, emit the fragrance of strawberries, only it is some what more aromatic and spicy. It was to me a very remarkable fragrance to be emitted by a pine, a very rich, delicious, aromatic, spicy fragrance, which, if the fresh and living shoots emitted, they would be still more to be sought after.
June 30, 1852. Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all, that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one s native place, for ​instance. She is most significant to a lover. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. . . .
Is not this period more than any other distinguished for flowers when roses, swamp pinks, morning glories, arethusas, orchises, blue-flags, epilobiums, mountain laurel, and white lilies are all in blossom at once.
June 30, 1860. Try the temperature of the springs and pond. At 2.15 p. m., the atmosphere north of house is 83° above zero.
The same afternoon, the water of the boiling spring, 45°.
Our well, after pumping, 49°.
Brister's spring, 49°.
Walden Pond at bottom, in four feet of water, 71°.
River at one rod from shore, 77°.
(2 p. m., July 1, the air is 77° and the river 75°.)
I see that the temperature of the boiling spring, on the 6th of March, 1846, was also 45°, and I suspect it varies very little throughout the year.
In sand, both by day and night, you find the heat to be permanently greatest some three inches below the surface. It is so to-day, and this is about the depth at which the tortoises place their eggs, where the temperature is ​highest permanently and changes least between night and day.
Generally speaking, the fields are not imbrowned yet, but the freshness of the year is preserved. As I stand on the side of Fair Haven Hill, the verdure generally appears at its height, the air clear, and the water sparkling after the rain of yesterday. It is a world of glossy leaves, and grassy fields and meads. The foliage of deciduous trees is now so nearly as dark as evergreens that I am not struck by the contrast. I think that the shadows under the edge of woods are less noticed now because the woods themselves are darker; so, too, with the darkness and shadows of elms.
Seen through this clear, sparkling, breezy air, the fields, woods, and meadows are very brilliant and fair. The leaves are now hard and glossy (the oldest), yet still comparatively fresh, and I do not see a single acre of grass that has been cut. The river meadows on each side the stream, looking toward the light, have an elysian beauty. . . . They are by far the most bright and sunny looking spots, such is the color of the sedges which grow there, while the pastures and hillsides are dark green, and the grain fields glaucous green. It is remarkable that the meadows which are the lowest part should have the lightest, sunniest, yellowest look.
​I hear scarcely any toads of late, except a few at evening. See in the garden, on the side of a corn-hill, the hole in which one sits by day. It is round, and about the width of his body across, extending one side underneath about the length of my little finger. It is shaped in the main like a turtle's nest, but not so broad beneath, and not quite so deep. There sits the toad in the shade and concealed completely under the ground, with its head toward the entrance, waiting for evening.
July 1, 1840. To be a man is to do a man's work. Always our resource is to endeavor. We may well say, Success to our endeavors. Effort is the prerogative of virtue.
The true laborer is recompensed by his labor not by his employer. Industry is its own wages. Let us not suffer our hands to lose one jot of their handiness by looking behind to a mere recompense, knowing that our true endeavor cannot be thwarted, nor we be cheated of our earnings unless by not earning them. Some symbol of value may shape itself to the senses in wood or marble or verse, but this is fluctuating as the laborer's hire, which may or may not be withheld. Perhaps the hugest and most effective deed may have no sensible result at all on earth, but paint itself in the heavens in new stars and constellations. Its very material lies out of Nature. ​When in rare moments we strive wholly with one consent, which we call a yearning, we may not hope that our work will stand in any artist's gallery.
July 1, 1852. 9.30 a. m. To Sherman's Bridge by land and water. One object, to see the white lilies in bloom. The Trifolium arvense, or rabbit's foot clover, is just beginning to show its color. . . . The mulleins generally now begin to show their pure yellow in roadside fields, and the white cymes of the elder are conspicuous on the edges of the copses. I perceive the meadow fragrance still. . . . Roses are in their prime now, growing amid huckleberry bushes, ferns, and sweet ferns, especially about some dry pond hole, some paler, some more red. It would seem they must have bloomed in vain while only wild men roamed, yet now they adorn only the pasture of these cows.—How well-behaved are cows! When they approach me reclining in the shade, from curiosity, or to receive a wisp of grass, or to share the shade, or to lick the dog held up, like a calf, though just now they ran at him to toss him, they do not obtrude; their company is acceptable, for they can endure the longest pause. They have not to be entertained. They occupy the most eligible lots in the town. I love to see some pure white about them. It suggests the more neatness.
​Borrowed his boat of B——, the wheelwright, at the Corner bridge. He was quite ready to lend it, arid took pains to shave down the handle of a paddle for me, conversing the while on the subject of spiritual knocking which he asked if I had looked into. Our conversation made him the slower. An obliging man who understands that I am abroad viewing the works of Nature and not loafing, though he makes the pursuit a semi-religious one, as are all more serious ones to most men. All that is not sporting in the field, as hunting and fishing, is of a religious or else love-cracked character.
The white lilies were in all their splendor, fully open, sometimes their lower petals lying flat on the surface. The largest appeared to grow in the shallower water, where some stood five or six inches out of water, and were five inches in diameter. Two which I examined had twenty-nine petals each. . . . Perhaps there was not one open which had not an insect in it, and most had some hundreds of small gnats. We shook them out, however, without much trouble, instead of drowning them out, which makes the petals close. The freshly opened lilies were a pearly white, and though the water amid the pads was quite unrippled, the passing air gave a slight oscillating, boatlike motion to and fro to the flowers, like boats held fast by their cables. ​Some of the lilies had a beautiful rosaceous tinge, most conspicuous in the half-opened flower, extending through the calyx to the second row of petals, or those parts of the petals between the calyx leaves which were most exposed to the light. It seemed to be owing to the same coloring principle which is seen in the under-sides of the pads as well as in the calyx leaves. Yet the rosaceous ones are chiefly interesting to me for variety, and I am contented that lilies should be white, and leave these higher colors to the land. I wished to breathe the atmosphere of lilies, and get the full impression which they are fitted to make. The form of this flower is very perfect, the petals are so distinctly arranged at equal intervals and at all angles from nearly a vertical to horizontal about the centre. Buds that were half expanded were interesting, showing the regularly notched outline of the points of the petals above the erect green calyx leaves. Some of the bays we entered contained a quarter of an acre, through which we with difficulty forced our boat. First there is the low, smooth, green surface of the pads, some of the Kalmianas purplish, then the higher level of the pickerel weed just beginning to blossom, and rising a little higher in the rear, often extensive fields of pipes (Equisetum) making a very level appearance. Mingled with the white lilies were the large yellow ones, and ​the smaller, and here at least much more common, Nuphar lutea (var. Kalmiana), and the floating heart also still in blossom, and the Brasenia peltata, water target or shield, not yet in bloom, the petiole attached to its leaf, like a boy's string to his sucking leather. The rich violet purple of the pontederias was the more striking as the blossoms were still rare. Nature will soon be very lavish of this blue along the river sides. It is a rich spike of blue flowers with yellowish spots. Over all these flowers hover devil's needles in their zigzag flight. On the edge of the meadow I see blushing roses and cornels (probably the panicled). The woods ring with the veery this cloudy day, and I also hear the red-eye, oven-bird, Maryland yellowthroat, etc.—After eating our luncheon . . . we observed that every white lily in the river was shut, and they remained so all the afternoon (though it was no more sunny nor cloudy than the forenoon), except some which I had plucked before noon and cast into the river. These had not power to close their petals. It would be interesting to observe how instantaneously these lilies close at noon. I only noticed that though there were myriads fully open before I ate my luncheon at noon, after it, I could not find one open anywhere for the rest of the day. . . .
Counted twenty-one fishes' nests by the ​shallow shore just beyond Sherman's bridge, within less than half a rod, edge to edge, with each a bream poised in it. In some cases the fish had just cleared away the mud or frog spittle, exposing the yellow sand or pebbles (sixteen to twenty-four inches in diameter).
July 1, 1854. p. m. To Cliffs. . . . From the hill I perceive that the air is beautifully clear after the rain of yesterday, and not hot; fine grained. The landscape is fine as behind a glass, the horizon edge distinct. The distant vales toward the northwest mountains lie up open and clear and elysian, like so many Tempes. The shadows of trees are dark and distinct. On the river I see the two broad borders of pads reflecting the light, the dividing line between them and the water, their irregular edge, perfectly distinct. The clouds are separate glowing masses or blocks floating in the sky, not threatening rain. I see from this hill their great shadows pass slowly here and there over the top of the green forest.
July 1, 1859. p. m. To 2d Division Brook. . . . White water ranunculus in fresh bloom, at least a week, . . . in the shade of the bank, a clear day. Its leaves and stems waving in the brook are interesting, much cut and green.
July 2, 1840. I am not taken up, like Moses, upon a mountain, to learn the law, but lifted up ​in my seat here in the warm sunshine and genial light.
Neither men nor things have any true mode of invitation but to be inviting. They who are ready to go are already invited.
Can that be a task which all things abet, and to postpone which is to strive against Nature?
July 2, 1851. It is a fresh, cool summer morning. From the road here, at N. Barrett's, at 8.30 a. m., the Great Meadows have a slight bluish, misty tinge in part, elsewhere a sort of hoary sheen, like a fine downiness, inconceivably fine and silvery far away, the light reflected from the grass blades, a sea of grass hoary with light, the counterpart of the frost in spring. As yet no mower has profaned it, scarcely a footstep since the waters left; miles of waving grass adorning the surface of the earth.
Last night, a sultry night which compelled one to leave all windows open. I heard two travelers talking aloud, was roused out of my sleep by their loud, day-like and somewhat unearthly discourse, at perchance one o'clock; from the country, whiling away the night with loud discourse. I heard the words Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips loudly spoken, and so did half a dozen of my neighbors who also were awakened. Such is fame. It affected me like Dante talking of the men of this world in the infernal ​regions. If the travelers had called my own name, I should equally have thought it an unearthly personage which it would have taken me some hours into daylight to realize. O traveler, have not you got any further than that? My genius hinted before I fairly awoke, "Improve your time." What is the night that a traveler's voice should sound so hollow in it? that a man, speaking aloud in it, speaking in the regions under the earth, should utter the words Theodore Parker?
A traveler! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us. I am interested in those that travel in the night.
It takes but little distance to make the hills and even the meadows look blue to-day. That principle which gives the air an azure color is more abundant.
To-day the milk-weed is blossoming. Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits, the purest and most ethereal. Cherries, too, are ripe.
Many large trees, especially elms, about a house, are a sure indication of old family distinction and worth. . . . Any evidence of care bestowed on these trees receives the traveler's ​respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn and potatoes.
July 2, 1852. . . . Last night, as I lay awake, I dreamed of the muddy and weedy river on which I had been paddling, and I seemed to derive some vigor from my day s experience, like the lilies which have their roots at the bottom.
I plucked a white lily bud just ready to expand, and after keeping it in water for two days (till July 3d), as I set about opening it, touching the lapped points of its petals, they sprang open and rapidly expanded in my hand into a perfect blossom with the petals as perfectly disposed at equal intervals as on their native lake, and in this case, of course, untouched by an insect. I cut its stem short and placed it in a broad dish of water, where it sailed about under the breath of the beholder with a slight undulatory motion. The breeze of his half-suppressed admiration it was that filled its sail, a kind of popular aura that may be trusted, methinks. It was a rose-tinted one. Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower, who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams.
The spikes of the pale lobelia, some blue, some white, passing insensibly from one to the other, and especially hard to distinguish in the twilight, are quite handsome now in moist ground, rising above the grass. The prunella has various tints ​in various lights, now blue, now lilac. As the twilight deepens into night, its color changes. It always suggests freshness and coolness from the places where it grows. I see the downy heads of the senecio gone to seed, thistle-like, but small. The gnaphaliums and this are among the earliest to present this appearance. . . .
At the bathing-place there is a hummock which was floated on to the meadow some springs ago, now densely covered with the handsome red-stemmed wild rose,—a full but irregular clump, showing no bare stems below, but a dense mass of shining leaves, and small, red stems above in their midst, and on every side countless roses; now in the twilight more than usually beautiful they appear, hardly closed, of a very deep rich color, as if the rays of the departed sun still shone through them; a more spiritual rose at this hour, beautifully blushing; and then the unspeakable beauty and promise of those fair swollen buds that spot the mass and will blossom to-morrow, and the more distant promise of the handsomely formed green ones which yet show no red; for few things are handsomer than a rose bud in any stage. These are mingled with a few pure white elder blossoms and some rosaceous or pinkish meadow-sweet. I am confident that there can be nothing so beautiful in any cultivated garden with all its varieties as this wild swamp. . . .
​Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report. To the full heart she is all but a figure of speech. This is my year of observation, and I fancy that my friends are also more devoted to outward observation than ever before, as if it were an epidemic.
I cross the brook by Hubbard's little bridge. Now nothing but the cool, invigorating scent which is perceived at night in these low meadowy places where the alders and ferns grow can restore my spirits. . . .
At this season I think we do not regard the larger features of the landscape as in the spring, but are absorbed in details. Then, when the meadows were flooded, I looked far over them to the distant woods and the outlines of the hills which were more distinct. I should not have so much to say of extensive water or landscapes at this season. One is a little bewildered by the variety of objects. There must be a certain meagreness of details and nakedness, for wide views.
Nine o'clock. The full moon rising (or full last night) is revealed first by some slight clouds above the eastern horizon looking white, the first indication that she is about to rise, the traces of day not yet gone in the west. There, similar ​clouds seen against a lighter sky look dark and heavy. Now a lower cloud in the east reflects a more yellowish light. The moon, far over the round globe, traveling this way, sends her light forward to yonder cloud from which the news of her coming is reflected to us. The moon's aurora! it is without redness . . . like the dawn of philosophy and its noon, too. At her dawning no cocks crow. How few creatures to hail her rising, only some belated travelers that may be abroad this night. What graduated information of her coming! More and more yellow glows the low cloud with concentrating light, and now the moon's edge suddenly appears above a low bank of cloud not seen before, and she seems to come forward apace without introduction, after all. The steadiness with which she rises with undisturbed serenity, like a queen who has learned to walk before her court, is glorious, and she soon reaches the open sea of the heavens. She seems to advance (so perchance flows the blood in the veins of the beholder) by graceful, sallying essays, trailing her garment up the sky.
July 2, 1854. 4 a. m. To Hill. Hear the chip-bird and robin very lively at dawn. From the hill, as the sun rises, I see a fine river-fog wreathing the trees, elms and maples, by the shore. . . . It is clear summer now. The cocks ​crow hoarsely, ushering in the long-drawn, summer-day.
p. m. An abundance of red lilies in an up land dry meadow, from one to two feet high, upright-flowered, more or less dark shade of red, freckled and sometimes wrinkle-edged petals. Must have been out some days. This has come with the intense summer heat, a torrid July heat. . . . The spring now seems far behind, yet I do not remember the interval; I feel as if some broad, invisible, Lethean gulf lay between this and spring.
July 2, 1855. Young bobolinks are now fluttering over the meadow, but I have not been able to find a nest, so concealed are they in the meadow grass.
At 2 p. m. Thermometer north side of house, 93°.
Air over river at Hubbard s bathing-place, 88°.
Water six feet, from shore and one foot deep, 84 1/2°.
Water near surface in middle when up to neck, 83 1/2°.
Water at bottom in same place, pulling [thermometer] up quickly, 83 1/2°.
Yet the air on the wet body, there being a strong southwest wind, feels colder than the water.
​July 2, 1857. Calla palustris, with its convolute point, like the cultivated, at the south end of Gowing's swamp. Having found this in one place, I now find it in another. Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray. So in the largest sense we find only the world we look for.
July 2, 1860. Yesterday I detected the smallest grass that I know, apparently Festuca tenella? It seemed to be out of bloom. In a dry path, two to four inches high, like a moss.
July 2, 1858. a. m. Start for the White Mountains in a private carriage with E—— H——. Spent the noon close by the old Dunstable graveyard, by a small stream north of it. . . . Walked to and along the river, and bathed in it. . . . What a relief and expansion of my thoughts when I came out from that inland position by the graveyard to this broad river s shore. This vista was incredible there. Suddenly I see a broad reach of blue beneath, with its curves and headlands, liberating me from the more terrene earth. What a difference it makes whether I spend my four hours nooning between the hills by yonder roadside, or on the brink of this fair river, within a quarter of a mile of that! Here the earth is fluid to my thought, the sky is reflected from beneath, and around yonder cape is ​the highway to other continents. This current allies me with the world. Be careful to sit in an elevating and inspiring place. There my thoughts were confined and trivial, and I hid myself from the gaze of travelers. Here they are expanded and elevated, and I am charmed by the beautiful river reach. It is equal to a different season and country, and creates a different mood. . . . This channel conducts our thoughts as well as our bodies to classic and famous ports, and allies us to all that is fair and great. I like to remember that at the end of half a day's walk I can stand on the bank of the Merrimack. It is just wide enough to interrupt the land, and leads my eye and thought down its channel to the sea. A river is superior to a lake in its liberating influence. It has motion and indefinite length. A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, unused it may be as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current, it is a slightly fluttering wing. . . .
The wood-thrush sings almost wherever I go, eternally recommending the world morning and evening for us. Again it seems habitable and more than habitable to us.
July 4, 1858. . . . It is far more independent to travel on foot, you have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most ​agreeable places in which to spend the noon, commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse. New Hampshire being a more hilly and newer State than Massachusetts, it is very difficult to find a suitable place to camp in near the road, affording water, a good prospect, and retirement. Several times we rode on, as much as ten miles, with a tired horse, looking in vain for such a place, and then almost invariably camped in some low and unpleasant spot. There are very few, scarcely any, lanes, or even paths and bars along the road. As we are beyond the range of the chestnut, the few bars that might be taken down are long and heavy planks or slabs intended to confine sheep, and there is no passable road behind. Besides, when you have chosen your place, one must stay behind to watch your effects, while the other looks about. I frequently envied the independence of the walker who can spend the midday hours and take his lunch in the most agreeable spot on his route. The only alternative is to spend your noon at some trivial inn, pestered by flies and tavern loungers.
Camped within a mile south of Senter Harbor, in a birch wood on the right, near the lake. Heard in the night a loon, screech-owl, and cuckoo; and our horse, tied to a slender birch ​close by, restlessly pawing the ground all night, and whinnying to us whenever we showed ourselves, asking for something more than meal to fill his belly with.
July 5, 1858. Go on through Senter Harbor, and ascend Red Hill in Moultonboro. Dr. Jackson says it is so called from the Uva ursi on it turning red in the fall. On the top we boil a dipper of tea for our dinner, spend some hours, having carried up water for the last half mile. Enjoyed the famous view of Winnepiseogee and its islands south-easterly, and Squam Lake on the west, but I was as much attracted at this hour by the wild mountain view on the northward. Chocorua and the Sandwich Mountains a dozen miles off seemed the boundary of cultivation on that side, as indeed they are. They are, as it were, the impassable southern barrier of the mountain region, themselves lofty and bare, and filling the whole northerly horizon, with the broad valley of Sandwich between you and them. Over their ridges, in one or two places, you detect a narrow blue edging or a peak of the loftier White Mountains, strictly so called. . . . Chocorua (which the inhabitants pronounce Shecorway, or Corway) is in some respects the wildest and most imposing of all the White Mountain peaks. . . . Descended and rode along the west and northwest side of ​Ossipee Mountain. Sandwich, in a large, level space surrounded by mountains, lay on our left. Here first in Moultonboro I heard the tea-lee of the white-throated sparrow. We were all the after noon riding along under Ossipee Mountain, which would not be left behind, unexpectedly large, still lowering over our path. Have new and memorable views of Chocorua as we get round it eastward. Stop at Tarn worth village for the night. We are now near the edge of a wild and unsettleable mountain region lying northwest, apparently including parts of Albany and Waterville. The landlord said that bears were plenty in it, that there was a little interval on Swift River that might be occupied, and that was all.
July 6, 1858. 5.30 a. m. Keep on through North Tamworth, and breakfast by shore of one of the Ossipee Lakes. Chocorua north-northwest. Here I see loons. . . . Chocorua is as interesting a peak as any to remember. You may be jogging along steadily for a day before you get round it and leave it behind, first seeing it on the north, then northwest, then west, and at last southwesterly, ever stern, rugged, [apparently] inaccessible, and omnipresent. . . . The scenery in Conway and onward to North Conway is surprisingly grand. You are steadily advancing into an amphitheatre of mountains. I do ​not know exactly how long we had seen one of the highest peaks before us in the extreme northwest, with snow on its side just below the summit, when a boy, a little beyond Conway, called it Mount Washington. If it were that, the snow must have been in Tuckerman's Ravine, which, methinks, is rather too low. Perhaps it was that we afterwards saw on Mount Adams. . . . The road, which is for the most part level, winds along the Saco through groves of maples, etc., on the intervals, with little of rugged New Hampshire under your feet, often a soft and sandy road. The scenery is remarkable for this contrast of level interval having soft and shady groves with mountain grandeur and ruggedness. Often from the midst of level maple groves which remind you only of classic lowlands, you look out through a vista of the most rugged scenery of New England. It is quite unlike New Hampshire generally, quite unexpected by me, and suggests a superior culture. . . . After leaving North Conway, the higher White Mountains were less seen, if at all. They had not appeared in pinnacles as sometimes described, but broad and massive. Only one of the higher summits, called by the boy Mount Washington, was conspicuous. . . . At Bartlett Corner we turned up the Ellis River and took our nooning on its bank, by the bridge just this side of Jackson Centre, ​in a rock-maple grove. . . . There are but few narrow intervals on the road, two or three only after passing Jackson, and each is improved by a settler. . . . Hear the night-warbler all along thus far. Saw the bones of a bear at the house [of one Wentworth, afterwards their attendant] and camped rather late, on right-hand side of road just beyond, a little more than four miles from Jackson. . . . Heard at evening the wood-thrush, veery, white-throated sparrow, etc. . . . Wentworth said he was much troubled by the bears. They killed his sheep and calves, and destroyed his corn when in the milk, close by his house. He has trapped and killed many of them, and brought home and reared the young.
July 7, 1858. Having engaged the services of Wentworth to carry up some of our baggage, and to keep our camp, we rode onward to the Glen House, eight miles further, sending back our horse and wagon to his house. He has lived here thirty years, and is a native. . . . Began the ascent of the mountain road at 11.30 a. m. Near the foot of the ledge and limit of trees, only their dead trunks standing, probably fir and spruce, a merry collier and his assistant, who had been making coal for the summit, and were preparing to leave the next morning, made us welcome to their shanty, where we spent the night, and entertained us with their talk. We here ​boiled some of our beef tongues, a very strong wind pouring in gusts down the funnel, and scattering the fire about through the cracked stove. This man . . . had imported goats on to the mountain, and milked them to supply us with milk for our coffee. . . . The wind blowing down the funnel set fire to a pile of dirty bed-quilts while I was out, and came near burning up the building. There were many barrels of spoiled beef in the cellar, and the collier said that a person coming down the mountain, some time ago, looked into the cellar and saw five wild cats (loups cerviers) there. He had heard two fighting like cats near by a few nights before.
July 8, 1858. Though a fair day, the sun did not rise clear. I started before my companions, wishing to secure a clear view from the summit, while they accompanied the collier, who, with his assistant, was conducting his goats up to the summit for the first time. He led the old one, and the rest followed.
I reached the summit about half an hour before my party, and enjoyed a good view, though it was hazy. By the time the rest arrived, a cloud invested us all, a cool, driving mist, which wet one considerably. As I looked downward over the rocky surface I saw tinges of blue sky and a light as of breaking away close to the rocky edge of the mountain, far ​below me, instead of above, showing that there was the edge of the cloud. It was surprising to look down thus under the cloud, at an angle of thirty or forty degrees, for the only evidences of a clear sky and breaking away. There was a ring of light encircling the summit thus close to the rocks under the thick cloud, and the evidences of a blue sky in that direction were just as strong as ordinarily when you look upward. . . .
I observed that the enduring snow-drifts were such as had lodged under the southeast cliffs, having been blown over the summit by the northwest wind. They lie up under such cliffs, and at the head of the ravines on the southeast slopes. . . .
About 8.15 a. m., being still in a dense fog, we started direct for Tuckerman's Ravine, I having taken the bearing of it before the fog, but Spaulding [one of "the landlords of the Tip-Top and Summit Houses"], also went some ten rods with us, and pointed toward the head of the Ravine, which was about S. 15° W. . . . The landlords were rather anxious about us. I looked at my compass every four or five rods, and then walked toward some rock in our course, but frequently, after taking three or four steps, though the fog was no more dense, I would lose the rock I steered for. The fog was very ​bewildering. You would think the rock you steered for was some large boulder twenty rods off, or perchance it looked like the brow of a distant spur, but a dozen steps would take you to it, and it would suddenly have sunk into the ground. Discovering this illusion, I said to my companions, "You see that boulder of a peculiar form, slanting over another. Well, that is in our course. How large do you think it is? and how far?" To my surprise, one answered, three rods, but the other said nine. I guessed four, and we all thought it about eight feet high. We could not see beyond it, and it looked like the highest point of a ridge before us. At the end of twenty-one paces, or three and a half rods, I stepped upon it less than two feet high, and I could not have distinguished it from the hundred similar ones around it, if I had not kept my eye on it all the while. It is unsafe for one to ramble over these mountains at any time, unless he is prepared to move with as much certainty as if he were solving a geometrical problem. A cloud may at any moment settle around him, and unless he has a compass and knows which way to go, he will be lost at once. One lost on the summit of these mountains should remember that if he will travel due east or west eight or nine miles, or commonly much less, he will strike a public road; or whatever direction he might ​take, the average distance would not be more than eight miles, and the extreme distance twenty. Follow some watercourse running easterly or westerly. If the weather were severe on the summit, so as to prevent searching for the summit houses or the path, I should at once take a westward course from the southern part of the range, and an eastward one from the northern part. To travel then with security, a person must know his bearings at every step, be it fair weather or foul. An ordinary rock in a fog, being in the apparent horizon, is exaggerated to perhaps ten times its size and distance. You will think you have gone further than you have, to get to it. Descending straight by compass through the cloud toward the head of Tuckerman's Ravine, we found it an easy descent over, for the most part, bare rocks, not very large, with at length moist, springy places, green with sedge, etc., between little sloping shelves of green meadow, where the hellebore grew within half a mile of the top, and the Oldenlandia cœrulea was abundantly out, very large and fresh, surpassing ours in the spring. . . . We crossed a narrow portion of the snow, but found it unexpectedly hard and dangerous to traverse. I tore up my nails in efforts to save myself from sliding down its steep surface. The snow field now formed an irregular crescent on the steep ​slope at the head of the ravine, some sixty rods wide horizontally, or from north to south, and twenty-five rods wide from upper to lower side. It may have been a half dozen feet thick in some places, but it diminished sensibly in the rain while we were there; said to be all gone commonly by the end of August. The surface was hard, difficult to work your heels into, a perfectly regular steep slope, steeper than an ordinary roof from top to bottom. A considerable stream, a source of the Saco, was flowing out from beneath it, where it had worn a low arch a rod or more wide. Here were the phenomena of winter and earliest spring contrasted with summer. On the edge of and beneath the overarching snow, many plants were just pushing up as in spring. The great plaited elliptical buds of the hellebore had just pushed up there, even under the edge of the snow, and also bluets. Also, close to the edge of the snow, the bare, upright twigs of a willow, with small, silvery buds, not yet expanded, of a satiny lustre, one to two feet high (apparently Salix repens), but not, as I noticed, procumbent, while a rod off, on each side, where it had been melted some time, it was going to seed, and fully leaved out. Saw also what was apparently the Salix phylicifolia. The surface of the snow was dirty, being covered with cinder-like rubbish of vegetation which ​had blown on to it. Yet from the camp it looked quite white and pure. For thirty or forty rods, at least, down the stream, you could see the print where the snow-field had recently melted. It was a dirty brown flattened stubble, not yet at all greened, covered with a blackish, shining dirt, the dust of the snow-crust. Looking closely I saw that it was composed, in great part, of golden-rods (if not asters), now quite flattened, with other plants. I should have said that from the edge of the ravine, having reached the lower edge of the cloud, we came out into the sun again, much to our satisfaction, and discovered a little lake called Hermit Late, about a mile off, at the bottom of the ravine, just within the limit of the trees. For this we steered, in order to camp by it, for the sake of the protection of the wood. But following down the edge of the stream, the source of Ellis River, which was quite a brook within a stone's throw of its head, we soon found it very bad walking in the scrubby fir and spruce, and therefore, when we had gone about two thirds of the way to the lake, decided to camp in the midst of the dwarf firs, clearing away a space with our hatchet. Having cleared a space with some difficulty where the trees were seven or eight feet high, Wentworth kindled a fire on the lee side, without, against my advice, removing the moss, which was especially dry on ​the rocks, and directly ignited and set fire to the fir leaves, spreading off with great violence and crackling over the mountain, and making us jump for our baggage. Fortunately, it did not burn a foot toward us, for we could not have run in that thicket. It spread particularly fast in the procumbent creeping spruce, scarcely a foot deep, and made a few acres of deers' horns, thus leaving our mark on the mountain side. We thought at first it would run for miles, and Wentworth said it would do no harm,—the more there was burned the better; but such was the direction of the wind that it soon reached the brow of a ridge east of us, and then burned very slowly down its east side. Yet Willey says, p. 23 [of his "Incidents of White Mountain History"], speaking of the dead trees, "bucks' horns," "Fire could not have caused the death of these trees; for fire will not spread here in consequence of the humidity of the whole region at this elevation," and he attributes their death to the cold of 1816. Yet fire did spread above the limit of trees in this ravine.—Finally, we kept on, leaving the fire raging, down to the first little lake, walking in the stream, jumping from rock to rock with it. It may have fallen a thousand feet, within a mile below the snow. We camped on a slightly rising ground between that first little lake and the stream, in a dense ​fir and spruce wood, thirty feet high, though it was but the limit of trees there. On our way we found the Arnica mollis (recently begun to bloom), a very fragrant yellow-rayed flower by the side of the brook, also half way up the ravine. The Alnus viridis was a prevailing shrub all along this stream, seven or eight feet high near our camp. Near the snow it was dwarfish, and still in flower, but in fruit only below; had a glossy, roundish, wrinkled, green, sticky leaf. Also a little Ranunculus abortivus by the brook, in bloom. . . . Our camp was opposite a great slide on the south, apparently a quarter of a mile wide, with the stream between us and it, and I resolved, if a great storm should occur, that we would flee to higher ground northeast. The little pond by our side was perfectly clear and cool, without weeds, and the meadow by it was dry enough to sit down in. When I looked up casually toward the crescent of snow, I would mistake it for the sky, a white glowing sky or cloud, it was so high, while the dark earth or mountain side above it passed for a dark cloud.
In the course of the afternoon, we heard, as we thought, a faint shout, and it occurred to me that B——, for whom I had left a note at the Glen House, might possibly be looking for me, but soon Wentworth decided that it must be a ​bear, for they make a noise like a woman in distress. He has caught many of them. Nevertheless we shouted in return, and waved a light coat on the meadow. After an hour or two had elapsed, we heard the voice again nearer, and saw two men. I went up the stream to meet B—— and B——, wet, ragged, and bloody from black flies. I had told B—— to look out for a smoke and a white tent. We had made a smoke sure enough. They were on the edge of the ravine when they shouted, and heard us answer, about a mile distant, over all the roar of the stream. They also saw our coat waved and ourselves. We slept five in the tent that night, and found it quite warm. It rained in the night, putting out the fire we had set. The wood-thrush, which Went worth called the nightingale, sang at evening and in the morning, and the same bird which I heard on Monadnock, I think, and then thought might be the Blackburnian warbler; also the veery.
July 9, 1858. Walked to Hermit Lake some forty rods northeast. It was clear and cold, with scarcely a plant in it, of perhaps half an acre. H—— tried in vain for trout here. From a low ridge east of it was a fine view of the ravine. Heard a bull-frog in the lake, and afterwards saw a large toad part way up the ravine. Our camp was about on the limit of trees, and may have ​been from twenty-five hundred to three thousand feet below the summit. I was here surprised to discover, looking down through the fir-tops, a large, bright, downy, fair weather cloud, covering the lower world far beneath us, and there it was the greater part of the time we were there, like a lake, while the snow and alpine summit were to be seen above us on the other side at about the same angle. The pure white crescent of snow was our sky, and the dark mountain side above, our permanent cloud.—We had the Fringilla hiemalis with its usual note about our camp. Wentworth said it was common, and bred about his house. I afterwards saw it in the valleys about the mountains. I had seen the white-throated sparrow near his house. This also, he said, commonly bred there on the ground.—The wood we were in was fir and spruce. Along the brook grew the Alnus viridis, Salix Torneyana(?), canoe birch, red cherry, mountain ash, etc. . . . I ascended the stream in the afternoon and got out of the ravine at its head, after dining on chiogenes tea, which plant I could gather without moving from my log seat. We liked it so well that B—— gathered a parcel to carry home. In most places it was scarcely practicable to get out of the ravine on either side on account of the precipices. I judged it to be one thousand or fifteen hundred feet deep. With care you could ​ascend by some slides. I found we might have camped in the scrub firs above the edge of the ravine, though it would have been cold and windy and comparatively unpleasant there, for we should have been most of the time in a cloud. The dense patches of dwarf fir and spruce scarcely rose above the- rocks which they concealed. At a glance, looking over, or even walking over this dense shrubbery, you would think it nowhere more than a foot or two deep, and the trees at most only an inch or two in diameter, but by searching you would find hollow places in it six or eight feet deep, where the firs were from six to ten inches in diameter. By clearing a space here with your hatchet you could find a shelter for your tent, and also fuel, and water was close by above the head of the ravine. The strong wind and the snow are said to flatten these trees down thus. I noticed that this shrubbery just above the ravine as well as in it was principally fir, while the yet more dwarfish and prostrate portion on the edge was spruce.
Returning I sprained my ankle in jumping down the brook, so that I could not sleep that night, nor walk the next day.—We had commonly clouds above and below us, though it was clear where we were. They commonly reached about down to the edge of the ravine.—The ​black flies which pestered us till into evening were of various sizes, the largest more than one eighth of an inch long. There were scarcely any mosquitoes, it was so cool.
A small owl came in the evening and sat within twelve feet of us, turning its head this way and that, and peering at us inquisitively.
July 10, 1858. . . . When I tasted the water under the snow arch . . . I was disappointed at its warmth, though it was in part melted snow, but half a mile lower down it tasted colder. Probably the air being cooled by the neighborhood of the snow, it seemed thus warmer by contrast. . . . The most peculiar and memorable songster was the one with a note like that I heard on Monadnock, keeping up an exceedingly brisk and lively strain. It was remarkable for its incessant twittering flow. Yet we never got sight of the bird, at least while singing, so that I could not identify it, and my lameness prevented my pursuing it. I heard it afterwards even in the Franconia Notch. It was surprising from its steady, uninterrupted flow, for, when one stopped, another appeared to take up the strain. It reminded me of a fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant tinkle from a cork, flowing rapidly, and I said he had pulled out the spile and left it running. That was the rhythm, but with a sharper tinkle of course. It had no more variety ​than that, and was more remarkable for its continuance and monotony than any other bird s note I ever heard. It evidently belongs only to cool mountain sides high up amid the fir and spruce. I saw ever flitting through the fir tops restlessly a small white and dark bird, sylvia-like, which may have been it. Sometimes they appeared to be attracted by our smoke. The note was so incessant that at length you only noticed when it ceased.
The black flies were of various sizes, much larger than I noticed in Maine. They compelled me most of the time to sit in the smoke, which I preferred to wearing a veil. They lie along your forehead in a line where your hat touches it, or behind your ears, or about your throat if not protected by a beard, or get into the rims of the eyes or between the fingers, and there suck till they are crushed. But fortunately they do not last far into the evening, and a wind or a fog disperses them. I did not mind them much, but I noticed that men working on the highway made a fire to keep them off. Anything but mosquitoes by night. I find many black flies accidentally pressed in my botany and plant books. A botanist s books, if he has ever visited the primitive northern woods, will be pretty sure to contain such specimens.
H—— found, near the edge of the ravine ​above, Rhododendron lapponicum, some time out of bloom, in the midst of empetrum and moss, according to Durand, at 68° in Greenland, Arctostaphylos alpina going to seed, Polygonum viviparum, in prime according to Durand, at all Kane's stations, and Salix harbacea, according to Duraud, at 73° in Greenland, a pretty, trailing, roundish-leaved willow going to seed, but apparently not as early as the Salix uva ursi.
July 11, 1858. . . . One of the slender spruce trees by our camp, which we cut down, twenty-eight feet high, and only six and a half inches in diameter, though it looked young and thrifty, had about 80 rings, and the firs were at least as old. . . .
After some observation I concluded that it was true, as Wentworth had intimated, that the lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir.
July 12, 1858. It having cleared up, we shouldered our packs and commenced our descent by a path two and a half or three miles to carriage road, not descending a great deal. . . . Trees at first, fir and spruce, then canoe birches increased, and, after two miles, yellow birch began.
I had noticed that the trees of the ravine camp, fir and spruce, did not stand firmly. Two ​or three of us could have pulled down one thirty feet high and six or seven inches thick. They were easily rocked, lifting their horizontal roots each time, which reminded me of what is said about the Indians, that they sometimes bend over a young tree, burying a chief under its roots and letting it spring back, for his monument and protection.—In the afternoon, we rode along, three of us, northward and northwestward on our way round the mountains, going through Gorham. We camped one and a half miles west of Gorham by the roadside on the bank of Moose River.
July 13, 1858. This morning it rained, keeping us in camp till near noon, for we did not wish to lose the view of the mountains as we rode along. . . .
I noticed, as we were on our way in the afternoon, that when finally it began to rain hard, the clouds settling down, we had our first distinct view of the mountain outline for a short time. . . . It rained steadily and soakingly the rest of the afternoon as we kept on through Randolph and Kilkenny to Jefferson Hill, so that we had no clear view of the mountains. We put up at a store just opposite the town hall on Jefferson Hill. It cleared up at sunset after two days rain, and we had a fine view, repaying us for our journey and wetting. . . . When the ​sun set to us, the bare summits were of a delicate rosaceous color, passing through violet into the deep, dark-blue or purple of the night, which already invested the lower parts. This night-shadow was wonderfully blue, reminding me of the blue shadows on snow. There was an after glow in which these tints and variations were repeated. It was the grandest mountain view I ever got. In the meanwhile, white clouds were gathering again about the summits, first about the highest, appearing to form there, but sometimes to send off an emissary to initiate a cloud upon a lower neighboring peak. You could tell little about the comparative distance of a cloud and a peak till you saw that the former actually impinged on the latter.
July 14, 1858. This forenoon we rode on through Whitefield to Bethlehem, clouds for the most part concealing the higher mountains. . . . Camped half a mile up the side of Lafayette.
July 15. Continued the ascent of Lafayette. It is perhaps three and a half miles from the road to the top by path along a winding ridge. . . . At about one mile or three quarters below the summit, just above the limit of trees, we came to a little pond, may be of a quarter of an acre (with a yet smaller one near by), one of the sources of the Pemigewasset. . . . The ​outlet of this pond was considerable, but soon lost beneath the rocks.
In the dwarf fir thickets above and below this pond were the most beautiful linnseas I ever saw. They grew quite densely, full of rose purple flowers (deeper reddish-purple than ours, which are pale), perhaps nodding over the brink of a spring. Altogether the finest mountain flowers I saw, lining the side of the narrow horse track through the fir scrub. Just below the top, reclined on a dense bed of Salix uva ursi, five feet in diameter by four or five inches deep, a good spot to sit on, mixed with a rush, amid rocks. This willow was generally showing its down.—We had fine weather on the mountain, and from the summit a good view of Mount Washington and the rest, though it was a little hazy in the horizon. It was a wild mountain and forest scene from south- southeast round eastwardly to north-northeast. On the northwest and down as far as Monadnock, the country was half cleared, the "leopard"-spotted land.
Boiled tea for our dinner by the little pond, the head of the Pemigewasset. . . . We made our fire on the moss and lichens by a rock amid the shallow fir and spruce, burning the dead fir twigs, or "deer's horns." I cut off a flourishing fir three feet high and not flattened at the top yet. This was one and a quarter inches in ​diameter, and had thirty-four rings. Another flourishing one fifteen inches high had twelve rings at ground. . . . Another, three feet high, fresh and vigorous, without a flat top as yet, had its woody part one and an eighth inches in diameter, the bark being one eighth inch thick, and sixty-one rings. There were no signs of decay, though it was, as usual, mossy or covered with lichens. . . .
When half way down the mountain amid the spruce, we saw two pine grossbeaks, male and female, and looked for a nest, but in vain. They were remarkably tame. . . . The male flew near inquisitively, uttering a low twitter, and perched fearlessly within four feet of us, eyeing us and pluming himself, and plucking and eating the leaves of the Amelanchier oligocarpa on which he sat for several minutes. The female, mean time, was a rod off. They were evidently breeding there, yet neither Wilson nor Nuttall speak of their breeding in the United States.
At the base of the mountain over the road heard singing, and saw at the same place where I heard him the evening before, a splendid rose-breasted grossbeak. I had before mistaken him at first for a tanager, then for a red-eye, but was not satisfied. Now with my glass I distinguished him sitting quite still high above the road at the entrance of the mountain path, in the deep ​woods, and singing steadily for twenty minutes. Its note was much more powerful than that of the tanager or red-eye. It had not the hoarse ness of the tanager's, and more sweetness and fullness than that of the red-eye. . . . Rode on and stopped at Morrison's (once Tilton's) Inn in West Thornton.
July 16, 1858. Continue on through Thornton and Campton. The butternut is first noticed in these towns, a common tree.
About the mountains were wilder and rarer birds, more or less arctic, like the vegetation. I did not even hear the robin in them, and when I had left them a few miles behind, it was a great change and surprise to hear the lark, the wood-pewee, the robin, and the bobolink (for the last had not done singing). On the mountains, especially at Tuckerman's Ravine, the notes of even familiar birds sounded strange to me. hardly knew the wood-thrush and veery and oven-bird at first. They sing differently there. . . . We were not troubled at all by black flies after leaving the Franconia Notch. It is only apparently in primitive woods that they work.
Saw chestnuts first and frequently in Franklin and Boscawen, about 43 1/2° north, or half a degree higher than Emerson puts it. . . . Of oaks I saw and heard only of. the red in northern New Hampshire. The witch-hazel was very abundant ​and large there and about the mountains. Lodged at tavern in Franklin, west side of river.
July 17, 1858. Passed by Webster's place, three miles this side of the village; some half dozen houses there, no store, nor public buildings. Very quiet; road lined with elms and maples. Railroad between house and barn. The farm apparently a level and rather sandy interval. Nothing particularly attractive about it. A plain, public grave-yard within its limits. Saw the grave of Ebenezer Webster, Esq., who died 1806, aged sixty-seven, and of Abigail, his wife, who died 1816, aged seventy-six, probably Webster's father and mother. . . . Webster was born two or more miles northwest, house now gone, . . . Reached Weare, and put up at a quiet and agreeable house, without any sign or bar-room. Many Friends in this town. Pillsbury and Rogers known here. The former lived in Henniker, the next town.
July 18, 1858. Keep on through New Boston, etc., to Hollis, . . . and at evening to Pepperell. A marked difference when we enter Massachusetts in roads, farms, houses, trees, fences, etc.; a great improvement, showing an older settled country. In New Hampshire there is a great want of shade trees; the roads bleak or sunny, from which there is no escape. What ​barbarians we are! The convenience of the traveler is very little consulted. He merely has the privilege of crossing somebody's farm by a particular narrow and may be unpleasant path. The individual retains all the rights as to trees, fruit, wash of the road, etc. On the other hand, these should belong to mankind inalienably. The road should be of ample width and adorned with trees expressly for the use of the traveler. There should be broad recesses in it, especially at springs and watering-places, where he can turn out, and rest or camp, if he will. I feel commonly as if I were condemned to drive through somebody's cow-yard or huckleberry pasture by a narrow lane, and if I make a fire by the roadside to boil my hasty pudding, the farmer comes running over to see if I am not burning up his stuff.
July 19, 1858. Got home at noon. . . . We might easily have built us a shed of spruce bark at the foot of Tuckerman's Ravine. I thought that I might in a few moments strip off the bark of a spruce a little bigger than myself and seven feet long, letting it curl, as it naturally would, then crawl into it and be protected from any rain. Wentworth said that he had sometimes stripped off birch bark two feet wide, and put his head through a slit in the middle, letting the ends fall down before and behind as he walked. ​—The slides in Tuckerman's Ravine appeared to be a series of deep gullies side by side, where sometimes it appeared as if a very large rock had slid down without turning over, plowing this deep furrow all the way, only a few rods wide. Some of the slides were streams of rocks a rod or more in diameter each. In some cases which I noticed, the ravine side had evidently been undermined by water on the lower side.
It is surprising how much more bewildering is a mountain top than a level area of the same extent. Its ridges and shelves and ravines add greatly to its apparent extent and diversity. You may be separated from your party by stepping only a rod or two out of the path. We turned off three or four rods to the pond on our way up Lafayette, knowing that H—— was behind, and so we lost him for three quarters of an hour, and did not see him again till we reached the summit. One walking a few rods more to the right or left is not seen over the ridge of the summit, and, other things being equal, this is truer the nearer you are to the apex. If you take one side of a rock, and your companion another, it is enough to separate you sometimes for the rest of the ascent.
On these mountain summits or near them, you find small and almost uninhabited ponds, apparently without fish, sources of rivers, still and ​cold, strange and weird as condensed clouds, of which, nevertheless, you make tea! surrounded by dryish bogs in which, perchance, you may detect traces of the bear or loup cervier.
We got the best views of the mountains from Conway, Jefferson, Bethlehem, and Campton. Conway combines the Italian (?) level and softness with Alpfhe peaks around.—Jefferson offers the completest view of the range a dozen or more miles distant, the place from which to behold the manifold varying lights of departing day on the summits.—Bethlehem also afforded a complete but generally more distant view of the range, and, with respect to the highest summits, more diagonal.
Campton afforded a fine distant view of the pyramidal Franconia Mountains, with the lumpish Profile Mountain. The last view, with its smaller intervals and partial view of the great range far in the north, was somewhat like that from Conway. . . .
It is remarkable that what you may call trees on the White Mountains (i. e., the forest), cease abruptly, with those about a dozen or more feet high, and then succeeds a distinct kind of growth, quite dwarfish and flattened, and confined almost entirely to fir and spruce, as if it marked the limit of almost perpetual snow, as if it indicated a zone where the trees were ​peculiarly oppressed by the snow, cold, wind, etc. The transition from these flattened firs and spruces to shrubless rocks is not nearly so abrupt as from upright or slender trees to these dwarfed thickets.
July 3, 1840. When Alexander appears, the Hercynian and Dodonean woods seem to wave a welcome to him. Do not thoughts and men's lives enrich the earth and change the aspect of things as much as a new growth of wood?
What are Godfrey and Gonsalve unless we breathe a life into them, and reenact their exploits as a prelude to our own? The past is only so heroic as we see it; it is the canvas on which our conception of heroism is painted, the dim prospectus of our future field. We are dreaming of what we are to do.
The last sunrise I witnessed seemed to outshine the splendor of all preceding ones, and I was convinced it behoved man to dawn as freshly, and with equal promise and steadiness advance into the career of life, with as lofty and serene a countenance to move onward, through his midday, to a yet fairer and more promising setting. Has the day grown old when it sets? and shall man wear out sooner than the sun? In the crimson colors of the west I discern the budding lines of dawn. To my western brother it is rising pure and bright as it did to me, but ​the evening exhibits in the still rear of day the beauty which through morning and noon escaped me. When we are oppressed by the heat and turmoil of the noon, let us remember that the sun which scorches us with brazen beams is gilding the hills of morning, and awaking the woodland choirs for other men.
We will have a dawn and noon and serene sunset in ourselves.
What we call the gross atmosphere of evening is the accumulated deed of the day, which absorbs the rays of beauty, and shows more richly than the naked promise of the dawn. By earnest toil in the heat of the noon, let us get ready a rich western blaze against the evening of our lives.
. . . The sky is delighted with strains [of music] which the connoisseur rejects. It seems to say "Now is this my own earth." In music are the centripetal and centrifugal forces. The universe only needed to hear a divine harmony that every star might fall into its proper place and assume a true sphericity.
July 3, 1852. . . . The Chimaphila umbellata, winter-green, must have been in blossom some time. The back side of its petals, "cream-colored, tinged with purple," which is turned toward the beholder, while the face is toward the earth, is the handsomer. It is a very pretty ​little chandelier of a flower, fit to adorn the forest floor. Its buds are nearly as handsome. They appear to be long in unfolding.
The pickers have quite thinned the crop of early blueberries where Stow cut off the trees winter before last. When the woods on some hill-side are cut off, the Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum springs up or grows more luxuriantly, being exposed to light and air, and by the second year its stems are weighed to the ground with clusters of blueberries covered with bloom, and much larger than they commonly grow, also with a livelier taste than usual, as if remembering some primitive mountain side given up to them anciently. Such places supply the villagers with the earliest berries for two or three years, or Until the rising wood overgrows them, and they withdraw into the bosom of Nature again. They flourish during the few years between one forest s fall and another's rise. Before you had prepared your mind or made up your mouth for the berries, thinking only of small green ones, earlier by ten days than you had expected, some child of the woods is at your door with ripe blueberries, for did not you know that Mr. Stow cut off his wood-lot winter before last. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and thus it happens that when the owner lays bare and deforms a hill-side, and alone appears to reap any ​advantage from it by a crop of wood, all the villagers and the inhabitants of distant cities obtain some compensation in the crop of berries that it yields. They glean after the woodchopper, not faggots, but full baskets of blueberries. . . . Bathed beneath Fair Haven. How much food the muskrats have at hand! They may well be numerous. At this place the bottom in shallow water at a little distance from the shore is thickly covered with clams, half buried and on their ends, generally a little aslant. Sometimes there are a dozen or more side by side within a square foot, and I think that over a space twenty rods long and one wide (I know not how much farther they reach into the river), they would average three to a square foot. This would give 16,335 clams to twenty rods of shore, on one side of the river, and I suspect there are many more. No wonder that muskrats multiply, and that the shores are covered with the shells left by them. In bathing here I can hardly step without treading on them, sometimes half a dozen at once, and often I cut my feet pretty severely on their shells. They are partly covered with mud and the short weeds at the bottom, and they are of the same color themselves, but stooping down over them where the soil has subsided, I can see them now at 5.30 p. m. with their mouths (?) open, an inch long ​and quarter of an inch wide, with a waving fringe about it, and another smaller opening close to it without any fringe, through both of which I see distinctly into the white interior of the fish. When I touch one, he instantly closes his shell, and, if taken out quickly, spurts water like a salt-water clam. Evidently taking in their food and straining it with short waving motion of the ciliæ, there they lie both under the pads and in the sun. . . . The common carrot by the roadside, Daucus carota, is in some respects an interesting plant. Its umbel, as Bigelow says, is shaped like a bird's nest, and its large pinnatifid involucre, interlacing by its fine segments, resembles a fanciful ladies' work-basket.
July 3, 1853. The oven-bird's nest in Laurel Glen is near the edge of an open pine wood under a fallen pine twig and a heap of dry oak leaves. Within these on the ground is the nest with a dome-like top and an arched entrance of the whole height and width on one side. Lined within with dry pine needles. . . . The chestnut behind my old house site is fully out, and apparently has been partly so for several days.
Black huckleberries.—Tansy on the causeway.
July 3, 1854. I hear the purple finch these days about the houses, à twitter witter weeter wee, à witter witter wee.
​p. m. To Hubbard's Bridge by boat. . . . The river and shores with their pads and weeds are now in their midsummer and hot weather condition, now when the pontederias have just begun to bloom. The seething river is confined within two burnished borders of pads, gleaming in the sun for a mile, and a sharp snap is heard from them from time to time. Next stands the upright phalanx of dark-green pontederias.—When I have left the boat for a short time, the seats become intolerably hot. What a luxury to bathe now. It is gloriously hot, the first of this weather. I cannot get wet enough. I must let the water soak into me. When you come put, it is rapidly dried on you, or absorbed into your body, and you want to go in again. I begin to inhabit the planet, and see how I may be naturalized at last.—As I return from the river, the sun westering, I admire the silvery light on the tops and extremities of the now densely-leaved golden willows, and swamp white oaks and maples, from the under-side of the leaves. They have so multiplied that you cannot see through the trees; these are solid depths of shade on the surface of which the light is variously reflected.
July 3, 1856. p. m. To Assabet River. In the main stream at the Rock I am surprised to see flags and pads laying the foundation of an ​islet in the middle where I had thought it deep before. Apparently a hummock, lifted by ice, sunk there in the spring, and this may be the way in which many an island has been formed in the river.
July 3, 1859. . . . p. m. To Hubbard's Grove. . . . The Mitchella repens, so abundantly in bloom now in the northwest part of this grove, emits a strong, astringent, cherry-like scent as I walk over it, which is agreeable to me, spotting the ground with its downy-looking white flowers.
July 3, 1860. . . . Looked at the marsh-hawk's nest (of June 16) in the Great Meadows. It was in the very midst of the sweet gale (which is three feet high) occupying an opening only a foot or two across. We had much difficulty in finding it again, but at last nearly stumbled upon a young hawk. There was one as big as my fist resting on the bare flat nest in the sun, with a great head, staring eyes, and open, gaping, or pouting mouth, yet mere down, grayish-white down as yet; but I detected another which had crawled a foot one side amid the bushes for shade or safety, more than half as large again, with small feathers, and a yet more angry, hawk-like look. How naturally anger sits on the young hawk s head. It was 3.30 p. m., and the old birds were gone and saw us not. Meanwhile ​their callow young lie panting under the sweet gale and rose-bushes in the swamp, waiting for their parents to fetch them food.
June is an up-country month when our air and landscape is most like that of a mountainous region, full of freshness, with the scent of fern by the wayside.
July 4, 1840. 4 a. m. The Townsend Light Infantry encamped last night in my neighbor's enclosure.—The night still breathes slumberously over field and wood when a few soldiers gather about one tent in the twilight, and their band plays an old Scotch air with bugle and drum and fife attempered to the season. It seems like the morning hymn of creation. The first sounds of the awakening camp mingled with the chastened strains which so sweetly salute the dawn, impress me as the morning prayer of an army. And now the morning gun fires. . . . I am sure none are cowards now. These strains are the roving dreams which steal from tent to tent, and break forth into distinct melody. They are the soldier's morning thought. Each man awakes himself with lofty emotions, and would do some heroic deed. You need preach no homily to him. He is the stuff they are made of.
We may well neglect many things, provided we overlook them.
When to-day I saw the "Great Ball" rolled ​majestically along, it seemed a shame that man could not move like it. All dignity and grandeur has something of the undulatoriness of the sphere. It is the secret of majesty in the rolling gait of the elephant, and of all grace in action and in art. The line of beauty is a curve.
Each man seems striving to imitate its gait, and keep pace with it, but it moves on regardless, and conquers the multitude with its majesty. What shame that our lives which should be the source of planetary motion, and sanction the order of the spheres, are full of abruptness and angularity, so as not to roll nor move majestically.
July 4, 1852. 3 a. m. To Conantum, to see the lilies open. I hear an occasional crowing of cocks in distant barns, as has been their habit for how many thousand years. It was so when I was young, and it will be so when I am old. I hear the croak of a tree-toad as I am crossing the yard. I am surprised to find the dawn so far advanced. There is a yellowish segment of light in the east, paling a star, and adding sensibly to the light of the waning and now declining moon. . . . I hear a little twittering and some clear singing from the seringo and the song-sparrow as I go along the back road, and now and then the note of a bull-frog from the river. The light in the east has acquired a reddish tinge ​near the horizon. Small wisps of cloud are already fuscous and dark, seen against the light, as in the west at evening. It being Sunday morning I hear no early stirring farmer driving over a bridge. . . . The sound of a whippoorwill is wafted from the woods. Now in the Corner road the hedges are alive with twittering sparrows, a blue-bird or two, etc. The daylight now balances the moonlight. How short the nights! The last traces of day have not disappeared much before 10 o'clock, or perchance 9.30, and before 3 a. m. you see them again in the east (probably 2.30), leaving about five hours of solid night, the sun so soon coming round again. The robins sing, but not so long and loud as in the spring. I have not been awakened by them latterly in the mornings. Is it my fault? Ah, those mornings when you are awakened by the singing, the matins of the birds! . . . Methinks I saw the not yet extinguished lights of one or two fire flies in the darker ruts in the grass in Conant's meadow. The moon yields to the sun, she pales even in the presence of the dawn. It is chiefly the spring birds that I hear at this hour, and in each dawn the spring is thus revived. The notes of the sparrows, and the blue-birds and the robin, have a prominence now which they have not by day. The light is more and more general, and some low bars begin to look bluish as well ​as reddish. Elsewhere the sky is wholly clear of clouds. The dawn is at this stage far lighter than the brightest moonlight; I write by it. Yet the sun will not rise for some time. Those bars are reddening more above one spot. They grow purplish, or lilac rather.
White and whiter grows the light in the eastern sky. And now descending to the Cliff by the river side, I cannot see the low horizon and its phenomena.
I love to go through these old apple orchards so irregularly set out, sometimes two trees standing close together. The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these. A bittern leaves the shore at my approach. A night-hawk squeaks and booms before sunrise. . . . I hear the blackbird's conqueree, and the kingfisher darts away with his alarum and outstretched neck. Every lily is shut. Sunrise. I see it gilding the top of the hill behind me, but the sun itself is concealed by the hills and woods on the east shore. A very slight fog begins to rise now in one place on the river. There is something serenely glorious and memorable to me in the sight of the first cool sunlight now gilding the eastern extremity of the bushy island in Fair Haven, that wild lake. The subdued light and the repose remind me of Hades. In such sunlight there ​is no fever. It is such an innocent pale yellow as the spring flowers. It is the pollen of the sun fertilizing plants. The color of the earliest spring flowers is as cool and innocent as the first rays of the sun in the morning, falling on woods and hills. The fog not only rises upward about two feet, but at once there is a motion from the sun over the surface. . . .
And now I see an army of skaters advancing in loose array, chasseurs or scouts, as Indian allies are drawn in old books. Now the rays of the sun have reached my seat, a few feet above the water. Flies begin to buzz, mosquitoes to be less troublesome. A humming-bird hums by over the pads up the river, as if looking, like myself, to see if lilies have blossomed. The birds begin to sing generally, and if not loudest, at least most noticeably on account of the quietness of the hour, a few minutes before sunrise. They do not sing so incessantly and earnestly, as a regular thing, half an hour later.—Carefully looking both up and down the river, I could perceive that the lilies began to open about fifteen minutes after the sun from over the opposite bank fell on them, perhaps three-quarters of an hour after sunrise, which is about 4.30, and one was fully expanded about twenty minutes later. When I returned over the bridge about 6.15, there were perhaps a dozen open ​ones in sight. It was very difficult to find one not injured by insects. Even the buds which were just about to expand were frequently bored quite through, and the water had rotted them. You must be on hand early to anticipate insects. I bring home a dozen perfect lily buds, all I can find within many rods, which have never yet opened. I prepare a large pan of water, and cutting their stems quite short, I turn back their calyx leaves with my fingers, so that they may float upright; then, touching the points of their petals, and breathing or blowing on them, I toss them in. They spring open rapidly, or gradually expand in the course of an hour, all but one or two.—At 12.30 p. m. I perceive that the lilies in the river have begun to shut up. . . . I go again at 2.30 p. m. and every lily is shut.
I will here tell the history of my rosaceous lilies, plucked the 1st of July. They were buds at the bottom of a pitcher of water all the 2d, having been kept in my hat part of the day before. On the morning of the 3d I assisted their opening, and put them in water, as I have described. They did not shut up at noon, like those on the river, but at dark, their petals, at least, quite close. They all opened again in the course of the forenoon of the 4th, but had not shut up at 10 o'clock p. m., though I found them ​shut on the morning of the 5th. May it be that they can bear only a certain amount of light, and so, being in the shade, remained open longer (I think not, for they shut up on the river that quite cloudy day, July 1), or is their vitality too little to allow them to perform their regular functions?
Can that meadow fragrance come from the purple summits of the eupatorium?
July 4, 1860. Standing on J. P. B——'s land, south side, I observed his rich and luxuriant uncut grass lands northward, now waving under the easterly wind. It is a beautiful Camilla, sweeping like waves of light and shade over the whole breadth of his land, like a low steam curling over it, imparting wonderful life to the landscape, like the light and shade of a changeable garment. . . . It is an interesting feature, very easily overlooked, and suggests that we are wading and navigating at present in a sort of sea of grass which yields and undulates under the wind like water, and so perchance the forest is seen to do from a favorable position. . . . Early there was that flashing light of waving pines in the horizon, now the Camilla on grass and grain.
July 5, 1840. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals.
​You cannot rob a man of anything which he will miss.
July 5, 1852. I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful, but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in Nature.
White lilies continue to open in the house in the morning and shut in the night, for five or six days, until their stamens have shed their pollen, and they turn rusty, and begin to decay. Then the beauty of the flower is gone, and its vitality, so that it no longer expands with the light.
How perfect an invention is glass! There is a fitness in glass windows which reflect the sun morning and evening; windows the doorways of light thus reflecting its rays with a splendor only second to itself. . . . The sun rises with a salute, and leaves the world with a farewell to our windows. To have, instead of opaque shutters, or dull horn or paper, a material like solidified air, which reflects the sun thus brightly. It is inseparable from our civilization and ​enlightenment. It is encouraging that this intelligence and brilliancy or splendor should belong to the dwellings of men, and not to the cliffs and micaceous rocks and lakes exclusively. . . .
p. m. To Second Division Brook.
There is a meadow on the Assabet, just above Derby's bridge (it may contain an acre, bounded on one side by the river, on the other by alders and a hill), completely covered with small hummocks which have lodged on it in the winter, covering it like the mounds in a graveyard, at pretty regular intervals. Their edges are rounded, and they and the paths between them are covered with a firm, short, green sward, with here and there hard-hacks springing out of them, so that they make excellent seats, especially in the shade of an elm that grows there. They are completely united with the meadow, forming little oblong hillocks from one to ten feet long. . . . I love to ponder the natural history thus written on the banks of the stream; for every higher freshet and intenser frost is recorded by it. The stream keeps a faithful journal of every event in its experience, whatever race may settle on its banks. It purls past this natural graveyard with a storied murmur, and no doubt it could find endless employment for an Old Mortality in renewing its epitaphs.
The progress of the season is indescribable. ​It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of a locust-tree. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady. Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. The earth is dry. Perhaps the sound of the locust expresses the season as well as anything. I might make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard. That is our torrid zone. This dryness and heat are necessary for the maturing of fruits.
How cheering it is to behold a full spring bursting forth directly from the earth, like this of Tarbell's, from clean gravel, copiously in a thin sheet; for it descends at once, where you see no opening, cool from the caverns of the earth, and making a considerable stream. . . .
I lie almost flat, resting my hands on what offers, to drink at this water where it bubbles, at the very udders of Nature, for man is never weaned from her breast while life lasts.
We are favored in having two rivers flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different ​characters, one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows, and black, dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. It is a factory of soil, depositing sediment. . . .
Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses in the love season. I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade . . . and listen to a wood-thrush now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds that sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains and amuse themselves with singing; the birds whose strains are of deeper sentiment,—not bobolinks that lose their bright colors and their song so early,—the robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood-thrush, etc. The wood-thrush s is no opera music, it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone that interests us, cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the sound, not the sequence. In the pe wee s note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is ​the liquid coolness of things drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush s alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing, from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours, a carol, but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal vigor and beauty. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views. . . . He sings to amend their institutions, to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.
How fitting to have every day, in a vase of water on your table, the wild flowers of the season which are just blossoming. Can any house be said to be furnished without them? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the thoughts it is fitted to suggest. . . . Let me know what picture Nature is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing now. ​The sun has set. . . . The dew is falling fast. Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day, and make the attraction in our western sky, that part of day's gross atmosphere which has escaped the clutches of the night, and is not enough condensed to fall to earth, soon to be gilded by the sun's parting rays; remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or rather as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of cloud of a wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon.
July 5, 1854. . . . p. m. To White Pond. . . . The blue curls and fragrant life-everlasting with their refreshing aroma show themselves now pushing up in dry fields, bracing to the thought.—On Lupine Knoll picked up a dark-colored spear head three and a half inches long, lying on the bare sand, so hot that I could not long hold it tight in my hand. Now the earth begins to be parched, the corn curls, and the four-leaved loosestrife, etc., wilt and wither.
July 5, 1856. The large evening primrose below the foot of our garden does not open till sometime between 6.30 and 8 p. m., or sundown. It was not open when I went to bathe, but ​freshly out in the cool of the evening at sun down, as if enjoying the serenity of the hour.
July 6, 1840. All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.—I observe a truly wise practice on every hand, in education, in religion, and the morals of society, enough embodied wisdom to have set up many an ancient philosopher. This society, if it were a person to be met face to face, would not only be tolerated but courted, with its so impressive experience and admirable acquaintance with things.—Consider society at any epoch, and who does not see that heresy has already prevailed in it?
Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if any sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore, so much increase of terra firma. This may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul, and on these sheets, as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.
July 6, 1851. I walked by night last moon, and saw its disk reflected in Walden Pond, the broken disk, now here, now there, a pure and memorable flame, unearthly bright. . . . Ah! ​but that first faint tinge of moonlight on the gap seen some time ago, a silvery light from the east before day had departed in the west. What an immeasurable interval there is between the first tinge of moonlight which we detect, lighting with mysterious, silvery, poetic light the western slopes, like a paler grass, and the last wave of daylight on the eastern slopes. It is wonderful how our senses ever span so vast an interval; how, from being aware of the one, we become aware of the other. . . . It suggests an interval equal to that between the most distant periods recorded in history. The silver age is not more distant from the golden than moonlight is from sunlight. I am looking into the west where the red clouds still indicate the course of departing day. I turn and see the silent, spiritual, contemplative moonlight shedding the softest imaginable light on the western slopes, . . . as if, after a thousand years of polishing, their surfaces were just beginning to be bright, a pale, whitish lustre. Already the crickets chirp to the moon a different strain, and the night wind rustles the leaves of the wood. . . . Ah, there is the mysterious light which for some hours has illustrated Asia and the scene of Alexander's victories, now at length, after two or three hours spent in "surmounting the billows of the Atlantic, come to shine on America. There on that illustrated ​sand bank was revealed an antiquity beside which Nineveh is young, such a light as sufficed for the earliest ages. . . . Even at midday I see the full moon shining in the sky. What if in some vales only its light is reflected! What if there are some spirits which walk in its light alone still! . . . I passed from dynasty to dynasty, from one age of the world to another, . . . from Jove, perchance, back to Saturn. What river of Lethe was there to run between! I bade farewell to that light setting in the west, and turned to salute the new light rising in the east.
There is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn you. Methinks I enjoy that advantage to an unusual extent. There is many a coarsely well-meaning fellow, who knows only the skin of me, who addresses me familiarly by my Christian name. I get the whole good of him, and lose nothing myself. There is "Sam," the jailer (whom I never call "Sam," however), who exclaimed last evening, "Thoreau, are you going up the street pretty soon? Well, just take a couple of these handbills along, and drop one on H——'s piazza, and one at H——'s, and I'll do as much for you another time." I am not above being abused sometimes.
​July 6, 1852. 2.30 p. m. To Beck Stow's, thence to Sawmill Brook, and return by Walden.—Now for the shade of oaks in pastures. The witnesses attending court sit on the benches in the shade of the great elm. The cattle gather under the trees. The pewee is heard in the heat of the day, and the red-eye (?). The pure white cymes (?) of the elder are very conspicuous along the edges of meadows, contrasting with the green above and around. . . . From the lane in front of Hawthorne's, I see dense beds of tufted vetch, Vicia cracca, for some time, taking the place of the grass in the low grounds, blue inclining in spots to lilac like the lupines. This, too, was one of the flowers that Proserpine was gathering; yellow lilies, also. It is affecting to see such an abundance of blueness in the grass. It affects the eyes, this celestial color. I see it afar . . . in masses on the hill-sides near the meadow, so much blue, laid on with so heavy a hand!—In selecting a site in the country, let a lane near your house, grass-grown, cross a sizable brook where is a watering-place.—I see a pickerel in the brook showing his whitish, greedy upper lips projecting over the lower. How well concealed he is. He is generally of the color of the muddy bottom, or the decayed leaves and wood that compose it, and the longitudinal light stripe on his back, and the transverse ones on his ​sides are the color of the yellowish sand here and there exposed. He heads up stream and keeps his body perfectly motionless, however rapid the current, chiefly by the motion of his narrow pectoral fins, though also by the waving of his other fins and tail as much as is necessary, a motion which a frog might mistake for that of weeds. Thus concealed by his color and stillness, like a stake, he lies in wait for frogs and minnows. Now a frog leaps in, and he darts forward three or four feet.
Pastinaca sativa, parsnip. How wholesome and edible smells its sweet root.—Tansy, tanacetum vulgare, just begins.
H—— is haying, but inclined to talk as usual. . . . I am disappointed that he, the most intelligent farmer in Concord, and perchance in Middlesex, who admits that he has property enough for his use without accumulating more, and talks of leaving off hard work, letting his farm, and spending the rest of his days easier and better, cannot yet think of any method of employing himself except in work for his hands. Only he would have a little less of it. Much as he is inclined to speculate in conversation, giving up any work to it for the time, and long-headed as he is, he talks of working for a neighbor for a day now and then, and taking his dollar. "He would not like to spend his time sitting on the ​Mill Dam" [i. e., in the village]. He has not even planned an essentially better life. . . .
Sometimes the swampy vigor in large doses proves rank poison to the sensitively bred man, as where dogwood grows. How far he has departed from the rude vigor of Nature, that he cannot assimilate and transmute her elements. The morning air may make a debauchee sick. No herb is friendly to him. All at last are poisons, and yet none are medicines to him, and so he dies; the air kills him. . . .
I heard a solitary duck on Goose Pond making a doleful cry, though its ordinary one, just before sundown, as if caught in a trap or by a fox, and creeping silently through the bushes, I saw it, probably a wood duck, sailing rapidly away. But it still repeated its cry as if calling for a mate. When the hen hatches ducks, they do not mind her clucking. They lead the hen.—Chickens and ducks are well set on the earth. What great legs they have! This part is early developed. A perfect Antæus is a young duck in this respect, deriving a steady stream of health and strength from the earth, for he rarely gets off it, ready either for land or water. Nature is not on her last legs yet. A chick's stout legs! If they were a little larger, they would injure the globe's tender organization with their scratching. Then, for digestion, consider their crops ​and what they put into them in the course of a day. Consider how well fitted to endure the fatigue of a day s excursion. A young chick will run all day in pursuit of grasshoppers, and occasionally vary its exercise by scratching, go to bed at night with protuberant crop, and get up early in the morning ready for a new start.
July 6, 1856. p. m. To Assabet bath. . . . I hear the distressed or anxious peet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half-grown, which runs beneath, and suddenly hides securely in the grass when but a few feet from me.
G. Emerson says the sweetbrier was doubt less introduced, yet according to Bancroft, Gosnold found it on the Elizabeth Isles.
July 6, 1859. . . . p. m. To Lee's Cliff. . . . The heart-leaf flower is now very conspicuous and pretty in that pool westerly of the old Conantum house. Its little, white, five-petalled flower, about the size of a five-cent piece, looks like a little white lily. Its perfectly heart-shaped floating leaf, an inch or more long, is the smallest kind of pad. There is a single pad to each slender stem which is from one to several feet long in proportion to the depth of the water, and these padlets cover sometimes, like an imbrication, the whole surface of a pool. Close underneath each leaf or pad is concealed an umbel of ​from ten to fifteen flower buds of various sizes, and of these, one at a time (and sometimes more) curls upward between the lobes of the base and expands its corolla to the light and air, about half an inch above the water, and so on successively till all have flowered. Over the whole surface of the shallow pool you see thus each little pad with its pretty lily between its lobes turned toward the sun. It is simply leaf and flower.
July 7, 1840. I have experienced such simple joy in the trivial matters of fishing and sporting formerly as might inspire the muse of Homer or Shakespeare. And now when I turn over the pages and ponder the plates of the "Angler's Souvenir," I exclaim with the poet,
"Can these things be, and overcome us like A summer's cloud?"
When I hear a sudden burst from a horn, I am startled, as if one had provoked such wildness as he could not rule nor tame. He dares make the echoes which he cannot put to rest.
July 7, 1851. The intimations of the night are divine, methinks. Men might meet in the morning and report the news of the night, what divine suggestions have been made to them. I find that I carry with me into the day often some such hint derived from the gods, such impulses ​to purity, to heroism, to literary effort, even, as are never day-born.
One of those mornings which usher in no day, but rather an endless morning, a protracted auroral season, for clouds prolong the twilight the livelong day.
Now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of the flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds. The golden robin, the bobolink, etc., are rarely heard.
I rejoice when in a dream I have loved virtue and nobleness.
Where is Grecian History? Is it when in the morning I recall the intimations of the night?
The moon is now more than half full. When I come through the village at ten o'clock this cold night, cold as in May, the heavy shadows of the elms, covering the ground with their rich tracery, impress me as if men had got so much more than they bargained for,—not only trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their shadows. At night they lie along the earth. They tower, they arch, they droop over the streets like chandeliers of darkness.
With a certain wariness, but not without a slight shudder at the danger oftentimes, I perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, as a case ​at court, and I am astonished to observe how willing; men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, to permit idle rumors, tales, incidents, even of an insignificant kind, to intrude upon what should be the sacred ground of the thoughts. Shall the temple of our thoughts be a public arena where the most trivial affair of the market and the gossip of the tea-table is discussed, a dusty, noisy, trivial place? or shall it be a quarter of the heavens itself, consecrated to the service of the gods, a hypaethral temple? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my mind with the most insignificant, which only a divine mind can illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case at the criminal court into the mind to stalk profanely through its very sanctum sanctorum for an hour,—aye, for many hours; to make a very bar-room of your mind's inmost apartment, as if for a moment the dust of the street had occupied you,—aye, the very street itself, with all its travel, had poured through your very mind of minds, your thought s shrine, with all its filth and bustle. Would it not be an intellectual suicide? By all manner of boards and traps threatening the ​extreme penalty of the divine law, excluding trespassers from these grounds, it behoves us to preserve the purity and sanctity of the mind. It is so hard to forget what it is Worse than useless to remember. If I am to be a channel or thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not of the city sewers. There is inspiration, the divine gossip which comes to the attentive mind from the Courts of Heaven, there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the individual determines to which source chiefly it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. They shall be dusty as stones in the street. Our very minds shall be paved and macadamized, their foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over. If you would know what will make the most durable pavements, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some mens' minds. If we have thus desecrated ourselves, the remedy will be by circumspection and wariness, by aspiration and devotion to consecrate ourselves, to make a fane of the mind. I think we should treat our ​minds as innocent and ingenuous children whose guardians we are, be careful what objects and what subjects are thrust on their attention. I think even the facts of science may dust them by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Every thought which passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them. Routine, conventionality, manners, etc.; how insensibly an undue attention to these dissipates and impoverishes the mind, robs it of its simplicity and strength, emasculates it.
Knowledge does not come to us by details, but by lieferungs from the gods.
Only thought which is expressed by the mind in repose, or, as it were, lying on its back and contemplating the heavens, is adequately and fully expressed. What are sidelong, transient, passing half views? The writer expressing his thoughts must be as well seated as the astronomer contemplating the heavens. He must not occupy a constrained position. The facts, the experience we are well poised upon! which secure our whole attention!
​The senses of children are unprofaned. Their whole body is one sense, they take a physical pleasure in riding on a rail. So does the unviolated, the unsophisticated mind derive an inexpressible pleasure from the simplest exercise of thought.
I can express adequately only the thought which I love to express.
All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy concentrated in that. Be so little distracted, your thoughts so little confused, your engagements so few, your attention so free, your existence so mundane, that in all places and in all hours you can hear the sound of crickets in those seasons when they are to be heard. It is a mark of serenity and health of mind when a person hears this sound much in streets of cities as well as in fields. Some ears can never hear this sound; are called deaf. Is it not because they have so long attended to other sounds?
July 7, 1852. 4 a. m. The first (?) really foggy morning. Yet before I rise, I hear the song of birds from out it like the bursting of its bubbles with music. . . . Their song gilds thus the frost work of the morning. . . . I came near waking this morning. I am older than last year. The mornings are further between. The days are fewer. Any excess, to have drunk too much ​water even the day before, is fatal to the morning's clarity. But in health, the sound of a cowbell is celestial music. O might I always wake to thought and poetry, regenerated! Can it be called a morning, if our senses are not clarified so that we perceive more clearly? if we do not rise with elastic vigor?
How wholesome these fogs which some fear. They are cool, medicated vapor baths mingled by Nature, which bring to our senses all the medical properties of the meadows; the touchstones of health. Sleep with all your windows open, and let the mist embrace you.
To the Cliffs. The fog condenses into fountains and streams of music, as in the strain of the bobolink which I hear, and runs off so. The music of the birds is the tinkling of the rills that flow from it. I cannot see twenty rods. . . .
There is everywhere dew on the cobwebs, little gossamer veils or scarfs as big as your hand dropped from the shoulders of fairies that danced on the grass the past night. . . . The to me beautiful rose-colored spikes of the hardback, Spirœa tomentosa; one is out.—I think it was this thin vapor that produced a kind of mirage when I looked over the meadow from the railroad last night toward Trillium wood, giving to the level meadow a certain liquid, sea-like look. Now the heads of herd's grass, seen through the dispersing fog, look like an ocean of grass.
​6 p. m. To Hubbard's Bathing Place. Pogonias are still abundant in the meadows, but arethusas I have not lately seen. . . . The blue-eyed grass shuts up before sunset. . . . The very handsome "pink-purple" flowers of the Calopogon! pulchellus enrich the grass all around the edge of Hubbard's blueberry swamp, and are now in their prime. The Arethusa bulbosa, "crystalline purple," Pogonia ophioglassoides, snake-mouthed [tongued] arethusa, "pale purple," and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink-purple," make one family in my mind (next to the purple orchis, or with it), being flowers par excellence, all flower, naked flowers, and difficult, at least the calopogon, to preserve. But they are flowers, excepting the first, at least, without a name. Pogonia! Calopogon!! They would blush still deeper if they knew what names man had given them. The first and the last interest me most, for the pogonia has a strong, snaky odor. The first may perhaps retain its name, arethusa, from the places in which it grows, and the other two deserve the names of nymphs, perhaps of the class called Naiades. How would the Naiad Ægle do for one? . . . To be sure, in a perfect flower, there will be proportion between the flowers and leaves, but these are fair and delicate, nymph-like. . . . When the yellow lily flowers in the meadows, and the red in dry lands and by wood-paths, then, ​methinks, the flowering season has reached its height. They surprise me as perhaps no more can. Now I am prepared for anything.
July 7, 1857. . . . Some of the inhabitants of the Cape think that the Cape is theirs, and all occupied by them, but, in my eyes, it is no more theirs than it is the blackbirds', and in visiting the Cape there is hardly more need of my regarding or going through the villages than of going through the blackbirds' nests. I leave them both on one side, or perchance I just glance into them to see how they are built and what they contain. I know that they have spoken for the whole Cape, and lines are drawn on the maps accordingly, but I know that these are imaginary, having perambulated many such, and they would have to get me or one of my craft to find them for them. For the most part, indeed with very trifling exceptions, there were no human beings there, only a few imaginary lines on a map.
July 8, 1838.
CLIFFS.
The loudest sound that burdens here the breeze Is the wood's whisper; 't is when we choose to list, Audible sound, and when we list not, It is calm profound. Tongues were provided But to vex the ear with superficial thoughts. When deeper thoughts up swell, the jarring discord Of harsh speech is hushed, and senses seem As little as may be to share the ecstasy.
I am pleased to learn that Thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently, as his astronomical discoveries prove.
It was a saying of Solon that "it is necessary to observe a medium in all things." The golden mean in ethics as in physics is the centre of the system, that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it is the uttermost extreme, yet when that planet's year is complete, it will be found central. They who are alarmed lest virtue run into extreme good have not yet wholly embraced her, but described only a small arc about her, and from so small a curvature you can calculate no centre whatever. Their mean is no better than meanness, nor their medium than mediocrity. If a brave man observes strictly this golden mean, he may run through all extremes with impunity, like the sun which now appears in the zenith, now in the horizon, and again is faintly reflected from the moon s disk, and has the credit of describing an entire great circle, crossing the equinoctial and solstitial colures, without detriment to his steadfastness.
Every planet asserts its own to be the centre of the system.
​Only meanness is mediocre, moderate; the true medium is not contained within any bounds, but is as wide as the ends it connects.
When Solon endeavored to prove that Salainis had formerly belonged to the Athenians, and not to the Megarians, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the Megarians to the opposite side. So does each fact bear witness to all, and the history of all the past may be read in a single grain of its ashes.
July 8, 1851. . . . I am struck by the cool, juicy, pickled-cucumber green of the potato-fields now. How lusty these vines look. The pasture naturally exhibits at this season no such living green as the cultivated fields. . . . Here are mulleins covering a field where three years ago none were noticeable, but a smooth, uninterrupted pasture sod. Two years ago it was ploughed for the first time for many years, and millet and corn and potatoes planted. Now, where the millet grew, these mulleins have sprung up. Who can write the history of these fields? The millet does not perpetuate itself, but the few seeds of the mullein which perchance were brought here with it are still multiplying the race. . . .
​Here are some rich rye-fields waving over all the land, their heads nodding in the evening breeze, with an apparently alternating motion, i. e., they do not all bend at once, by ranks, but separately, and hence this agreeable alternation. How rich a sight this cereal fruit, now yellow for the cradle, flavus. It is an impenetrable phalanx. I walk for half a mile, looking in vain for an opening. . . . This is food for man. The earth labors not in vain. It is bearing its burden. The yellow, waving, rustling rye extends far up and over the hills on either side, a kind of pinafore to Nature, leaving only a narrow and dark passage at the bottom of a deep ravine. How rankly it has grown! How it hastes to maturity! I discover that there is such a goddess as Ceres. . . . The small trees and shrubs seen dimly in its midst are overwhelmed by the grain as by an inundation. They are seen only as indistinct forms of bushes and green leaves, mixed with the yellow stalks. There are certain crops which give me the idea of bounty, of the Alma Natura. They are the grains. Potatoes do not so fill the lap of earth. This rye excludes everything else, and takes possession of the soil. The farmer says, next year I will raise a crop of rye, and he proceeds to clear away the brush, and either ploughs it, or, if it is too uneven or stony, burns and harrows ​it only and scatters the seed with faith. And all winter the earth keeps his secret, unless it did leak out somewhat in the fall, and in the spring this early green on the hillsides betrays him. When I see this luxuriant crop spreading far and wide, in spite of rock and bushes and unevenness of ground, I cannot help thinking that it must have been unexpected by the farmer himself, and regarded by him as a lucky accident for which to thank fortune. This to reward a transient faith the gods had given.
July 8, 1852. p. m. Down river in boat to the Holt. . . . It is perhaps the warmest day yet. We held on to the abutments under the Red Bridge to cool ourselves in the shade. No better place in hot weather, the river rippling away beneath you, and the air rippling through between the abutments, if only in sympathy with the river, while the planks afford a shade, and you hear all the travel and the travelers' talk without being seen or suspected. . . . There is generally a current of air circulating over water, always, methinks, if the water runs swiftly, as if it put the air in motion. There is quite a breeze here this sultry day. Commend me to the subpontean, the under-bridge life.
I am inclined to think bathing almost one of the necessaries of life, but it is surprising how indifferent some are to it. What a coarse, foul, ​busy life we lead compared even with the South Sea Islanders in some respects. Truant boys steal away to bathe, but the farmers, who most need it, rarely dip their bodies into the streams or ponds. M—— was telling me last night that he had thought of bathing when he had done his hoeing, of taking some soap and going down to Walden, and giving himself a good scrubbing, but something had occurred to prevent, and now he will go unwashed to the harvesting, aye, even till the next hoeing is over. Better the faith and practice of the Hindoos, who worship the sacred Ganges. We have not faith enough in the Musketaquid to wash in it even after hoeing. Men stay on shore, keep themselves dry, and drink rum. Pray what were rivers made for? One farmer, who came to bathe in Walden one Sunday while I lived there, told me it was the first bath he had had for fifteen years. Now what kind of religion could his be? or was it any better than a Hindoo's?
July 8, 1853. . . . Toads are still heard occasionally at evening. To-day I heard a hylodecipeep (perhaps a young one), which have so long been silent.
July 8, 1854. Full moon. By boat to Hubbard's Bend. There is wind, making it cooler and keeping off fog. Delicious on water. The moon reflected from the rippled surface like a ​stream of dollars. I hear a few toads still. . . . The bull-frogs trump from time to time. . . . The whippoorwills are heard, and the baying of dogs.
The Rosa nitida, I think, has some time done; lucida generally now ceasing, and the Carolina (?) just begun.
July 8, 1857. . . . Counted the rings of a white-pine stump sawed off last winter at Laurel Glen. It is three and a half feet in diameter and has one hundred and twenty-six rings.
July 9, 1840. In most men s religion the ligature which should be the umbilical cord connecting them with the source of life is rather like that thread which the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from the temple of Minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of the goddess. Frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are left without an asylum.
The value of many traits in Grecian history depends not so much on their importance as history, as on the readiness with which they accept a wide interpretation, and illustrate the poetry and ethics of mankind. When they announce no particular truth, they are yet central to all truth. . . . Even the isolated and unexplained facts are like the ruins of the temples which in imagination we restore, and ascribe to some Phidias or other master.
​The Greeks were boys in the sunshine; the Romans were men in the field; the Persians, women in the house; the Egyptians, old men in the dark.
He who receives an injury is an accomplice of the wrong-doer.
July 9, 1851. When I got out of the cars at Porter's, Cambridge, this morning, I was pleased to see the handsome blue flowers of the succory or endive, Cichorium intybus, which reminded me that within the hour I had been whirled into a new botanical region. They must be extremely rare, if they occur at all in Concord. This weed is handsomer than most garden flowers. . . .
Coming out of town willingly as usual, when I saw that reach of Charles River just above the Depot, the fair, still water this cloudy evening suggesting the way to eternal peace and beauty, whence it flows, the placid, lake-like fresh water so unlike the salt brine, affected me not a little. I was reminded of the way in which Wordsworth so coldly speaks of some natural visions or scenes "giving him pleasure." This is perhaps the first vision of elysium on the route from Boston. And just then I saw an encampment of Penobscots, their wigwams appearing above, the railroad fence, they, too, looking up the river as they sat on the ground, and enjoying the scene. What can be more impressive than to look up a ​noble river just at evening,—one, perchance, which you have never explored,—and behold its placid waters, reflecting the woods and sky, lapsing inaudibly toward the ocean, to behold it as a lake, but know it as a river, tempting the beholder to explore it and his own destiny at once, haunt of water-fowl. This was above the factories, all that I saw. That water could never have flowed under a factory. How then could it have reflected the sky?
July 9, 1852. 4 a. m. To Cliffs. . . . An aurora fading into a general saffron color. At length the redness travels over partly from east to west, before sunrise, and there is little color in the east. The birds all unite to make the morning choir, sing rather faintly, not prolonging their strains. The crickets appear to have received a reinforcement during the sultry night.
There is no name for the evening red corresponding to aurora. It is the blushing foam about the prow of the sun's boat, and at eve, the same in its wake.—I do not often hear the blue bird now except at dawn.—I think we have had no clear winter skies, no skies the color of a robin's egg and pure amber . . . for some months.—These blueberries on Fair Haven have a very innocent, ambrosial taste, as if made of the ether itself, as they plainly are colored with it.
​How handsome the leaves of the shrub oak, so clear and unspotted a green, so firm and enduring, glossy, uninjured by the wind, meed for mighty conquerors, lighter on the under-side, which contrast is important. . . . It must be the cuckoo that makes that half-throttled sound at night, for I saw one while he made it this morning, as he flew from an apple-tree when I disturbed him.—Those white water-lilies, what boats! I toss one into the pan half unfolded, and it floats upright like a boat. It is beautiful when half open, and also when fully expanded.
Morton, in his "Crania Americana," says, referring to Wilkinson as his authority, that vessels of porcelain of Chinese manufacture have of late been repeatedly found in the catacombs of Thebes in Egypt, some as old as the Pharaonic period, and the inscriptions on them "have been read with ease by Chinese scholars, and in three instances record the following legend, "The flower opens, and lo! another year." There is something sublime in the fact that some of the oldest written sentences should thus celebrate the coining in of spring. How many times have the flowers opened and a new year begun! Hardly a more cheering sentence could have come down to us. How old is spring, a phenomenon still so fresh! Do we perceive any decay in Nature? How much evidence is ​contained in this short and simple sentence respecting the former inhabitants of this globe! It is a sentence to be inscribed on vessels of porcelain, suggesting that so many years had gone before, an observation as fit then as now.
3 p. m. To Clematis Brook. The heat of to-day, as yesterday, is furnace-like. It produces a thickness almost amounting to vapor in the near horizon. The railroad men cannot work in the Deep Cut, but have come out on to the cause way, where there is a circulation of air. They tell, with a shudder, of the heat reflected from the rails, yet a breezy wind, as if it were born of the heat, rustles all leaves.—Those piles of clouds in the north, assuming interesting forms of unmeasured rocky mountains or unfathomed precipices, light-colored and even downy above, but with watery bases, portend a thunder-shower before night. Well, I can take shelter in some barn or under a bridge. It shall not spoil my afternoon.—I have scarcely heard one strain from the telegraph harp this season. Its string is rusted and slackened, relaxed, and now no more it encourages the walker. So is it with all sublunary things. Every poet's lyre loses its tension. It cannot bear the alternate contraction and expansion of the seasons.—How intense and suffocating the heat under some sunny woodsides where no breeze circulates!
​The red lily with its torrid color and sun-freckled spots, dispensing, too, with the outer garment of a calyx, its petals so open and wide apart that you can see through it in every direction, tells of hot weather. It is of a handsome bell shape, so upright, and the flower prevails over every other part. It belongs not to spring.
It is refreshing to see the surface of Fair Haven rippled with wind. The waves break here quite as on the sea shore, and with like effects. This little brook makes great sands comparatively at its mouth, which the waves of the pond wash up and break upon like a sea. Bathing is an undescribed luxury. To feel the wind blow on your body, and the water flow upon you and lave you, is a rare physical enjoyment this hot day. . . .
Low hills or even hillocks which are stone-capped (have rocky summits), as this near James Baker's, remind me of mountains, which in fact they are on a small scale,—the brows of earth, round which the trees and bushes trail like the hair of eyebrows, outside bald places, templa, primitive places where lichens grow. I have some of the same sensations as if I sat on the top of the Rocky Mountains. Some low places thus give a sense of elevation.
July 9, 1854. . . . Examined a lanceolate thistle which has been pressed and has lain by a ​year. The papers being taken off, its head sprang up more than an inch, and the downy seeds began to fly off.
July 9, 1857. . . . p. m. Up Assabet with S——. There is now but little black willow down left on the trees. I think I see how this tree is propagated by its seeds. Its countless, minute, brown seeds, just perceptible to the naked eye in the midst of their cotton, are wafted with the cotton to the water (most abundantly about a fortnight ago), and then they drift and form a thick white scum together with other matter, especially against some alder or other fallen or drooping shrub where there is less current than usual. There within two or three days a great many germinate and show their two little roundish leaves, more or less tinging with green the surface of the scum, somewhat like grass seed in a tumbler of cotton. Many of these are drifted in amid the button-bushes, willows, and other shrubs, and the sedge along the river side, and the water falling just at this time when they have put forth little fibres, they are deposited on the mud just left bare in the shade, and thus probably a great many of them have a chance to become perfect plants. But if they do not drift into sufficiently shallow water, and are not left on the mud just at the right time, probably they perish. The mud in many such places ​is now green with them, though perhaps the seed has often blown thither directly through the air.—I am surprised to see dense groves of young maples an inch or more high from seed of this year. They have sprung in pure sand where the seed has been drifted and moisture enough supplied, at the water's edge. The seed, now effete, commonly lies on the surface, having sent down its rootlet into the sand.
July 10, 1840. To myself I am as pliant as an osier, and my courses seem not so easy to be calculated as that of Encke's comet, but I am powerless to bend the character of another. He is like iron in my hands. I could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. He is material which no tool of mine will work. A naked savage will fell an oak with a firebrand, and wear a hatchet out of the rock, but I cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my fellow to beautify or deform it.
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.
We know men through their eyes. You might say that the eye was always original and unlike another. It is the feature of the individual, and not of the family; in twins, still different. All a man's privacy is in his eye, and its expression he cannot alter more than he can alter his character. So long as we look a man in the eye, it ​seems to rule the other features, and make them too original. When I have mistaken one person for another, observing only his form and carriage and inferior features, the unlikeness seemed of the least consequence, but when I caught his eye and my doubts were removed, it seemed to pervade every feature. The eye revolves on an independent pivot which we can no more control than our own will. Its axle is the axle of the soul, as the axis of the earth is coincident with the axis of the heavens.
July 10-12, 1841. . . . A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter. It is the original sound of which all literature is the echo. It makes all fear superfluous. Bravery comes from further than the sources of fear.
July 10, 1851. A gorgeous sunset after rain, with horizontal bars of cloud, red sashes to the western window, barry clouds hanging like a curtain over the window of the west, damask. First there is a low arch of the storm clouds, under which is seen the clearer, fairer, serener sky and more distant sunset clouds, and under all, on the horizon's edge, heavier, massive dark clouds not to be distinguished from the mountains. How many times I have seen this kind of sunset, the most gorgeous sight in Nature. From the hill ​behind Minot's I see the birds flying against this red sky; one looks like a bat. Now between two stupendous mountains of the low stratum under the evening red, clothed in slightly rosaceous, amber light, through a magnificent gorge, far, far away, as perchance may occur in pictures of the Spanish coast viewed from the Mediterranean, I see a city, the eternal city of the West, the phantom city, in whose streets no traveler has trod, over whose pavement the horses of the sun have already hurried, some Salamanca of the imagination. But it lasts only for a moment, for now the changing light has wrought such changes in it that I see the resemblance no longer. A softer amber sky than in any picture. The swallows are improving this short day, twittering as they fly, the huckleberry-bird repeats his jingling strain, and I hear the notes of the song-sparrow more honest-sounding than most.—I am always struck by the centrality of the observer's position. He always stands fronting the middle of the arch, and does not suspect at first that a thousand observers from a thousand hills behold the sunset sky from equally favorable positions.
And now I turn and observe the dark masses of the trees in the east, not green, but black. While the sun was setting in the west, the trees were rising in the east.
​I perceive that the low stratum of dark clouds under the red sky all dips one way, and to a remarkable degree presents the appearance of the butt ends of cannons slanted towards the sky. Such uniformity on a large scale is unexpected, and pleasant to detect, evincing the simplicity of the laws of their formation. Uniformity in the shapes of clouds of a single stratum is always to be detected, the same wind shaping clouds of the same consistency and in like positions. No doubt an experienced observer could discover the states of the upper atmosphere by studying the forms and characters of the clouds. I traced the distinct form of the cannon in seven instances, stretching over the whole length of the cloud many a mile in the horizon.
July 10, 1852. Another day, if possible, still hotter than the last. We have already had three or four such, and still no rain. The soil under the sward in the yard is dusty as an ash-heap for a foot in depth, and the young trees are suffering and dying.
2 p. m. To the North River, in front of Major Bassett's. It is with a suffocating sensation, and a slight pain in the head, that I walk the Union Turnpike where the heat is reflected from the road. The leaves of the elms on the dry highways begin to roll up. I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head. But I find a ​refreshing breeze from over the river and meadow. In the hottest day you can be comfortable in the shade on the open shore of a pond or river, where a zephyr comes over the water sensibly cooled by it; that is, if the water is deep enough to cool it. I find the white melilot, Melilotus leucantha, a fragrant clover, in blossom by the roadside. We turn aside by a large rye-field near the old Lee place. The rye-fields are now quite yellow and ready for the sickle. Already there are many flavous colors in the landscape, much maturity of small seeds. The nodding heads of the rye make an agreeable maze to the eye. I hear now the huckleberry bird, the red eye, and the oven-bird. The robin, methinks, is oftener heard of late, even at noon. . . . The long, narrow, open intervals in the woods near the Assabet are quite dry now, in some parts yellow with the upright loosestrife. One of these meadows, a quarter of a mile long, by a few rods wide, narrow and winding, and bounded on all sides by maples showing the under-sides of their leaves, swamp white-oaks, with their glossy dark-green leaves, birches, etc., and full of meadow-sweet just coming into bloom, and cranberry vines, and a dry kind of grass, is a very attractive place to walk in. We undressed on this side, carried our clothes down in the stream a considerable distance, and ​finally bathed in earnest from the opposite side. The heat tempted us to prolong this luxury. . . . I made quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial . . . walk. It seemed the properest highway for this weather, now in water a foot or two deep, now suddenly descending through valleys up to my neck, but all alike agreeable. Sometimes the bottom looked as if covered with large, flat, sharp-edged rocks. I could break off cakes three or four inches thick, and a foot or two square. It was a conglomeration . . . of sand and pebbles, as it were cemented with oxide of iron (?), quite red with it, iron colored to the depth of an inch on the upper-side, a hard kind of pan covering or forming the bottom in many places. . . . There are many interesting objects of study, as you walk up and down a clear river like this in the water, where you can see every inequality in the bottom, and every object on it. The breams' nests are interesting and even handsome, and the shallow water in them over the sand is so warm to my hand that I think their ova will soon be hatched; also, the numerous heaps of stones, made I know not certainly by what fish, many of them rising above the surface. There are weeds on the bottom which remind you of the sea; the radical leaves of the floating heart which I have never seen mentioned, very large, ​five inches long and four wide, dull claret (and green when freshest), pellucid, with waved edges, in large tufts or dimples on the bottom, oftenest without the floating leaves, like lettuce, or some kelps, or carrageen moss (?). The bottom is also scored with furrows made by the clams moving about, sometimes a rod long, and always the clam lies at one end. So this fish can change its position, and get into deeper and cooler water. I was in doubt before whether the clam made these furrows; for one, apparently fresh, that I examined, had a "mud clam" at the end, but these, which were very numerous, had living clams.—There are but few fishes to be seen. They have, no doubt, retreated to the deepest water. In one somewhat muddier place close to the shore I came upon an old pout cruising with her young. She dashed away at my approach, but the fry remained. They were of various sizes, from one third of an inch to one and a half inches, quite black and pout-shaped, except that the head was most developed in the smallest. They were constantly moving about in a somewhat circular or rather lenticular school, about fifteen or eighteen inches in diameter, and I estimated that there were at least one thousand of them. Presently the old pout came back and took the lead of her brood, which followed her, or rather gathered about her, like ​chickens about a hen; but this mother had so many children she didn't know what to do. Her maternal yearnings must be on a great scale. When one half of the divided school found her out they came down upon her and completely invested her like a small cloud. She was soon joined by another smaller pout, apparently her mate, and all, both old and young, began to be very familiar with me. They came round my legs and felt them with their feelers, and the old pouts nibbled my toes, while the fry half concealed my feet. Probably if I had been standing on the bank, with my clothes on, they would have been more shy. Ever and anon the old pouts dashed aside to drive away a passing bream or perch. The larger one kept circling about her charge as if to keep them together within a certain compass. If any of her flock were lost or drowned she would hardly have missed them. I wondered if there was any calling of the roll at night; whether she, like a faithful shepherdess, ever told her tale under some hawthorn in the river dales. Ever ready to do battle with the wolves that might break into her fold. The young pouts are protected then for a season by the old. Some had evidently been hatched before the others. One of these large pouts had a large velvet black spot which included the right pectoral fin,—a ​kind of disease which I have often observed on them.—I wonder if any Roman emperor ever indulged in such a luxury as this—of walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head. What were the baths of Caracalla to this? Now we traverse a long watery plain some two feet deep; now we descend into a dark river valley, where the bottom is lost sight of arid the water rises to our armpits; now we go over a hard iron pan; now we stoop and go under a low bough of the Salix nigra; now we slump into soft mud, amid the pads of the Nymphœa odorata, at this hour shut. On this road there is no other traveler to turn out for. We finally return to the dry land and recline in the shade of an apple-tree on a bank overlooking the meadow. When I first came out of the water the short, wiry grass was burning hot to my feet, and my skin was soon parched and dry in the sun.—I still hear the bobolink. . . . The stones lying in the sun on this hillside, where the grass has been cut, are as hot to the hand as an egg just boiled, and very uncomfortable to hold; so do they absorb the heat. Every hour do we expect a thunder-shower to cool the air, but none conies. We say they are gone down the river.
. . . St. John's-wort is perhaps the prevailing flower now. Many fields are very yellow with ​it. In one such I was surprised to see rutabaga turnips growing well and showing no effects of drouth, and still more surprised when the farmer . . . showed me, with his hoe, that the earth was quite fresh and moist there only an inch beneath the surface. This he thought was the result of keeping the earth loose by cultivation.
July 10, 1853. . . . The bream poised over its sandy nest on waving fin—how aboriginal! So it was poised here and watched its ova before the new world was known to the old. Still I see the little cavities of their nests along the shore.
July 10, 1854. . . . The singing birds at present are (villageous) robin, chip-bird, warbling vireo, swallows; (rural) song-sparrow, seringo, flicker, king-bird, goldfinch, link of bobolink; cherry-bird; (sylvan) red-eye, tanager, wood-thrush, chewink, veery, oven-bird, all even at mid-day, cat-bird (full strain), whippoorwill, crows.
July 10, 1856. . . . 5 p. m. Up Assabet. As I was bathing under the swamp white-oaks art; 6 p. m. heard a suppressed sound, often repeated, like perhaps the working of beer through a bunghole, which I already suspected to be produced by owls. I was uncertain whether it was far or near. Proceeding a dozen rods up stream on the south side, toward where a cat-bird was ​incessantly mewing, I found myself suddenly within a rod of a gray screech-owl, sitting on an alder bough, with horns erect, turning its head from side to side, and up and down, and peering at me in that same ludicrously solemn and complacent way that I had noticed in one in captivity. Another, more red, also horned, repeated the same warning sound, an apparent call to its young, about the same distance off, in another direction, on an alder. When they took to flight, they made some noise with their wings. With their short tails and squat figures they looked very clumsy, all head and shoulders. Hearing a fluttering under the alders, I drew near and found a young owl, a third smaller than the red, all gray, without obvious horns, only four or five feet distant. It flitted along two rods, and I followed it. I saw at least two or more young. . . . These birds kept opening their eyes when I moved, as if to get a clearer sight of me. The young were very quick to notice any motion of the old, and so betrayed their return by looking in that direction when they returned, though I had not heard it. Though they permitted me to come near with so much noise, as if bereft of half their senses, they at once noticed the coming and going of the old birds, even when I did not. There were four or five owls in all. I have heard a ​somewhat similar note further off, and louder, in the night.
July 10, 1860. . . . This cloudy, cool afternoon I was exhilarated by the mass of cheerful, bright yellowish light reflected from the sedge, Carex Pennsylvanica growing densely on hillsides laid bare within a year or two. It is of a distinct, cheerful, yellow color, even this overcast day, as if it were reflecting a bright sunlight, though no sun is visible. It is surprising how much this will light up a hillside, or upland hollow or plateau, and when, in a clear day, you look toward the sun over it late in the afternoon, the scene is incredibly bright and elysian.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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