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delicate pink shadow
sea spray mist
purple sky
how most men fall drunk
one bitter spring day

ZPHX, 10/22/09

Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung?

October 22.

I am surprised to find in the field behind the top of the Cliffs a little vetch still perfectly fresh and blooming, where Wheeler had grain a year or two since, with numerous little plump pods four or five eighths of an inch long and commonly four roundish seeds to each. It must be, I think, Gray's Vicia tetrasperma, though he makes that have white flowers (apparently same as Bigelow's V. pusilla, also made to have white flowers, but Dewey calls them "bluish white"), while these are purple. Otherwise it corresponds. 

A marsh hawk sails over Fair Haven Hill. 

In the wood-path below the Cliffs I see perfectly fresh and fair Viola pedata flowers, as in the spring, though but few together. 

No flower by its second blooming more perfectly brings back the spring to us. 

In my blustering walk over the Mason and Hunt pastures yesterday, I saw much of the withered indigo-weed which was broken off and blowing about, and the seeds in its numerous black pods rattling like the rattlepod though not nearly so loud. 

The very surface of the earth itself has been rapidly imbrowned of late, like the acorns in their cups, in consequence of cold and frost; and the evergreens and few deciduous plants which are slow to wither, like Jersey tea, are more and more distinct. 

F. hyemalis quite common for a week past.




When a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is taking a step toward its own dissolution.

Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?

Is it the intention of lawmakers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? Who is it whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hung? [etc.]

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, October 22, 1859

No flower by its second blooming more perfectly brings back the spring to us. See October 23, 1853 ("Many phenomena re mind me that now is to some extent a second spring, — not only the new-springing and blossoming of flowers, but the peeping of the hylodes for some time, and the faint warbling of their spring notes by many birds. . . .The Viola pedata looking up from so low in the wood-path makes a singular impression.”); November 9, 1850 ("I found many fresh violets (Viola pedata) to-day (November 9th) in the woods.").

A straggling flock of migrating crows contends with the strong northwest wind.

October 20. 

. P. M— . To Ripple Lake.

Dug some artichokes behind Alcott's, the largest about one inch in diameter. Now apparently is the time to begin to dig them, the plant being considerably frost-bitten. Tried two or three roots. The main root ran down straight about six inches, and then terminated abruptly. They have quite a nutty taste eaten raw. 

What is that flat, spreading festuca-like grass, just killed, behind A.'s house? 

As I go to Clintonia Swamp along the old cross-road, I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly southwest from over the hill behind Bull's and contending with the strong and cold northwest wind. This is the annual phenomenon. They are on their migrations. 

The beach plum is nearly bare, and so is the woodbine on the brick house. The wild red cherry by A. Brooks's Hollow is completely fallen; how long? The sand cherry in my field path is almost entirely bare. Some chinquapin is half fallen. 

Scare up a yellow-legs, apparently the larger, on the shore of Walden. It goes off with a sharp phe phe, phe phe. 

This is the coldest day as yet; wind from the northwest. It is finger-cold as I come home, and my hands find their way to my pocket. I learn the next day that snow fell to-day in northern New York and New Hampshire, and that accounts for it.

We feel the cold of it here as soon as the telegraph can inform us.

La Mountain's adventure has taught us how swiftly the wind may travel to us from that quarter.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 20, 1859

I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly southwest from over the hill behind Bull's and contending with the strong and cold northwest wind.  See November 1, 1853 ("As I return, I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.”); Compare March 5, 1854 ("And crows, as I think, migrating northeasterly. They come in loose, straggling flocks, about twenty to each, commonly silent, a quarter to a half a mile apart, till four flocks have passed, perhaps more. Methinks I see them going southwest in the fall.")

Scare up a yellow-legs, apparently the larger, on the shore of Walden. See September 14, 1854 ("A flock of thirteen tell tales, great yellow-legs, start up with their shrill whistle from the midst of the great Sudbury meadow, and away they sail in a flock. . .to alight in a more distant place.”); September 26, 1859 ("Hearing a sharp phe-phe and again phe-phe-phe, I look round and see two (probably larger) yellow-legs, like pigeons, standing in the water by the bare, flat ammannia shore, their whole forms reflected in the water. They allow me to paddle past them, though on the alert.")

This is the coldest day as yet; wind from the north west. Compare October 20, 1858 (“Another remarkably warm and pleasant day, if not too hot for walking; 74° at 2 P. M. ”)

We feel the cold of it here as soon as the telegraph can inform us. See May 31, 1856  ("It has been very cold for two or three days, and to-night a frost is feared. The telegraph says it snowed in Bangor to-day")

La Mountain's adventure . In September 1859, John La Mountain, a piooneering baloonist made an ascension from Watertown, New York across Minnesota and Michigan. drifted over the Canadian wilderness, and spent the four days wandering in the wilderness .~ Wikipedea

tinyurl.com/HDT591020

In what book is this world and its beauty described?

October 4. 

October 4, 2020

When I have made a visit where my expectations are not met, I feel as if I owed my hosts an apology for troubling them so. If I am disappointed, I find that I have no right to visit them. I have always found that what are called the best of manners are the worst, for they are simply the shell without the meat. They cover no life at all. They are the universal slaveholders, who treat men as things. Nobody holds you more cheap than the man of manners. They are marks by the help of which the wearers ignore you and remain concealed themselves. Are they such great characters that they feel obliged to make the journey of life incognito? Sailors swear; gentlemen make their manners to you. 

All men sympathize by their lower natures; the few, only, by their higher. The appetites of the mistress are commonly the same as those of her servant, but her society is commonly more select. The help may have some of the tenderloin, but she must eat it in the kitchen.

P. M. — To Conantum. 

How interesting now, by wall-sides and on open springy hillsides, the large, straggling tufts of the dicksonia fern above the leaf-strewn greensward, the cold fall-green sward! They are unusually preserved about the Corner Spring, considering the earliness of this year. 

Long, handsome lanceolate green fronds, pointing in every direction, recurved and full of fruit, intermixed with yellowish and sere brown and shrivelled ones. The whole clump, perchance, strewn with fallen and withered maple leaves and overtopped by now withered and unnoticed osmundas. 

Their lingering greenness so much the more noticeable now that the leaves (generally) have changed. They affect us as if they were evergreen, such persistent life and greenness in the midst of their own decay. 

I do not notice them so much in summer. No matter how much withered they are, with withered leaves that have fallen on them, moist and green they spire above them, not fearing the frosts, fragile as they are. 

Their greenness so much the more interesting because so many have already fallen and we know that the first severer frost will cut off them too. In the summer greenness is cheap; now it is something comparatively rare and is the emblem of life to us.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose, for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be.

In what book is this world and its beauty described? 

Who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beauty? 

You have got to be in a different state from common. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are, and you will have no communication to make to the Royal Society. 

If it were required to know the position of the fruit-dots or the character of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so surely accomplished. 

In the one case, you take a sentence and analyze it, you decide if it is printed in large [sic] primer or small pica; if it is long or short, simple or compound, and how many clauses it is composed of; if the i's are all dotted, or some for variety without dots; what the color and composition of the ink and the paper; and it is considered a fair or mediocre sentence accordingly, and you assign its place among the sentences you have seen and kept specimens of. But as for the meaning of the sentence, that is as completely overlooked as if it had none. This is the Chinese, the Aristotelean, method. 

But if you should ever perceive the meaning you would disregard all the rest. So far science goes, and it punctually leaves off there, — tells you finally where it is to be found and its synonyms, and rests from its labors. 

This is a fine and warm afternoon, Indian-summer like, but we have not had cold enough before it. 

Birds are now seen more numerously than before, as if called out by the fine weather, probably many migrating birds from the north. I see and hear probably flocks of grackles with their split and shuffling note, but no red-wings for a long time; chip-birds (but with out chestnut crowns; is that the case with the young ?), bay-wings on the walls and fences, and the yellow-browed sparrows. 

Hear the pine warblers in the pines, about the needles, and see them on the ground and on rocks, with a yellow ring round the eye (!), reddish legs,  slight whitish bar on wings. Going over the large hill side stubble-field west of Holden Wood, I start up a large flock of shore larks; hear their sveet sveet and sveet sveet sveet, and see their tails dark beneath. They are very wary, and run in the stubble for the most part invisible, while one or two appear to act the sentinel on rock, peeping out behind it perhaps, and give their note of alarm, when away goes the whole flock. 

Such a flock circled back and forth several times over my head, just like ducks reconnoitring before they alight. If you look with a glass you are surprised to see how alert these spies are. When they alight in some stubbly hollow they set a watch or two on the rocks to look out for foes. They have dusky bills and legs. 

The birds seem to delight in these first fine days of the fall, in the warm, hazy light, — robins, bluebirds (in families on the almost bare elms), phcebes, and probably purple finches. 

I hear half-strains from many of them, as the song sparrow, bluebird, etc., and the sweet phe-be of the chickadee. 

Now the year itself begins to be ripe, ripened by the frost, like a persimmon.


The maidenhair fern at Conantum is apparently unhurt by frost as yet.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 4, 1859

In what book is this world and its beauty described? See September 7, 1851 ("I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon.")

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know . . . simply to perceive that such things are. See November 21, 1850(" I begin to see ... an object when I cease to understand it ."); February 14, 1851 ("We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see"); November 30, 1858 (""In my account of this bream I cannot go a hair's breadth beyond the mere statement that it exists.").

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair's breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose, for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. In what book is this world and its beauty described? Who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beauty? You have got to be in a different state from common. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are, and you will have no communication to make to the Royal Society. . . .

Winding up accounts

October 3.

P. M. — To Bateman's Pond; back by hog- pasture and old Carlisle road. Some faces that I see are so gross that they affect me like a part of the person improperly exposed, and it occurs to me that they might be covered, and, if necessary, some other, and perhaps better-looking, part of the person be exposed.

It is somewhat cooler and more autumnal. A great many leaves have fallen and the trees begin to look thin.


You incline to sit in a sunny and sheltered place.

This season, the fall, which we have now entered on, commenced, I may say, as long ago as when the first frost was seen and felt in low ground in August. From that time, even, the year has been gradually winding up its accounts.

Cold, methinks, has been the great agent which has checked the growth of plants, condensed their energies, and caused their fruits to ripen, in September especially. 

Perchance man never ripens within the tropics.

I see on a wall a myrtle-bird in its October dress, looking very much like a small sparrow. 

Also every where about the edge of the woods this afternoon, sylvias rather large and of a greenish yellow above and beneath, perhaps white vent, and much dark brown above, getting their food on the white birches. The same in very distant places. Perhaps it is the birch louse they eat. What bird is this?  It is quite unlike the sparrow-like myrtle-bird above described, unless some of them are of this color now. 

The Woodsia Ilvensis is partly withering or withered on the rocks, but not so much as the dicksonia. Yet it is evidently not evergreen. 

I see the ground strewn with Populus grandidentata leaves in one place on the old Carlisle road, where one third are fallen. These yellow leaves are all thickly brown-spotted and are very handsome, somewhat leopard-like. It would seem that they begin to decay in spots at intervals all over the leaf, producing a very pretty effect. 

Think of the myriad variously tinted and spotted and worm-eaten leaves which now combine to produce the general impression of autumn! The ground is here strewn with thousands, any one of which, if you carry it home, it will refresh and delight you to behold. If we have not the leopard and jaguar and tiger in our woods, we have all their spots and rosettes and stripes in our autumn-tinted leaves. 

The ash trees are at their height now, if not earlier. Many of their leaves have fallen. The dicksonia ferns by the old Carlisle road-side are now almost all withered to dark cinnamon, and the large cinnamon ferns in Buttrick's wood are no longer noticed. 

Looking from the hog-pasture over the valley of Spencer Brook westward, we see the smoke rising from a huge chimney above a gray roof amid the woods, at a distance, where some family is preparing its evening meal. There are few more agreeable sights than this to the pedestrian traveller. No cloud is fairer to him than that little bluish one which issues from the chimney. It suggests all of domestic felicity beneath. There beneath, we suppose, that life is lived of which we have only dreamed. 

In our minds we clothe each unseen inhabitant with all the success, with all the serenity, which we can conceive of. If old, we imagine him serene; if young, hopeful. Nothing can exceed the perfect peace which reigns there. We have only to see a gray roof with its plume of smoke curling up amid the trees to have this faith. 

There we suspect no coarse haste or bustle, but serene labors which proceed at the same pace with the declining day. There is no hireling in the barn nor in the kitchen. 

Why does any distant prospect ever charm us? Because we instantly and inevitably imagine a life to be lived there such as is not lived elsewhere, or where we are. We presume that success is the rule. We forever carry a perfect sampler in our minds. 

Why are distant valleys, why lakes, why mountains in the horizon, ever fair to us? Because we realize for a moment that they may be the home of man, and that man's life may be in harmony with them. Shall I say that we thus forever delude ourselves? 

We do not suspect that that farmer goes to the depot with his milk. There the milk is not watered. We are constrained to imagine a life in harmony with the scenery and the hour. The sky and clouds, and the earth itself, with their beauty forever preach to us, saying, Such an abode we offer you, to such and such a life we encourage you. There is not haggard poverty and harassing debt. There is not intemperance, moroseness, meanness, or vulgarity.

Men go about sketching, painting landscapes, or writing verses which celebrate man's opportunities. To go into an actual farmer's family at evening, see the tired laborers come in from their day's work thinking of their wages, the sluttish help in the kitchen and sink-room, the indifferent stolidity and patient misery which only the spirits of the youngest children rise above, — that suggests one train of thoughts. 

To look down on that roof from a distance in an October evening, when its smoke is ascending peacefully to join the kindred clouds above, — that suggests a different train of thoughts. We think that we see these fair abodes and are elated beyond all speech, when we see only our own roofs, perchance. 

We are ever busy hiring house and lands and peopling them in our imaginations. There is no beauty in the sky, but in the eye that sees it. Health, high spirits, serenity, these are the great landscape-painters. Turners, Claudes, Rembrandts are nothing to them. We never see any beauty but as the garment of some virtue. Men love to walk in those picture-galleries still, because they have not quite for gotten their early dreams. 

When I see only the roof of a house above the woods and do not know whose it is, I presume that one of the worthies of the world dwells beneath it, and for a season I am exhilarated at the thought. I would fain sketch it that others may share my pleasure. 

But commonly, if I see or know the occupant, I am affected as by the sight of the almshouse or hospital. 

Wild apples are perhaps at their height, or perhaps only the earlier ones. 

Those P. grandidentata leaves are wildly rich. So handsomely formed and floridly scalloped, to begin with, — a fine chrome yellow now richly spotted with dark brown like a leopard's skin, — they cover the still green sward by the roadside and the gray road thick as a pavement, each one worthy to be admired as a gem or work of Oriental art. 

Among sound leaves I think of the fever-bush, Rhus radicans, beech, and shrub oak. 

It was mainly the frost of September 15 and 16 that put an end to the summer, that put the finishing stroke to the already withering grass, and left it to bleach in the fields, turning russet with blackberry vines intermixed, ripens nuts, — acorns, for example, — browning them. Frost and cold paint the acorn and the chestnut. The hickory has spots with a central ring, evidently produced by an insect. 

Consider the infinite promise of a man, so that the sight of his roof at a distance suggests an idyll or pastoral, or of his grave an Elegy in a Country Church yard. How all poets have idealized the farmer's life! What graceful figures and unworldly characters they have assigned to them! Serene as the sky, emulating nature with their calm and peaceful lives. 

As I come by a farmer's to-day, the house of one who died some two years ago, I see the decrepit form of one whom he had engaged to "carry through," taking his property at a venture, feebly tying up a bundle of fagots with his knee on it, though time is fast loosening the bundle that he is. When I look down on that roof I am not reminded of the mortgage which the village bank has on that property, — that that family long since sold itself to the devil and wrote the deed with their blood. I am not reminded that the old man I see in the yard is one who has lived beyond his calculated time, whom the young one is merely "carrying through" in fulfillment of his contract; that the man at the pump is watering the milk. 

I am not reminded of the idiot that sits by the kitchen fire.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 3, 1859

You incline to sit in a sunny and sheltered place. See April 26, 1857 (In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates.”); October 21, 1857 ("Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit."); October 26, 1852 ("At this season we seek warm sunny lees and hillsides . . .where we cuddle and warm ourselves in the sun as by a fire, where we may get some of its reflected as well as direct heat.");

View from Pine Hill

October 1.

Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden.



The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit. The plateaus and little hollows are crowded with them three to five feet high, the pretty fruit, varying in size, pointedness, and downiness, being now generally turned brown, with light, converging meridional lines. 

Many leading shoots are perfectly bare of leaves, the effect of the frost, and on some bushes half the cups are empty, but these cups generally bear the marks of squirrels' teeth, and probably but few acorns have fallen of themselves yet. 

However, they are just ready to fall, and if you bend back the peduncles on these bare and frost-touched shoots, you find them just ready to come off, separating at the base of the peduncle, and the peduncle remaining attached to the fruit. The squirrels, probably striped, must be very busy here nowadays. 

Though many twigs are bare, these clusters of brown fruit in their grayish-brown cups are unnoticed and almost invisible, unless you are looking for them, above the ground, which is strewn with their similarly colored leaves; i. e., this leaf-strewn earth has the same general gray and brown color with the twigs and fruit, and you may brush against great wreaths of fruit without noticing them. You press through dense groves full of this interesting fruit, each seeming prettier than the last. 

Now is the time for shrub oak acorns, then, if not for others. 

I see where the squirrels have left the shells on rocks and stumps. They take the acorn out of its cup on the bush, leaving the cup there with a piece bit out of its edge.

The little beechnut burs are mostly empty, and the ground is strewn with the nuts mostly empty and abortive. Yet I pluck some apparently full grown with meat. This fruit is apparently now at its height.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 1, 1859

["There are many paths to the top of the Mountain, but the view is the same."]

Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden. See October 5, 1860 ("He can easily find a perch overlooking the lake and discern his prey in the clear water. No doubt he well knows the habits of these little fishes which dimple the surface of Walden at this season, and I doubt if there is any better fishing-ground for him."); see also October 14, 1859 ("We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden."); November 4, 1857 ("I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length, or half a mile, — I sit high."); November 30, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden. The country seems to slope up from the west end of Walden to the mountain")

Now is the time for shrub oak acorns. See September 13, 1859 ("I see some shrub oak acorns turned dark on the bushes and showing their meridian lines, but generally acorns of all kinds are green yet."); September 21, 1859 ("Acorns have been falling very sparingly ever since September 1, but are mostly wormy. They are as interesting now on the shrub oak (green) as ever."); September 28, 1858 ("The small shrub oak . . . with its pretty acorns striped dark and light alternately."); September 30, 1859 ("Most shrub oak acorns browned.")