About 6:30 P.M. paddle on Walden.
August 28, 2014
The sky is completely overcast.
I am in the shade of the woods when, just before setting, the sun comes out into a clear space in the horizon and a sudden blaze of light falls on east end of the pond and the hillside. At this angle a double amount of bright sunlight reflects from the water up to the underside of the still very fresh green leaves of the bushes and trees on the shore and on Pine Hill, revealing the most vivid and varied shades of green. I never saw such a green glow before. It is a wonderful contrast with the previous and still surrounding darkness .
When the sun falls lower, and the sunlight no longer fell on the pond, the green blaze of the hillside at once diminishes, because the light no longer reflects upward to it.
At sunset the air over the pond is 62 + ; the water at the top, 74°; poured from a stoppled bottle which lay at the bottom where one hundred feet deep, twenty or thirty minutes, 55° (and the same when drawn up in an open bottle which lay five minutes at the bottom); in an open bottle drawn up from about fifty feet depth (there) or more, after staying there five minutes, 63°. This about half the whole difference between the top and bottom, so that the temperature seems to fall regularly as you descend, at the rate of about one degree to five feet. When I let the stoppled bottle down quickly, the cork was forced out before it got to the bottom, when [ ? ] the water drawn up stood at 66°. Hence it seemed to be owing to the rising of the warmer water and air in the bottle. Five minutes with the open bottle at the bottom was as good as twenty with it stoppled. I found it 2° warmer than the 24th, though the air was then 4° warmer than now. Possibly, comparing one day with the next, it is warmer at the bottom in a cold day and colder in a warm day, because when the surface is cooled it mixes more with the bottom, while the average temperature is very slightly changed.
The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 28, 1860
a sudden blaze of light falls on east end of the pond and the hillside. See September 3, 1860 ("The dense fresh green grass which has sprung up since it was mowed reflects a blaze of light, as if it were morning all the day.”); September 27, 1855 ("I see a blaze of red reflected from the troubled water.”); September 13, 1852 ("At this season, a golden blaze salutes me here from a thousand suns.”)
The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp. See August 26, 1859 ("A new plant, apparently Lycopodium inundatum, Hubbard's meadow-side.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Lycopodiums
tinyurl.com/greenblaze
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