The local cloud of the mountain

August 9.


Looking into the clear southwest sky not long after sundown, all at once a small cloud begins to form half a mile from the summit and rapidly grows in a mysterious manner till it drapes and conceals the summit above us for a few moments, then passes off and disappears northeastward just as it had come.

Watching these small clouds forming and dissolving about the summit of our mountain, I cast my eyes toward the dim bluish outline of the Green Mountains in the clear red evening sky, and, to my delight, I detect exactly over the summit of Saddleback Mountain, some sixty miles distant, its own little cloud shaped like a parasol and answering to that which caps ours.

There is no other cloud to be seen in that horizon. It is a beautiful and serene object, a sort of fortunate isle in the sunset sky, the local cloud of the mountain.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 9, 1860

I cast my eyes toward the dim bluish outline of the Green Mountains in the clear red evening sky. See August 6, 1860 ("These are the Green Mountains that we see, but there is no greenness, only a bluish mistiness; and all of Vermont is but a succession of parallel ranges of mountains.”)

Its own little cloud shaped like a parasol. See November 12, 1852 (“From Fair Haven Hill, I see a very distant, long, low dark-blue cloud in the northwest horizon beyond the mountains, and against this I see, apparently, a narrow white cloud resting on every mountain and conforming exactly to its outline”)

August 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 9

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021