Vermont from Monadnock

August 6.

Evening is the most interesting season. When the sun is half an hour high I get sight, as it were accidentally, of an elysium beneath me. The smoky haze of the day gives place to a clear transparent enamel, through which houses, woods, farms, and lakes are seen indescribably fair. We distinguish the reflections of the woods perfectly in ponds three miles off. By the shadows, the landscape is shown to be not flat, but hilly.

But above all, from half an hour to two hours before sunset, many western mountain-ranges are revealed as the sun declines, one behind another, by their dark outlines and the intervening haze. The Connecticut Valley is one broad gulf of haze over which I count eight distinct ranges, revealed by the darker lines of the ridges rising successively higher as if a succession of terraces reaching as far as you can see from north to south.

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.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1860

We distinguish the reflections of the woods perfectly in ponds three miles off. See August 4, 1852 ("A pleasant time to behold a small lake in the woods . . . With its glassy reflecting surface , , ,more full of light than the regions of the air above it")

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

 

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