Lighting up of the mist by the sun.

February 27. 

Saw to-day on Pine Hill behind Mr. Joseph Merriam's house a Norway pine, the first I have seen in Concord. Mr. Gleason pointed it out to me as a singular pine which he did not know the name of. It was a very handsome tree, about twenty-five feet high.

E. Wood thinks that he has lost the surface of two acres of his meadow by the ice. Got fifteen cartloads out of a hummock left on another meadow. Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. 

Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare  knows that he knows nothing, and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all, — what great advantage has the latter over the former ? which is the best to deal with? 

I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise, or a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we had called knowledge before; an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know in any higher sense, than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 27, 1851

Blue-joint was introduced into the first meadow where it did not grow before. See February 25, 1851 ("The crust of the meadow afloat. . . .When the ice melts or the soil thaws, of course it falls to the bottom, wherever it may be. Here is another agent employed in the distribution of plants.")

It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. See Walking