The flower opens, and lo! another year.

July 9. 

Friday. 4 a.m. — To Cliffs. 

No dew; no dewy cobwebs. The sky looks mist-like, not clear blue. An aurora fading into a general saffron color. At length the redness travels over, partly from east to west, before sunrise, and there is little color in the east. 

The birds all unite to make the morning quire; sing rather faintly, not prolonging their strains. The crickets appear to have received a reinforcement during the sultry night. 

There is no name for the evening red corresponding to aurora. It is the blushing foam about the prow of the sun's boat, and at eve the same in its wake. 

I do not often hear the bluebird now except at dawn. 

Methinks we have had no clear winter skies — no skies the color of a robin's egg, and pure amber around — for some months. 

These blueberries on Fair Haven have a very innocent, ambrosial taste, as if made of the ether itself, as they plainly are colored with it.

I hear the chickadee's two wiry notes. 

The jay's note, resounding along a raw wood-side, suggests a singular wildness. 

I hear many scarlet tanagers, the first I have seen this season, which some might mistake for a red-eye. A hoarse, rough strain, comparatively, but more easily caught owing to its simplicity and sameness; something like heer chip-er-way-heer chory chay.

A bobolink.


Morton, in his "Crania Americana," says, referring to Wilkinson as his authority, that "vessels of porcelain of Chinese manufacture have of late been repeatedly found in the catacombs of Thebes, in Egypt," some as old as the Pharaonic period, and the inscriptions on them "have been read with ease by Chinese scholars, and in three instances record the following legend: 

"The flower opens, and lo! another year." 

There is something sublime in the fact that some of the oldest written sentences should thus celebrate the coming in of spring. How many times have the flowers opened and a new year begun! Hardly a more cheering sentence could have come down to us. How old is spring, a phenomenon still so fresh! Do we perceive any decay in Nature?  How much evidence is contained in this short and simple sentence respecting the former inhabitants of this globe! It is a sentence to be inscribed on vessels of porcelain. Suggesting that so many years had gone before.  An observation as fit then as now.

The heat to-day (as yesterday) is furnace-like. It produces a thickness almost amounting to vapor in the near horizon. How intense and suffocating the heat under some sunny wood-sides where no breeze circulates!  The railroad men cannot work in the Deep Cut, but have come out on to the causeway, where there is a circulation of air. They tell with a shudder of the heat reflected from the rails. 

Yet a breezy wind, as it were born of the heat, rustles all leaves.  It is refreshing to see the surface of Fair Haven rippled with wind. The waves break here quite as on the seashore. To feel the wind blow on your body, the water flow you and lave you, is a rare physical enjoyment this hot day. Bathing is an undescribed luxury.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 9, 1852

Morton referring to Wilkinson. See John Gardner Wilkinson, A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians. [Revised and abridged from Manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians] (1854) ("One side presents a flower, and the other an inscription, containing, according to Sir J. Davis (in three out of eight he examined), the following legend: — “The flower opens, and lo! another year; ” and another has been translated by Mr. Thoms: — “During the shining of the moon the fir-tree sends forth its sap,” ( which in a thousand years becomes amber. )")

Bathing is an undescribed luxury. To feel the wind blow on your body, the water flow on you and lave you, is a rare physical enjoyment this hot day. The water is remarkably warm here, especially in the shal lows, — warm to the hand, like that which has stood long in a kettle over a fire. The pond water being so warm made the water of the brook feel very cold; and this kept close on the bottom of the pond for a good many rods about the mouth of the brook, as I could feel with my feet; and when I thrust my arm down where it was only two feet deep, my arm was in the warm water of the pond, but my hand in the cold water of the brook. See July 3, 1854 ("What a luxury to bathe now! It is gloriously hot, — the first of this weather. I cannot get wet enough. I must let the water soak into me. I begin to inhabit the planet, and see how I may be naturalized at last.”) See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing

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