July 5.
I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature.
The progress of the season is indescribable.
I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature.
The progress of the season is indescribable.
It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle-berrying.
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1852
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1852
Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. SeeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cherry-bird (cedar waxwing)
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.. See January 9, 1853 (" I thought of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity . . .”); July 16, 1851 ("It is an air this afternoon that makes you indifferent to all things, - perfect summer. . . You know not heat nor cold. What season of the year is this?") See also August 6, 1852 (" Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming.")
The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, . . — its four or five open purple flowers — . . . makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa. See July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, " crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers,")
July 5. I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love ? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature. White lilies continue to open in the house in the morning and shut in the night for five or six days, un til their stamens have shed their pollen and they turn rusty and begin to decay, and the beauty of the flower is gone, and its vitality, so that it no longer expands with the light.
How perfect an invention is glass ! There is a fitness in glass windows which reflect the sun morning and evening, windows, the doorways of light, thus reflecting the rays of that luminary with a splendor only second to itself. This invention one would say was anticipated in the arrangement of things. The sun rises with a salute and leaves the world with a farewell to our windows. To have, instead of opaque shutters or dull horn or paper, a material like solidified air, which reflects the sun thus brightly! It is inseparable from our civilization and enlightenment. It is encouraging that this intelligence and brilliancy or splendor should be long to the dwellings of men, and not to the cliffs and micaceous rocks and lakes exclusively.
P. M. — To Second Division Brook. The Typha latifolia, or reed-mace, sheds an abundance of sulphur-like pollen into the hand now. Its tall and handsome swords are seen waving above the bushes in low grounds now. What I suppose the Vaccinium fuscatum, or black blueberry, is now ripe here and there, quite small. Heard the Mating or lowing of a calf. Sat in the shade of the locusts in front of J. Hosmer's cottage and heard a locust z-ing on them, but could not find him. This cottage and the landscape, seen through the frame made by the " Railroad Crossing " sign, as you approach it along the winding bushy road, is a pleasing sight. It is picturesque.
There is a meadow on the Assabet just above Derby's Bridge, — it may contain an acre, — bounded on one side by the river, on the other by alders and a hill, completely covered with small hummocks which have lodged on it in the winter, covering it like the mounds in a graveyard at pretty regular intervals. Their edges are rounded like [the] latter, and they and the paths between are covered with a firm , short greensward , with here and there hardhacks springing out of them , so that they make excellent seats , especially in the shade of an elm that grows there . They are completely united with the meadow , forming little oblong hillocks from one to ten feet long , flat as a mole to the sward . I am inclined to call it the elfin burial - ground , or per- chance it might be called the Indian burial - ground . It is a remarkably firm - swarded meadow , and convenient to walk on . And these hummocks have an important effect in elevating it . It suggests at once a burial - ground of the aborigines , where perchance lie the earthly re- mains of the rude forefathers of the race . I love to ponder the natural history thus written on the banks of the stream , for every higher freshet and intenser frost is recorded by it . The stream keeps a faithful and a true journal of every event in its experience , what- ever race may settle on its banks ; and it purls past this natural graveyard with a storied murmur , and no doubt it could find endless employment for an old mortality in renewing its epitaphs .
The progress of the season is indescribable. It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. Campanula aparinoides, slender bell- flower. The Cicuta maculata, American hemlock. It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle berrying.
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. The earth is dry. Perhaps the sound of the locust expresses the season as well as anything. The farmers say the abundance of the grass depends on wet in June. I might make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard. That is our torrid zone. This dryness and heat are necessary for the maturing of fruits.
How cheering it is to behold a full spring bursting forth directly from the earth, like this of Tarbell's, from clean gravel, copiously, in a thin sheet; for it descends at once, where you see no opening, cool from the caverns of the earth, and making a consider able stream. Such springs, in the sale of lands, are not valued for as much as they are worth. I lie almost flat, resting my hands on what offers, to drink at this water where it bubbles, at the very udders of Nature, for man is never weaned from her breast while this life lasts. How many times in a single walk does he stoop for a draught!
We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. It is a factory of soil, depositing sediment.
How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs ; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you. In the Ministerial Swamp there is a great deal of the naked viburnum rising above the dwarf andromeda. The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, is remarkably handsome in the grass in low grounds, by contrast — its four or five open purple flowers — with the surrounding green. It makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa, with a slight fragrance, methinks. It is very much indebted to its situation, no doubt, in low ground, where it contrasts with the dark- green grass. All color, with only a grass-like leaf be low; flowers eminently. If it grew on dry and barren hilltops, or in woods above the dead leaves, it would lose half its attractions. Buttercups have now almost disappeared, as well as clover. Some of the earliest roses are ceasing, but others remain. I see many devil's-needles zigzagging along the Second Division Brook, some green, some blue, both with black and perhaps velvety wings. They are confined to the brook. How lavishly they are painted ! How cheap was the paint! How free the fancy of their creator! I caught a handful of small water-bugs, fifteen or twenty, about as large as apple seeds. Some country people call them apple seeds, it is said, from their scent. I perceived a strong scent, but I am not sure it was like apples. I should rather think they were so called from their shape.
Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season.
I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early.
The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc.
The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai's note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs.
The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.
Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.
How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming! Can any house [be] said to be furnished without them ? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers ? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the fine thoughts it is fitted to suggest. Shall we say, " A penny for your thoughts," before we have looked into the face of Nature ? Let me know what picture she is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing, now.
I hear my hooting owl now just before sunset. You can fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if Nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. It reminds of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. One answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. Some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it. Yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me.1
Some fields are quite yellow with johnswort now, — a pleasing motley hue, which looks autumnal. What is that small chickweed-like plant on Clamshell Hill, now out of bloom ?
The sun has set. We are in Dennis's field. The dew is falling fast. Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day and make the attraction in our western sky, — that part of day's gross atmosphere which has escaped the clutches of the night and is not enough condensed to fall to earth, — soon to be gilded by his parting rays. They are remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or, rather, as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. C, as usual, calls it a Mediterranean sky. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of clouds of wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon.
The Asclepias Cornuti (Syriaca) and the A. incarnata (pulchra) (this hardly out). Considerable fog to night.
The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Thrush
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.. See January 9, 1853 (" I thought of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity . . .”); July 16, 1851 ("It is an air this afternoon that makes you indifferent to all things, - perfect summer. . . You know not heat nor cold. What season of the year is this?") See also August 6, 1852 (" Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming.")
The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, . . — its four or five open purple flowers — . . . makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa. See July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, " crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers,")
July 5. I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love ? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature. White lilies continue to open in the house in the morning and shut in the night for five or six days, un til their stamens have shed their pollen and they turn rusty and begin to decay, and the beauty of the flower is gone, and its vitality, so that it no longer expands with the light.
How perfect an invention is glass ! There is a fitness in glass windows which reflect the sun morning and evening, windows, the doorways of light, thus reflecting the rays of that luminary with a splendor only second to itself. This invention one would say was anticipated in the arrangement of things. The sun rises with a salute and leaves the world with a farewell to our windows. To have, instead of opaque shutters or dull horn or paper, a material like solidified air, which reflects the sun thus brightly! It is inseparable from our civilization and enlightenment. It is encouraging that this intelligence and brilliancy or splendor should be long to the dwellings of men, and not to the cliffs and micaceous rocks and lakes exclusively.
P. M. — To Second Division Brook. The Typha latifolia, or reed-mace, sheds an abundance of sulphur-like pollen into the hand now. Its tall and handsome swords are seen waving above the bushes in low grounds now. What I suppose the Vaccinium fuscatum, or black blueberry, is now ripe here and there, quite small. Heard the Mating or lowing of a calf. Sat in the shade of the locusts in front of J. Hosmer's cottage and heard a locust z-ing on them, but could not find him. This cottage and the landscape, seen through the frame made by the " Railroad Crossing " sign, as you approach it along the winding bushy road, is a pleasing sight. It is picturesque.
There is a meadow on the Assabet just above Derby's Bridge, — it may contain an acre, — bounded on one side by the river, on the other by alders and a hill, completely covered with small hummocks which have lodged on it in the winter, covering it like the mounds in a graveyard at pretty regular intervals. Their edges are rounded like [the] latter, and they and the paths between are covered with a firm , short greensward , with here and there hardhacks springing out of them , so that they make excellent seats , especially in the shade of an elm that grows there . They are completely united with the meadow , forming little oblong hillocks from one to ten feet long , flat as a mole to the sward . I am inclined to call it the elfin burial - ground , or per- chance it might be called the Indian burial - ground . It is a remarkably firm - swarded meadow , and convenient to walk on . And these hummocks have an important effect in elevating it . It suggests at once a burial - ground of the aborigines , where perchance lie the earthly re- mains of the rude forefathers of the race . I love to ponder the natural history thus written on the banks of the stream , for every higher freshet and intenser frost is recorded by it . The stream keeps a faithful and a true journal of every event in its experience , what- ever race may settle on its banks ; and it purls past this natural graveyard with a storied murmur , and no doubt it could find endless employment for an old mortality in renewing its epitaphs .
The progress of the season is indescribable. It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. Campanula aparinoides, slender bell- flower. The Cicuta maculata, American hemlock. It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle berrying.
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. The earth is dry. Perhaps the sound of the locust expresses the season as well as anything. The farmers say the abundance of the grass depends on wet in June. I might make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard. That is our torrid zone. This dryness and heat are necessary for the maturing of fruits.
How cheering it is to behold a full spring bursting forth directly from the earth, like this of Tarbell's, from clean gravel, copiously, in a thin sheet; for it descends at once, where you see no opening, cool from the caverns of the earth, and making a consider able stream. Such springs, in the sale of lands, are not valued for as much as they are worth. I lie almost flat, resting my hands on what offers, to drink at this water where it bubbles, at the very udders of Nature, for man is never weaned from her breast while this life lasts. How many times in a single walk does he stoop for a draught!
We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. It is a factory of soil, depositing sediment.
How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs ; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you. In the Ministerial Swamp there is a great deal of the naked viburnum rising above the dwarf andromeda. The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, is remarkably handsome in the grass in low grounds, by contrast — its four or five open purple flowers — with the surrounding green. It makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa, with a slight fragrance, methinks. It is very much indebted to its situation, no doubt, in low ground, where it contrasts with the dark- green grass. All color, with only a grass-like leaf be low; flowers eminently. If it grew on dry and barren hilltops, or in woods above the dead leaves, it would lose half its attractions. Buttercups have now almost disappeared, as well as clover. Some of the earliest roses are ceasing, but others remain. I see many devil's-needles zigzagging along the Second Division Brook, some green, some blue, both with black and perhaps velvety wings. They are confined to the brook. How lavishly they are painted ! How cheap was the paint! How free the fancy of their creator! I caught a handful of small water-bugs, fifteen or twenty, about as large as apple seeds. Some country people call them apple seeds, it is said, from their scent. I perceived a strong scent, but I am not sure it was like apples. I should rather think they were so called from their shape.
Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season.
I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early.
The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc.
The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai's note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs.
The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.
Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.
How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming! Can any house [be] said to be furnished without them ? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers ? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the fine thoughts it is fitted to suggest. Shall we say, " A penny for your thoughts," before we have looked into the face of Nature ? Let me know what picture she is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing, now.
I hear my hooting owl now just before sunset. You can fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if Nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. It reminds of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. One answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. Some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it. Yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me.1
Some fields are quite yellow with johnswort now, — a pleasing motley hue, which looks autumnal. What is that small chickweed-like plant on Clamshell Hill, now out of bloom ?
The sun has set. We are in Dennis's field. The dew is falling fast. Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day and make the attraction in our western sky, — that part of day's gross atmosphere which has escaped the clutches of the night and is not enough condensed to fall to earth, — soon to be gilded by his parting rays. They are remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or, rather, as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. C, as usual, calls it a Mediterranean sky. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of clouds of wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon.
The Asclepias Cornuti (Syriaca) and the A. incarnata (pulchra) (this hardly out). Considerable fog to night.
The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Thrush
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