A season to awake

July 7.

July 7, 2012

Before I rise I hear the song of birds from out the fog, like the bursting of its bubbles with music, the bead on liquids just uncorked. 

Oh, might I always wake to thought and poetry – regenerated! 

I came near awaking this morning. 

I am older than last year; the mornings are further between; the days are fewer.  

When the yellow lily flowers in the meadows, and the red in dry lands and by wood-paths, then, methinks, the flowering season has reached its height. They surprise me as perhaps no more can. 

Now I am prepared for anything.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 7, 1852


4 a.m. — The first really foggy morning. Yet before I rise I hear the song of birds from out it, like the bursting of its bubbles with music, the bead on liquids just uncorked. Their song gilds thus the frostwork of the morning. As if the fog were a great sweet froth on the surface of land and water, whose fixed air escaped, whose bubbles burst with music. The sound of its evaporation, the fixed air of the morning just brought from the cellars of the night escaping. The morning twittering of birds in perfect harmony with it. 

I came near awaking this morning. I am older than last year; the mornings are further between ; the days are fewer. 

Any excess — to have drunk too much water, even, the day before — is fatal to the morning's clarity, but in health the sound of a cow-bell is celestial music. 

Oh, might I always wake to thought and poetry — regenerated ! Can [it] be called a morning, if our senses are not clarified so that we perceive more clearly, if we do not rise with elastic vigor? 

How wholesome these fogs which some fear ! They are cool, medicated vapor baths, mingled by Nature, which bring to our senses all the medical properties of the meadows. The touchstones of health. Sleep with all your windows open, and let the mist embrace you. 

To the Cliffs. 

The fog condenses into fountains and streams of music, as into the strain of the bobolink which I hear, and runs off so. The music of the birds is the tinkling of the rills that flow from it. 

I cannot see twenty rods. The trees look darker through it, and their outlines more distinct, apparently because of the whiteness of the fog and the less light that comes through the trees. There is everywhere dew on the cobwebs, little gossamer veils or scarfs as big as your hand, dropped from fairy shoulders that danced on the grass the past night. Even where the grass was cut yesterday and is now cocked up, these dewy webs are as thick as anywhere, promising a fair day.

There is no sunrise.

***
The very handsome "pink purple" flowers of the Calopogon (!) pulchellus enrich the grass all around the edge of Hubbard's blueberry swamp, and are now in their prime. 

• 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, and difficult — at least the calopogon — to preserve. 

But they are flowers, excepting the first, at least, without a name. Pogonia! Calopogon ! ! They would blush still deeper if they knew what names man had given them. 

The first and the last interest me most, for the pogonia has a strong snaky odor. 

July 7, 1852

The mornings are further between; the days are fewer. See July 20, 1852 ("The stars are few and distant; the fireflies fewer still.")

Methinks the flowering season has reached its height. See July 7, 1851 ("And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds.”)

The pogonia has a strong snaky odor. See note to July 7, 1856 ("The snake-head arethusa is now abundant ") and June 21, 1852 ("The adder's-tongue arethusa smells exactly like a snake.")

I am older now

mornings are further between –

the days are fewer.