After passing Hubbard's Bridge, looking up the smooth river between the rows of button-bushes, willows, and pads, we see the sun shining on Fair Haven Hill behind a sun-born cloud, while we are in shadow, -- a misty golden light, yellow, fern-like, with shadows of clouds flitting across its slope, -- and horses in their pasture standing with outstretched necks to watch us; and now they dash up the steep in single file, as if to exhibit their limbs and mettle.
Sunday. 8.30 a. m. — To the Sudbury meadows in boat.
Peter Robbins says that the rain of yesterday has not reached the potatoes, after all. Exorbitant potatoes! It takes a good deal to reach them, — serious preaching to convert them.
The white lilies and the floating-heart are both well open at this hour, and more abundant than I have noticed them before. Like ducks, the former sit on the water as far as I can see on both sides.
As we push away from Monroe's shore, the robins are singing and the swallows twittering. There is hardly a cloud in the sky. There are dewy cob webs on the grass; so this is a fit morning for any adventure. It is one of those everlasting mornings, with cobwebs on the grass, which are provided for long enterprises.
It is a sabbath within the water as well as in the air and on the land, and even the little pickerels not half so long as your finger appear to be keeping it holy amid the pads. There is a sort of dusty or mealy light in the bream's tail and fins waving in clear water.
The river is now in all its glory, adorned with water-lilies on both sides. Walkers and sailers ordinarily come hither in the afternoon, when the lilies are shut, and so never see the river in its pride. They come after the exhibition is over for the day, and do not suspect it.
We are gliding swiftly up the river by Barrett's Bend. The surface of the water is the place to see the pontederia from, for now the spikes of flowers are all brought into a dense line, — a heavy line of blue, a foot or more in width, on one or both sides of the river. The pontederias are now in their prime, there being no withered heads. They are very freshly blue. In the sun, when you are looking west, they are of a violaceous blue. The lilies are in greater profusion than when we came to see them before. They appear to be too many for the insects, and we find enough untouched.
Horsemint (Mentha Canadensis) is now out.
We take a bath at Hubbard's Bend. The water seems fresher, as the air, in the morning. Again under weigh, we scare up the great bittern amid the pontederia, and, rowing to where he alights, come within three feet of him and scare him up again. He flies sluggishly away plowing the air with the coulter of his breast-bone, and alighting ever higher up the stream.
We scare him up many times in the course of an hour. The surface of the river is spotted with the radical leaves of the floating-heart, large and thin and torn, rarely whole, which something has loosened from the bottom. The larks and blackbirds and kingbirds are heard in the meadows. But few button-bushes are in blossom yet.
Are they dark-brown weed-like fibrous roots of the plant itself that invest its stems below?
Harmless bright-downy clouds form in the atmosphere on every side and sail the heavens. After passing Hubbard's Bridge, looking up the smooth river between the rows of button-bushes, willows, and pads, we see the sun shining on Fair Haven Hill behind a sun-born cloud, while we are in shadow, — a misty golden light, yellow, fern-like, with shadows of clouds flitting across its slope, — and horses in their pasture standing with outstretched necks to watch us; and now they dash up the steep in single file, as if to exhibit their limbs and mettle.
The carcass of a cow which has recently died lies on the sandy shore under Fair Haven, close to the water. Perhaps she was poisoned with the water parsnip, which is now in flower and abounds along the side of the river.
We have left the dog in the middle of Fair Haven Bay swimming in our wake, while we are rowing past Lee's, and we see no more of him.
How simple are the ornaments of a farmhouse! To one rowing past in the middle of a warm summer day, a well at a distance from the house in the shadow of an oak, as here, is a charming sight. The house, too, with no yard but an open lawn sloping to the river. And young turkeys seen wandering in the grass, and ever and anon hopping up as if a snake had scared them. The pontederias are alive with butterflies. Here is a fisherman's willow pole left to mark a lucky place, with green shoots at the top. The other day I noticed that Neighbor Gorman's willow bean poles had grown more than his beans.
We now go through the narrow gut at the bend near the town bound. A comfortable day. Methinks we shall have no torrid blazing dry heats after this," but muggy, dog-dayish weather, tempered by mists and shadows of fogs, the evaporation of vegetation? The nights, too, can be decidedly cool.
No one has ever put into words what the odor of water-lilies expresses. A sweet and innocent purity. The perfect purity of the flower is not to be surpassed. They now begin to shut up. Looking toward the sun, I cannot see them, cannot distinguish lilies from the sun reflected from the pads.
Thus we go on, into the Sudbury meadows, opening the hills. The near hills, even, have a misty blueness, — a liquid one, like a field of oats yet green. Both wish now to face up-stream and see the hills open.
The Peltandra Virginica (Calla), which I saw well budded opposite the Pantry, July 1st, has flowered and curved downward into the water and mud, but I observe other flowers to come. The columbine lingers still.
The red-eye sings at noon, and the song sparrow. The bobolink I do not hear of late, — not since this fall-like, late-feeling weather. Now the fogs have begun, in midsummer and mid-haying time.
We go inland to the Jenkins house spring, through the handsome oak grove, white and black (?), eight or nine of them, on the further edge of the meadow, where the haymakers' path comes in. Strawberries are still occasionally found in meadows. The Cerasus Virginiana, or choke-cherry, is turning, nearly ripe.
We sit on the edge of the hill at the Jenkins house, looking northward over a retired dell in the woods, an unfrequented johnswort and blackberry field, surrounded by a deep forest — with several tall white pines against the horizon, a study of which you would never tire.
The swallows twitter over head, the locust, we know not where, is z-ing, and the huckleberry-bird is heard on the birches. The ground under the apple tree, where we lie, is strewn with small sun-baked apples, but we are not yet reminded of apples.
When I think of the London Times and the reviews here, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and of the kind of life which it is possible to live here, I perceive that this, the natural side, has not got into literature. Think of an essay on human life, through all which was heard the note of the huckleberry-bird still ringing, as here it rings ceaselessly. As if it were the muse invoked! The Revue des Deux Mondes does not embrace this view of things, nor imply it.
Which neottia have I found? In the front and lowest rank, the narrow-leaved polygonum, in the river, I see a flower or two beginning. The farmers have cut some meadow-hay here. In the broader meadows the river winds the most, where there are no iron-bound rocky hills to constrain it. Through all these Sudbury meadows it is a perfect meander, where no wind will serve the sailer long. It is a luxury to sit sailing or rowing here and look off to the hills, at the deep shadows of the trees in which the cattle stand. We land on the left, half a mile above Sherman's Bridge, ramble to the " sand " and poplars, where I picked up two arrow heads. The Spergula arvensis, corn-spurry, which has long been in blossom; the Raphanus Raphanistrum, wild radish; the Lycopus sinuatus, horehound. Here is a horse who keeps the hilltop for the breeze.
We push still further up the river into the great meadow, scaring the bitterns, the largest and the next in size. In many parts of the river the pickerel-weed is several rods wide, its blueness akin to the misty blue air which paints the hills. You thin it by rising in the boat; you thicken or deepen it by sitting low. (When we looked from the hills, there was a general sheeny light from the broad, level meadow, from the bent grass, watered, as it were, with darker streaks where a darker grass, the pipes, etc., bordered the (for the most part) concealed river.)
The lilies are shut. First on the edge of the bright river in the sun, in this great meadow, are the pads, then the pontederia or polygonum, then the bulrushes standing in dense squadrons, or pipes or meadow-grass, then the broad heavens, in which small downy clouds are constantly forming and dissolving. No fear of rain. The sky is a pretty clear blue, yet not such a skimmed-milk blue, methinks, as in winter; some cream left in the milk. I cannot believe that any of these dissolving cloudlets will be rainbow-tinged or mother-o'-pearled.
I observe that even in these meadows, where no willows nor button-bushes line the shore, there is still a pretty constant difference between the shores. The border of pontederia is rarely of equal depth on both sides at once, but it keeps that side in the meander where the sediment is deposited, the shortest course which will follow the shore, as I have dotted it,
crossing from this side to that as the river meanders; for on the longest side the river is active, not passive, wearing into the bank, and runs there more swiftly. This is the longest line of blue that nature paints with flowers in our fields, though the lupines may have been more densely blue within a small compass. Thus by a natural law a river, instead of flowing straight through its meadows, meanders from side to side and fertilizes this side or that, and adorns its banks with flowers. The river has its active and its passive side, its right and left breast.
Return.
There is a grand view of the river from the hill near Rice's. The outlines of this hill, as you ascend it, and its various swells are very grateful, closely grazed, with a few shade trees on its sides. You look far south over the gulf meadow, and north also. The meadow-grass seen from this side has no sheen on it. Round Hill is a mathematical curve. The petals of the rhexia have a beautiful clear purple with a violet tinge. The Brasenia peltata, or water-shield, which was budded July 1st, is now in blossom, — obscure reddish blossoms.
To what plant does that elliptical pad belong whose lobes lap more than half an inch, three inches long, and stem lenticular on a cross-section? Does the Kalmiana so vary? What kind of lettuce (or Nabalus?) is that, with triangular hastate leaves, reddish stem, and apparently whitish flowers, now budded ?
When near home, just before sundown, the sun still inconveniently warm, we were surprised to observe on the uppermost point of each pontederia leaf a clear drop of dew already formed, or flowing down the leaf, where all seemed still warmth and dryness, also as often hanging from the lobes below. It appeared a wonderful chemistry by which the broad leaf had collected this pearly drop on its uppermost extremity. The sun had no sooner sunk behind the willows and the button-bushes, than this process commenced.
And now we see a slight steam like smoke rising from amidst the pontederias. In half an hour the river and the meadows are white with fog, like a frosted cake. As you stand on the bank in the twilight, it suddenly moves up in sprayey clouds, moved by an unfelt wind, and invests you where you stand, its battalions of mists reaching even to the road.
But there is less in the morning.
Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.
Got green grapes to stew.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 18, 1852
Every poet has trembled on the verge of science. See February 18, 1852(“It is impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science.”)
A Book of 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
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