Autumnal madness. My thoughts break out spotted yellow and green and brown.

September 8.

September 8, 2014

The grapes would no doubt be riper a week hence, but I am compelled to go now before the vines are stripped. I partly smell them out. 

I pluck splendid great bunches of the purple ones, with a rich bloom on them and the purple glowing through it like a fire; large red ones, also, with light dots, and some clear green. Sometimes I crawl under low and thick bowers, where they have run over the alders only four or five feet high, and see the grapes hanging from a hollow hemisphere of leaves over my head. At other times I see them dark-purple or black against the silvery undersides of the leaves, high overhead where they have run over birches or maples, and either climb or pull them down to pluck them. 

Some goldfinches twitter over, while I am pulling down the vines from the birch tops. The witch-hazel on Dwarf Sumach Hill looks as if it would begin to blossom in a day or two.

Many green-briar leaves are very agreeably thickly spotted now with reddish brown, or fine green on a yellow or green ground, producing a wildly variegated leaf. I have seen nothing more rich. Now, while I am gathering grapes, I see them. It excites me to a sort of autumnal madness. My thoughts break out like them, spotted all over, yellow and green and brown. Now for the ripening year! Even leaves are beginning to be ripe.

I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with. As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1854

I partly smell them out. . . . As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore. See August 30, 1853 ("Grapes are already ripe; I smell them first.");   September 8, 1858 (“Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house.”); September 8, 1859 ("Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe."); September 13, 1856 ("Up Assabet. Gather quite a parcel of grapes, quite ripe.. . . the best are more admirable for fragrance than for flavor. Depositing them in the bows of the boat, they fill all the air with their fragrance, as we row along against the wind, as if we were rowing through an endless vineyard in its maturity."); October 9, 1853 ("I smell grapes, . . . their scent is very penetrating and memorable.")

tinyurl.com/HDTgrapes