Are there any finer days in the year than these?

September 22.

The river is peculiarly smooth and the water clear and sunny as I look from the stone bridge. A painted tortoise with his head out, outside of the weeds, looks as if resting in the air with head and flippers outstretched.

As I look off from the hilltop, wonder if there are any finer days in the year than these. The air is so fine and more bracing, and the landscape has acquired some fresh verdure withal. The frosts come to ripen the year, the days, like fruits. 

Crossing the hill behind Minott’s just as the sun is preparing to dip below the horizon, the thin haze in the atmosphere north and south along the west horizon reflects a purple tinge and bathes the mountains with the same, like a bloom on fruits. Is it not another evidence of the ripe days?

What if we were to walk by sunlight with equal abstraction and aloofness, yet with equally impartial observation and criticism. As if it shone not for you, nor you for it, but you had come forth into it for the nonce to admire it. 

By moonlight we are not of the earth earthy, but we are of the earth spiritual. So might we walk by sunlight, seeing the sun but as a moon, a comparatively faint and reflected light, and the day as a brooding night, in which we glimpse some stars still.

By moonlight all is simple. We are enabled to erect ourselves, our minds, on account of the fewness of objects. We are no longer distracted. It is simple as bread and water. It is simple as the rudiments of an art, — a lesson to be taken before sunlight, perchance, to prepare us for that.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1854

Any finer days in the year than these. The air is so fine and more bracing. See September 22, 1851 ("It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings.");See also September 18, 1858 ("It is a wonderful day."); September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.");  September 20, 1851 ("This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, - cool and cloudless, bright days, . . . preceded by frosty mornings." ); September 21, 1859 (" A peculiarly fine September day, looking toward the fall, warm and bright.") Also see A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

By moonlight all is simple. We are no longer distracted. See September 21, 1851 ("Moonlight is peculiarly favorable to reflection . It is a cold and dewy light in which the vapors of the day are condensed, and though the air is obscured by darkness, it is more clear.")