Like light reflected from a fog-bank. A season of prolonged youth.

September 19. 

September 19, 2014

Viburnum Lentago berries now perhaps in prime, though there are but few blue ones.

Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter, I realize how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I think with what more than princely, with what poetical, leisure I have spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy-free. 

I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! 

I cannot overstate this advantage. I do not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public had been expecting as much of me as there is danger now that they will. If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter?

It has been my vacation, my season of growth and expansion, a prolonged youth.

An upland plover goes off from Conantum top (though with a white belly), uttering a sharp white, tu white. 

That drought was so severe that a few trees here and there—birch, maple, chestnut, apple, oak—have lost nearly all their leaves. 

I see large flocks of robins with a few flickers, the former keeping up their familiar peeping and chirping. 

Many pignuts have fallen. 

Hardhack is very commonly putting forth new leaves where it has lost the old. They are half an inch or three quarters long, and green the stems well. 

The stone-crop fruit has for a week or more had a purplish or pinkish tinge by the roadside. Fallen acorns in a few days acquire that wholesome shining dark chestnut color. 

Did I see a returned yellow redpoll fly by? 

I saw, some nights ago, a great deal of light reflected from a fog-bank over the river upon Monroe’s white fence, making it conspicuous almost as by moonlight from my window. 

September 19, 2014

(And in the distance

a maple by the water, 

beginning to blush.)

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 19, 1854

I see large flocks of robins with a few flickers, the former keeping up their familiar peeping and chirping. See August 21, 1854 ("I see robins in small flocks and pigeon woodpeckers with them."); September 21, 1853 ("[Near Bangor] saw robins in flocks going south.")

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