The jays with their scream
at home in the scenery
this raw gusty day.
remind me of snows to come.
Shelter for the birds.
November 4, 1851
The birch sheds its seed
about the time winter birds
arrive from the north.
November 4, 1860
arrive from the north.
November 4, 1860
This raw gusty day
the jays with their scream
at home in the scenery
I hear a tree creak
sharply like a bird,
a phoebe.
A few small hemlocks
remind me of snows to come –
shelter for the birds.
My thought is a part
of the meaning of the world,
and hence I use a part
of the world as a symbol
to express my thought.
Must be out-of-doors enough
to get experience of wholesome reality,
as a ballast to thought and sentiment.
Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.
This life in the present.
Let a man have thought
what he will of Nature in the house,
she will still be novel outdoors.
I keep out of doors
for the sake of the
mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.
To Hubbard's Close.
I find no traces of the fringed gentian here,
so that in low meadows
I suspect it does not last very late.
The fertile catkins of the yellow birch
appear to be in the same state with those of the white,
and their scales are also shaped like birds,
but much larger.
The shad-bush buds
have expanded into small
leaflets already.
The winter is approaching.
The birds are almost all gone.
The note of the dee de de sounds now more distinct,
prophetic of winter,
as I go amid the wild apples.
November 4, 1855
I have failed to find white pine seed this year,
though I began to look for it a month ago.
The cones were fallen and open.
Look the first of September.
I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting,
this cool evening.
Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout
whose leaves still glow with life,
Walden lies an oblong square
endwise to, beneath me.
Its surface is slightly rippled,
and dusky prolonged reflections of trees
extend wholly across its length.
November 4, 1857
 |
Overlooking Walden Pond toward
Waschusett, from Pine Hill
April 28, 1906
Waschusett, from Pine Hill
April 28, 1906
But those grand and glorious mountains,
how impossible to remember daily
that they are there,
and to live accordingly!
They are meant to be
a perpetual reminder to us,
pointing out the way.
November 4, 1857
The true sportsman
can shoot you almost any of his game
from his windows.
It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun;
but the rest of the world never see it with the feathers on.
He will keep himself supplied
by firing up his chimney.
The geese fly exactly under his zenith,
and honk when they get there.
The fisherman, too, dreams of fish,
till he can almost catch them
in his sink-spout
We cannot see any thing
until we are possessed with the idea of it,
and then we can hardly see anything else
.
In my botanical rambles
I find that first the idea, or image,
of a plant occupies my thoughts,
though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality,
and for some weeks or months
I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously,
and at length I surely see it,
and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine.
This is the history of my finding
a score or more of rare plants which I could name.
I notice for the first time
that peculiar blueness of the river
agitated by the wind
and contrasting with the tawny fields –
a fall phenomenon.
White birch seed has but recently begun to fall.
I see a quarter of an inch of many catkins bare.
The birch sheds its seed
about the time winter birds
arrive from the north.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2018
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
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