Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing.
My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to! Though, with respect to our channels, our valleys, and the country we are fitted to drain, we are Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels.
The arbor-vita: by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom.
I notice acorns sprouted.
My birch wine now, after a week or more, has become pretty clear and colorless again, the brown part having settled and now coating the glass.
Helped Mr. Emerson set out in Sleepy Hollow two over-cup oaks, one beech, and two arbor-vitaes.
As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. I put one which had been open all winter into water, and in an hour or two it shut up nearly as tight as at first.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1856
I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. . . . See March 17, 1852 ("I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual"); July 16, 1851(" I am astonished. I am daily intoxicated. There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion -- . . . I am dealt with by superior powers"); May 24, 1851 ("My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place”).
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