The meadow is so broad and level that you see shadows of clouds on it as on the sea.

July 11

A. M. — To Tarbell Swamp Hill all day with W. E. C.

Landed at path end, Great Meadows. No haying there yet. 

In the now isolated ditches, etc., there thousands of little pouts about one inch long, more or less. The water is muddy, and I see no old ones. They are rather difficult to catch (like minnows generally, but less so), but I got two and have them in spirit. 

I scare up several apparent snipes (?), which go off with a crack. They are rather heavy-looking, like woodcocks, but have gray breasts. Are probing the meadow. Quite numerous there. 

The Ludwigia sphoerocarpa, which had been out apparently a week on the 6th of August, 1855, shows hardly a sign of a flower yet. So it will hardly open before August 1st. 

The grass on the islets in those pools is much flattened in many places by the turtles, which lie out sunning on it. They tumble in before me, and by the sound and marks of one I suspect it a snap- turtle. They are commonly E. picta. 

Bathe and lunch under the oak at Tarbell's first shore. It is about as cool a place as you can find, where you get the southwest breeze from over the broad meadow, for it draws through the valley behind. 

While sitting there, see, some twenty-five rods up-stream, amid the pads on the south side, where we had passed, several apparently young ducks, which soon disappear again in the meadow-grass. Saw them hereabouts August 6th last year. They regularly breed hereabouts, and the broad meadow affords lurking-places. 

July 11, 2016

The meadow is so broad and level that you see shadows of clouds on it as on the sea. 

A great snap-turtle floats by us with his head out, in midstream, reconnoitering us. Rambles over the hill at angle. 

Allium out some time on the shore. I have only seen it here, methinks, and on the Assabet shores. 

Hear now the link of bobolinks, and see quite a flock of red-wing blackbirds and young (?). 

The water milkweed, or Asclepias pulchra.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 11, 1856

The meadow is so broad and level that you see shadows of clouds on it as on the sea. See June 3, 1858 ("It was interesting to watch from that height [Monadnock] the shadows of fair-weather clouds passing over the landscape . . . It reminded me of the similar shadows seen on the sea from the high bank of Cape Cod beach . . . [O]n a mountain-top, or on a lower elevation in a plain country or by the seaside, the shadows of clouds flitting over the landscape are a never-failing source of amusement."); See also May 30, 1852 ("Now is the summer come . . . A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave."); July 1,1854 ("I see from this hill their great shadows pass slowly here and there over the top of the green forest."); July 27, 1852 ("It is pleasing to behold at this season contrasted shade and sunshine on the side of neighboring hills. They are not so attractive to the eye when all in the shadow of a cloud or wholly open to the sunshine. Each must enhance the other.")

Hear now the link of bobolinks, and see quite a flock of red-wing blackbirds and young. See July 13, 1856 (“See quite a large flock of chattering red-wings, the flight of first broods.”);   July 15, 1854 ("We seem to be passing, or to have passed, a dividing line between spring and autumn, and begin to descend the long slope toward winter. . . . Many birds begin to fly in small flocks like grown-up broods."); July 19, 1855 ("Young bobolinks; one of the first autumnalish notes.");  July 22, 1855 ("See small flocks of red-wings, young and old, now, over the willows.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Bobolink; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Young Birds

The water milkweed, or Asclepias pulchra. See July 11, 1851 (" I pluck the blossom of the milkweed in the twilight and find how sweet it smells"); See also July 5, 1852 ("The Asclepias Cornuti (Syriaca) and the A. incarnata (pulchra) (this hardly out)");  July 7, 1853 ("The Asclepias incarnata, or water asclepias now");  July 15, 1854  ("There are many butterflies, yellow and red, about the Asclepias incarnata now."); July 16, 1851 ("I see the yellow butterflies now gathered in fleets in the road, and on the flowers of the milkweed (Asclepias pulchra) by the roadside, a really handsome flower");  July 21, 1853 ("The Asclepias incarnata is well named water silkweed, for it grows here amid the button- bushes and willows in the wettest places along the river. "); August 24, 1851 ("The pods of the Asclepias pulchra stand up pointedly like slender vases on a salver, an open salver truly! Those of the Asclepias Syriaca hang down. ") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Milkweed

July 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 11

Seen as on the sea –

shadows of clouds on the broad 

and level meadow.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The meadow is so broad

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2026

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