It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time

August 18. 

August 18, 2016

P. M. — To Beck Stow's. 

Now, perhaps, get thoroughwort. The lecheas in the Great Fields are now turning red, especially the fine one. 

As I go along the hillsides in sprout-lands, amid the Solidago stricta, looking for the blackberries left after the rain, the sun warm as ever, but the air cool nevertheless, I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. 

It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail. Such preparation, such an outfit has our life, and so little brought to pass! 

Hear a faint-warbling bird amid birches and pines. Clear-yellow throat and breast, greenish-yellow head, conspicuous white bar on wings, white beneath, forked tail, bluish legs. Can it be pine warbler? The note, thus faint, is not like it. 

See black and white creeper. 

Yellow Bethlehem-star yet, and indigo. 

Saw yesterday and some days before a monster aphis some five eighths of an inch long on a huckleberry leaf. I mistook it, as before, for a sort of loose-spun cocoon. It was obovate, indistinctly ribbed, of long, loose, white, streaming down, but being touched it recoiled and, taken off the leaf, rolled itself into a ball. The father of all the aphides.

OEnothera pumila still.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 18, 1856

I hear the steady shrilling of . . .the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. See August 15, 1852 ("That clear ring like an alder locust (is it a cricket ?) for some time past is a sound which belongs to the season."); August 4, 1856 (" Have heard the alder cricket some days. The turning-point is reached."); August 4, 1851 ("I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. . . .").

It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time,  . . . so little brought to pass! See August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? . . .The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life. The sound of so many insects and the sight of so many flowers affect us so,. . . They say, 'For the night cometh in which no man may work.'") See also July 31, 1856 ("I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years."); Henry Thoreau A Book of the Seasons: Midsummer midlife blues