Be not in haste

August 28 

First watermelon. 

P. M. — To tortoise eggs, Marlborough road. 

Potentilla Norvegica again. 

I go over linnaea sprout lands. 

The panicled cornel berries are whitening, but already mostly fallen. As usual the leaves of this shrub, though it is so wet, are rolled like corn, showing the paler under sides. At this season it would seem that rain, frost, and drought all produce similar effects. 

Now the black cherries in sprout-lands are in their  prime, and the black choke-berries just after huckleberries and blueberries. They are both very abundant this year. The branches droop with cherries. Those on some trees are very superior to others. 

The bushes are weighed down with choke-berries, which no creature appears to gather. This crop is as abundant as the huckleberries have been. They have a sweet and pleasant taste enough, but leave a mass of dry pulp in the mouth. But it is worth the while to see their profusion, if only to know what nature can do. 

Huckleberries are about given up, low blueberries more or less shrivelled, low blackberries done, high blackberries still to be had. Viburnum nudum berries are beginning; I already see a few shrivelled purple ones amid the light green. Poke berries also begun. 

A goldfinch twitters away from every thistle now, and soon returns to it when I am past. I see the ground strewn with the thistle-down they have scattered on every side. 

At Tarbell's andromeda swamp. A probable Bidens connata or small chrysanthemoides. 

I open the painted tortoise nest of June 10th, and find a young turtle partly out of his shell. He is roundish and the sternum clear uniform pink. The marks on the sides are pink. The upper shell is fifteen sixteenths of an inch plus by thirteen sixteenths. He is already wonderfully strong and precocious. Though those eyes never saw the light before, he watches me very warily, even at a distance. With what vigor he crawls out of the hole I have made, over opposing weeds! He struggles in my fingers with great strength; has none of the tenderness of infancy. His whole snout is convex, and curved like a beak. Having attained the surface, he pauses and warily watches me. In the meanwhile another has put his head out of his shell, but I bury the latter up and leave them.

Meanwhile a striped squirrel sits on the wall across the road under a pine, eying me, with his cheek-pouches stuffed with nuts and puffed out ludicrously, as if he had the mumps, while the wall is strewn with the dry brown husks of hazelnuts he has stripped. A bird, perhaps a thrasher, in the pine close above him is hopping restlessly and scolding at him. 

June, July, and August, the tortoise eggs are hatching a few inches beneath the surface in sandy fields. You tell of active labors, of works of art, and wars the past summer; meanwhile the tortoise eggs underlie this turmoil. What events have transpired on the lit and airy surface three inches above them! Sumner knocked down; Kansas living an age of suspense. Think what is a summer to them! How many worthy men have died and had their funeral sermons preached since I saw the mother turtle bury her eggs here! They contained an undeveloped liquid then, they are now turtles. 

June, July, and August, — the livelong summer, — what are they with their heats and fevers but sufficient to hatch a tortoise in. Be not in haste; mind your private affairs. Consider the turtle. A whole summer — June, July, and August — is not too good nor too much to hatch a turtle in. 

Perchance you have worried yourself, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seemed rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with a turtle's pace. 

The young turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience and learns the ways of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fail. Has not the tortoise also learned the true value of time? You go to India and back, and the turtle eggs in your field are still unhatched. French empires rise or fall, but the turtle is developed only so fast. 

What's a summer? Time for a turtle's eggs to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. 

They have seen no berries, had no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as much as for you?

Euphorbia hypericifolia, how long? It has pretty little white and also rose-colored petals, or, as they are now called, involucre. Stands six inches high, regularly curving, with large leaves prettily arranged at an angle with both a horizontal and perpendicular line. 

See the great oval masses of scarlet berries of the arum now in the meadows. Trillium fruit, long time.

August 28, 2014

The river being thus high, for ten days or more I have seen little parcels of shells left by the muskrats. So they eat them thus early. 

Peppermint, how long? May be earlier than I have thought, for the mowers clip it. 

The bright china-colored blue berries of the Cornus sericea begin to show themselves along the river, amid their red-brown leaves, — the kinnikinnic of the Indians. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 28, 1856

The panicled cornel berries are whitening. See August 15, 1854 ("Panicled cornel berries on College Road. “); August 22, 1852 ("The panicled cornel berries now white. “)

I open the painted tortoise nest of June 10th. See June 10, 1856 ("A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel-track on the Marlborough road.”). See also August 26, 1854 ("Open one of my snapping turtle's eggs.”)

Be not in haste. September 17, 1839 ("Nature never makes haste; her systems revolve at an even pace."); July 19, 1851 ("This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in me, why should it hurry me?"); August 19, 1851 ("The seasons do not cease a moment to revolve, and therefore Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other."); September 24, 1859 ("Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it.")

Has not the great world existed for them as much as for you? See September 9, 1854 ("Thus the earth is the mother of all creatures.”); August 26, 1854 ("I am convinced that there must be an irresistible necessity for mud turtles.”)

The bright china-colored blue berries of the Cornus sericea [red-osier dogwood]] begin to show themselves along the river. .See  August 28, 1852 ("Now the red osier berries are very handsome along the river, overhanging the water, for the most part pale blue mixed with whitish, -- part of the pendant jewelry of the season.”);   See also August 31, 1856 (“The Cornus sericea, with its berries just turning, is generally a dull purple now."); September 1, 1854 (The Cornus sericea berries are now in prime, of different shades of blue, lighter or darker, and bluish white. . . .a great ornament to our causeways and riverside.”)

What is a summer? 

Time for turtle eggs to hatch

June, July, August.

Nature steadily 

and serenely advances 

with a turtle's pace.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Be not in haste

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560828