I go across lots like a hunting dog.

August 10. 

Sunday. 

The weather is fair and clear at last. The dog-days over at present, which have lasted since July 30th. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill and Walden.

Fragrant everlasting, maybe some days. 

Rhus copallina not yet for two or three days. 

The Pycnanthemum incanum, the handsomest of the pycnanthemums, grows also at the west end the Knoll with the R. copallina. All the upper leaves are equally hoary there in the light. The corymbs are an inch across, and the flowers large and very prettily purple-spotted. They are swarming with great wasps of different kinds, and bees.

Hear the wood thrush still.

I go across lots like a hunting dog. With what tireless energy and abandonment they dash through the brush and up the sides of hills! I meet two white foxhounds, led by an old red one. How full of it they are! How their tails work! They are not tied to paths; they burst forth from the thickest shrub oak lot, and immediately dive into another as the fox did.

There are more varieties of blackberries between the low and the high than I take notice of. Vide that kind in the Well Meadow Field.

The fine (early sedge?) grass in the frosty hollows about Walden (where no bushes have sprung up) looks like an unkempt head. 

Vernonia, how long? 

The river has been rising all day. It is between two and a half and three feet higher than ten days ago. Even the white umbels of the sium are drowned, except here and there where they stand over the water. It is within nine and a half inches of the top of Hoar's wall at 6 p. m. 

The meadows have quite a springlike look, yet the grass conceals the extent of the flood. It appears chiefly where it is mown. Yet a quarter part as much rain would have raised the river more in the spring, so much of it was soaked up by the thirsty earth. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 10, 1856

They are swarming with great wasps of different kinds: Pycnanthemum incanum, with the common name hoary mountain-mint, wild basil or hoary basil, is a herbaceous perennial in the mint family. Pycnanthemum means "dense flower-clusters" in Greek, and the flowers are favored by butterflies, moths, and some species of wasps. ~ wikipedia

Hear the wood thrush still.  See August 10, 1854 ("The woods are comparatively still at this season"); August 12, 1851("I hear a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise, as in the heat of the day."); August 12, 1854 ("Have not heard a wood thrush since last week of July."); August 14, 1853 (" I hear no wood thrushes for a week"); August 18, 1852 ("The woods are very still. I hear only a faint peep or twitter from one bird, then the never-failing wood thrush, it being about sunrise,..").

I go across lots like a hunting dog.. . .See April 22, 1852 ("A strange dog accompanies us today, a hunting dog, gyrating about us at a great distance, beating every bush and barking at the birds, with great speed, gyrating his tail too all the while. Our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet. This stranger dog has good habits for a companion, he keeps so distant. He never trusts himself near us, though he accompanies us for miles.").

August 10. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau , August 10

 

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 © 2009-2021