It is truly a raw and gusty day,
and I hear a tree creak sharply
like a bird, a phoebe.
The jays with their scream
are at home in the scenery.
My thought is a part
of the meaning of the world,
of the meaning of the world,
and hence i use a part of the world
as a symbol to express my thought.
Must be out-of-doors enough
to get experience of wholesome reality,
as a ballast to thought and sentiment.
Health requires this relaxation,
this aimless life.
This life in the present.
Let a man have thought
what he will of Nature in the house,
she will still be novel outdoors.
I keep out of doors for the sake of the
mineral, vegetable, and animal in me.
To Hubbard's Close.
I find no traces of the fringed gentian here,
so that in low meadows
I suspect it does not last very late.
The fertile catkins of the yellow birch
appear to be in the same state
with those of the white,
and their scales
are also shaped like birds,
but much larger.
The shad-bush buds
have expanded into
small leaflets already.
I have failed to find
white pine seed this year,
though I began to look for it a month ago.
The cones were fallen and open.
But those grand and glorious mountains,
how impossible to remember daily
that they are there,
and to live accordingly!
They are meant to be
a perpetual reminder to us,
pointing out the way.
The true sportsman
can shoot you almost
any of his game from his windows.
It comes and perches at last
on the barrel of his gun;
but the rest of the world
never see it with the feathers on.
He will keep himself supplied
by firing up his chimney.
The geese fly exactly under his zenith,
and honk when they get there.
The fisherman, too, dreams of fish,
till he can almost catch them
in his sink-spout.
We cannot see any thing
until we are possessed
with the idea of it,
and then
we can hardly see
anything else.
In my botanical rambles
I find that first the idea,
or image,of a plant
occupies my thoughts,
though it may at firat
seem very foreign to this locality,
and for some weeks or months
I go thinking of it and
expecting it unconsciously,
and at length I surely see it,
and it is henceforth
an actual neighbor of mine.
This is the history of my finding
a score or more of rare plants
which I could name.
As I go over John Hosmer's High Level,
I notice for the first time
that peculiar blueness of the river
agitated by the wind
and contrasting with
the tawny fields,
a fall phenomenon.
White birch seed
has but recently begun to fall.
has but recently begun to fall.
I see a quarter of an inch
of many catkins bare.
of many catkins bare.
The birch begins to shed its seed
about the time our winter birds
arrive from the north.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
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