8 a. m. — To Lee's Cliff by river.
Salix pedicellaris off Holden's has been out of bloom several days at least. So it is earlier to begin and to end than our S. lucida.
This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are.
Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.
Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.
I see a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a certain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what this grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass.
For I only see those other facts as through a glass darkly.
Crataegus Crus-Galli, maybe a day.
Early iris.
Viburnum-Lentago, a day or more.
Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the fore noon and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers.
The long mocker-nut on Conantum not yet out, and the second, or round, one will be yet later. Its catkins are more grayish.
I see many great devil's-needles in an open wood, — and for a day or two, — stationary on twigs, etc., standing out more or less horizontally like thorns, holding by their legs and heads(?). They do not incline to move when touched, and their eyes look whitish and opaque, as if they were blind.
They were evidently just escaped from the slough. I often see the slough on plants and, I think, the pupa in the water, as at Callitriche Pool.
As I sit on Lee's Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. Regularly, at short intervals, it utters its monotonous note like till-till-till, or pe-pe-pe. Looking round for its prey and occasionally changing its perch, it every now and then darts off (phoebe-like), even five or six rods, to ward the earth to catch an insect, and then returns to its favorite perch. If I lose it for a moment, I soon see it settling on the dead twigs again and hear its till, till, till. It appears through the glass mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail.
There is a thorn now in its prime, i. e. near the beaked hazel, Conantum, with leaves more wedge-shaped at base than the Cratcegus coccinea; apparently a variety of it, between that and Crus-Galli. (In press.)
A kingbird's nest, with two of its large handsome eggs, very loosely set over the fork of a horizontal willow by river, with dried everlasting of last year, as usual, just below Garfield's boat. Another in black willow south of long cove (east side, north of Hubbard's Grove) and another north of said cove.
A brown thrasher's nest, with two eggs, on ground, near lower lentago wall and toward Bittern Cliff.
The Ranunculus Purshii is in some places abundantly out now and quite showy. It must be our largest ranunculus (flower).
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857
Salix pedicellaris off Holden's has been out of bloom several days at least. See May 4, 1858 (“Salix pedicellaris at Holden's Swamp, staminate, out apparently two days.”)
Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind.
I see a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a certain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what this grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass.
For I only see those other facts as through a glass darkly.
Crataegus Crus-Galli, maybe a day.
Early iris.
Viburnum-Lentago, a day or more.
Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the fore noon and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers.
The long mocker-nut on Conantum not yet out, and the second, or round, one will be yet later. Its catkins are more grayish.
I see many great devil's-needles in an open wood, — and for a day or two, — stationary on twigs, etc., standing out more or less horizontally like thorns, holding by their legs and heads(?). They do not incline to move when touched, and their eyes look whitish and opaque, as if they were blind.
They were evidently just escaped from the slough. I often see the slough on plants and, I think, the pupa in the water, as at Callitriche Pool.
As I sit on Lee's Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. Regularly, at short intervals, it utters its monotonous note like till-till-till, or pe-pe-pe. Looking round for its prey and occasionally changing its perch, it every now and then darts off (phoebe-like), even five or six rods, to ward the earth to catch an insect, and then returns to its favorite perch. If I lose it for a moment, I soon see it settling on the dead twigs again and hear its till, till, till. It appears through the glass mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail.
There is a thorn now in its prime, i. e. near the beaked hazel, Conantum, with leaves more wedge-shaped at base than the Cratcegus coccinea; apparently a variety of it, between that and Crus-Galli. (In press.)
A kingbird's nest, with two of its large handsome eggs, very loosely set over the fork of a horizontal willow by river, with dried everlasting of last year, as usual, just below Garfield's boat. Another in black willow south of long cove (east side, north of Hubbard's Grove) and another north of said cove.
A brown thrasher's nest, with two eggs, on ground, near lower lentago wall and toward Bittern Cliff.
The Ranunculus Purshii is in some places abundantly out now and quite showy. It must be our largest ranunculus (flower).
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857
Salix pedicellaris off Holden's has been out of bloom several days at least. See May 4, 1858 (“Salix pedicellaris at Holden's Swamp, staminate, out apparently two days.”)
Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts. Compare Walden ("Solitude") ("Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled")
Each season is but an infinitesimal point. See May 23, 1841 ("All nature is a new impression every instant");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. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); January 26, 1852 (" The moment always spurs us. The spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life."); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.") and Economy, ("In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”); April 24, 1859 ("The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.") December 8, 1859 ("Only the poet has the faculty to see present things as if also past and future, as if universally significant.”)
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