A botanist in pursuit of grasses tramples down oaks in his walk.

September 9. 

P. M. — To Waban Cliff. 

A very hot day, — 90°, as I hear. Yesterday was hot, too. 

Now it is about time to gather elder-berries. 

Many Viola cucullata have opened again. 

What is that short squeaking note heard from time to time from amid the weeds on the west side the river at Hubbard’s Bath? 

There are broad patches, sometimes of several acres, on the edge of the meadow, where it is wettest and weediest, which the farmers do not mow. There especially stands the brown-headed wool-grass. There are small tracts still, as it were, in their primitive condition, — wild tracts where the bittern rises and where, no doubt, the meadow-hen lurks.

(Was it the note of the last I heard?)

Heard a short plover-like note from a bird flying high across the river. 

Watched a little dipper some ten rods off with my glass, but I could see no white on the breast. It was all black and brownish, and head not enlarged. Who knows how many little dippers are sailing and sedulously diving now along the edge of the pickerel-weed and the button-bushes on our river, unsuspected by most? 

This hot September afternoon all may be quiet amid the weeds, but the dipper, and the bittern, and the yellow legs, and the blue heron, and the rail are silently feeding there. At length the walker who sits meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food along their edge: Yet ordinary eyes might range up and down the river all day and never detect its small black head above the water. 

It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants, as, for example, Juncaceoa and Gramineoe; even; i. e., I find that when I am looking for the former, I do not see the latter in their midst. 

How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He as it were tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk. 

Bidens cernua, how long?


The river is about at its height to-day or yesterday. Much bur-reed and heart-leaf is floating and washed up, apparently the first important contribution to the river wrack. The sportsman will paddle a boat now five or six miles, and wade in water up to his knees, being out all day without his dinner, and think himself amply compensated if he bags two or three yellow-legs. The most persistent and sacrificing endeavors are necessary to success in any direction. 

Woodbine scarlet, like a brilliant scarf on high, wrapped around the stem of a green tree. By a blush betrays where it hangs upon an elm. 

I find an abundance of beaked hazelnuts at Blackberry Steep, one to three burs together, but, gathering them, I get my fingers full of fine shining bristles, while the common hazel burs are either smooth or covered with a softer glandular down; i. e., its horns are brazen tipped. 

Under the rocks near the slippery elm, the Gymnostichum Hystrix, bottle-brush grass, hedgehog grass, long done. 

Rice says he saw two meadow-hens when getting his hay in Sudbury some two months ago, and that they breed there. They kept up a peculiar note. My egg (named Sept. 7th) was undoubtedly a meadow-hen’s Rallus Virginiana. 

R. says that he has caught pigeons which had ripe grapes in their crops long before any were ripe here, and that they came from the south west. 

We live in the same world with the Orientals, far off as they may seem. Nature is the same here to a chemist’s tests. 

The weeping willow (Salix Babylonica) will grow here. The peach, too, has been transplanted, and is agreeable to our palates. So are their poetry and philosophy near and agreeable to us.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 9, 1858

It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. See  November 18 1851 ("A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going.".); September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye."); March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye."); June 14, 1853 (". . . you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.”); December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”); April 28, 1856 ("Again, as so many times, I am reminded of the advantage to the poet, and philosopher, and naturalist, and whomsoever, of pursuing from time to time some other business than his chosen one, — seeing with the side of the eye.") July 2, 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”); October 13, 1857 (“We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there.”); November 4, 1858 ("Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray (continued) as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them”) Autumnal tints.("Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them”)

Many Viola cucullata have opened again. See September 4, 1856 (“Viola pedata again.”); September 10, 1857 ("I see lambkill ready to bloom a second time.”); September 16, 1852 (“Some birds, like some flowers, begin to sing again in the fall.”); and note to October 10, 1856 ("Indian summer itself is a similar renewal of the year, with the faint warbling of birds and second blossoming of flowers.”)

There are broad patches, sometimes of several acres, on the edge of the meadow, where it is wettest and weediest, which the farmers do not mow. There are small tracts still, as it were, in their primitive condition, — wild tracts where the bittern rises and where, no doubt, the meadow-hen lurks. See Walden (“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”); Walking (“A town is saved by the woods and swamps that surround it.”); January 22, 1852 (“I see, one mile to two miles distant on all sides from my window, the woods, which still encircle our New England towns. They still bound almost every view. They have been driven off only so far. Where still wild creatures haunt. How long will these last?”)