Grapes for some time have perfumed the house.

September 8. 

6 A. M. —On river. 

September 8 2018

It flows with a full tide. When it is thus deep its current is swift, and then its surface (commonly smooth and dark) is freckled with ripples, or rather I should say that swifter currents are here and there bursting up from be low and spreading out on every side, as if the river were breaking over a thousand concealed rocks. The surface is broken and dimpled with upswelling currents. 

Red oak acorns, yet green, are abundantly cut off by the squirrels. 

The yellow-legs is nodding its head along the edge of the meadow. I hear also its creaking te te te.

Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house. 

P. M. — To Owl Swamp. 

I perceive the dark-crimson leaves, quite crisp, of the white maple on the meadows, recently fallen. This is their first fall, i. e. of those leaves which changed long ago. They fall, then, with birches and chestnuts, etc. (lower leaves), before red maples generally begin to turn. 

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. So, in my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing. 

“Though man proposeth, God disposeth all.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1858

Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house. See September 8, 1852 (“Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days”) and  note to September 8, 1854 ("I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with..”); September 8, 1859 ("Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe")

Red oak acorns, yet green, are abundantly cut off by the squirrels. See September 12, 1854 (“The red oak began to fall first.”)

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs. See April 29, 1852 ("The art of life, not having anything to do, is to do something.”); September 13, 1852 ("To the . . . idle man, the stillness of a placid September day sounds like the din and whirl of a factory. Only employment can still this din in the air.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day

In my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing. See  March 18, 1858 ("Going by the epigaea on Fair Haven Hill, I thought I would follow down the shallow gully through the woods from it, that I might find more or something else.");  April 13, 1860 ("At first I had felt disinclined to make this excursion up the Assabet, but it distinctly occurred to me that, perhaps, if I came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, I might discover something else interesting.”); compare September 2, 1856; (" I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood.”);  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. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work . . . that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.")