We have a cool, white sunset, Novemberish, and no redness to warm our thoughts.

October 27. 

P. M. — Sail to Fair Haven Pond. 

A moderate northerly wind and pleasant, clear day. 

There is a slight rustle from the withered pontederia.

The Scirpus lacustris, which was all conspicuously green on the 16th, has changed to a dull or brownish yellow. 

The bayonet rush also has partly changed, and now, the river being perhaps lower than before this season, shows its rainbow colors, though dull. It depends, then, on the river being low at an earlier period, say a month ago at least, when this juncus is in its full vigor, — though then, of course, you would not get the yellow!——that the colors may be bright. 

I distinguish four colors now, perfectly horizontal and parallel bars, as it were, six or eight inches wide as you look at the side of a dense patch along the shallow shore. The lowest is a dull red, the next clear green, then dull yellowish, and then dark brown. These colors, though never brilliant, are yet noticeable, and, when you look at a long and dense patch, have a rainbow-like effect. 

The red (or pinkish) is that part which has been recently submerged; the green, that which has not withered; the yellowish, what has changed; and the brown, the withered extremity, since it dies downward gradually from the tip to the bottom. The amount of it is that it decays gradually, beginning at the top, and throughout a large patch one keeps pace with another, and different parts of the plant being in different stages or states at the same time and, moreover, the whole being of a uniform height, a particular color in one plant corresponds exactly to the same in another, and so, though a single stalk would not attract attention, when seen in the mass they have this singular effect. 

I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush. When, moreover, you see it reflected in the water, the effect is very much increased. 

The leaves of the Salix cordata are now generally withered and many more fallen. They are light-brown, and many remain on the twigs, so many that this willow and the tristis I think must be peculiar in this respect as well as its  turning scarlet. Some others, as the sericea, are still yellow and greenish and have not been touched by frost. They must be tougher. 

At the east shore of Fair Haven Pond I see that clams have been moving close to the water’s edge. They have just moved a few feet toward the deeper water, but they came round a little, like a single wheel on its edge. 

Alders are fallen without any noticeable change of color. 

The leaves of young oaks are now generally withered, but many leaves of large oaks are greenish or alive yet. Many of them fall before withering. I see some now three quarters bare, with many living leaves left. Is it not because on larger trees they are raised above the effect of frost? 

We have a cool, white sunset, Novemberish, and no redness to warm our thoughts. 

Not only the leaves of trees and shrubs and flowers have been changing and withering, but almost countless sedges and grasses. They become pale-brown and bleached after the frost has killed them, and give that peculiar light, almost silvery, sheen to the fields in November. 

The colors of the fields make haste to harmonize with the snowy mantle which is soon to invest them and with the cool, white twilights of that season which is itself the twilight of the year. 

They become more and more the color of the frost which rests on them. 

Think of the interminable forest of grasses which dies down to the ground every autumn! What a more than Xerxean army of wool-grasses and sedges without fame lie down to an ignominious death, as the mowers esteem it, in our river meadows each year, and become “old fog” to trouble the mowers, lodging as they fall, that might have been the straw beds of horses and cattle, tucked under them every night! The fine-culmed purple grass, which lately we admired so much, is now bleached as light as any of them.

Culms and leaves robbed of their color and withered by cold. This is what makes November—and the light reflected from the bleached culms of grasses and the bare twigs of trees! When many hard frosts have formed and melted on the fields and stiffened grass, they leave them almost as silvery as themselves. There is hardly a surface to absorb the light. 

It is remarkable that the autumnal change of our woods has left no deeper impression on our literature yet. There is no record of it in English poetry, apparently because, according to all accounts, the trees acquire but few bright colors there. Neither do I know any adequate notice of it in our own youthful literature, nor in the traditions of the Indians. One would say it was the very phenomenon to have caught a savage eye, so devoted to bright colors. In our poetry and science there are many references to this phenomenon, but it has received no such particular attention as it deserves. High-colored as are most political speeches, I do not detect any reflection, even, from the autumnal tints in them. They are as colorless and lifeless as the herbage in November. The year, with these dazzling colors on its margin, lies spread open like an illustrated volume. The preacher does not utter the essence of its teaching. 

A great many, indeed, have never seen this, the flower, or rather ripe fruit, of the year, — many who have spent their lives in towns and never chanced to come into the country at this season. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that the tints had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. 

October has not colored our poetry yet. 

Not only many have never witnessed this phenomenon, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

It is impossible to describe the infinite variety of hues, tints, and shades, for the language affords no names for them, and we must apply the same term monotonously to twenty different things. If I could exhibit so many different trees, or only leaves, the effect would be different. When the tints are the same they differ so much in purity and delicacy that language, to describe them truly, would have not only to be greatly enriched, but as it were dyed to the same colors herself, and speak to the eye as well as to the ear. And it is these subtle diflerences which especially attract and charm our eyes. Where else will you study color under such advantages? What other school of design can vie with this?

To describe these colored leaves you must use colored words. How tame and ineffectual must be the words with which we attempt to describe that subtle difference of tint, which so charms the eye? Who will undertake to describe in words the difference in tint between two neighboring leaves on the same tree? or of two thousand? — for by so many the eye is addressed in a glance. 

In describing the richly spotted leaves, for instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal twist toward our mark, — such as reddish, yellowish, purplish, etc. We cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be compounded like colors, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 27, 1858

The leaves of the Salix cordata are now generally withered and many more fallen. They are light-brown, and many remain on the twigs, so many that this willow and the tristis I think must be peculiar in this respect as well as its turning scarlet. See October 16, 1858 ("It is remarkable among our willows for turning scarlet, and I can distinguish this species now by this,. . .. It is as distinctly scarlet as the gooseberry, though it may be lighter.")

We have a cool, white sunset, Novemberish, and no redness to warm our thoughts. See October 25, 1858 ("Call these November Lights. Hers is a cool, silvery light.”); November 18, 1857 (“The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight.”)

The cool, white twilights of that season which is itself the twilight of the year. See August 31, 1852 ("The evening of the year is colored like the sunset.”); October 24, 1858 (“the sky before the end of the day, and the year near its setting. October is the red sunset sky, November the later twilight. ); ;November 2, 1853("We come home in the autumn twilight. . . — clear white light, which penetrates the woods”); November 14, 1853 ("the clear, white, leafless twilight of November”)