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| September 29, 2019 |
P. M. — To Goose Pond via E. Hosmer's; return by Walden.
Found Hosmer carting out manure from under his barn to make room for the winter. He said he was tired of farming, he was too old. Quoted Webster as saying that he had never eaten the bread of idleness for a single day, and thought that Lord Brougham might have said as much with truth while he was in the opposition, but he did not know that he could say as much of himself. However, he did not wish to be idle, he merely wished to rest.
Looked on Walden from the hill with the sawed pine stump on the north side. Scared up three black ducks, which rose with a great noise of their wings, striking the water. The hills this fall are unusually red, not only with the huckleberry, but the sumach and the blackberry vines. Walden plainly can never be spoiled by the wood- chopper, for, do what you will to the shore, there will still remain this crystal well.
The intense brilliancy of the red-ripe maples scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks and hickories on its hilly shore is quite charming. They are unexpectedly and incredibly brilliant, especially on the western shore and close to the water's edge, where, alternating with yellow birches and poplars and green oaks, they remind me of a line of soldiers, redcoats and riflemen in green mixed together.
The pine is one of the richest of trees to my eye. It stands like a great moss, a luxuriant mildew, — the pumpkin pine, — which the earth produces without effort.
The poet writes the history of his body.
Query: Would not the cellular tissue of the grass poly make good tinder? I find that, when I light it, it burns up slowly and entirely, without blaze, like spunk.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 29, 1851
The intense brilliancy of the red-ripe maples scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks and hickories on its hilly shore is quite charming. See September 25, 1857 ("A single tree becomes the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale and attracts the attention of the traveller from afar."); September 26, 1854 ("Some single red maples are very splendid now, the whole tree bright-scarlet against the cold green pines; now, when very few trees are changed, a most remarkable object in the landscape; seen a mile off."); September 27, 1855 ("Some single red maples now fairly make a show along the meadow. I see a blaze of red reflected from the troubled water."); October 3, 1856 (" Especially the hillsides about Walden begin to wear these autumnal tints in the cooler air. These lit leaves, this glowing, bright-tinted shrubbery, is in singular harmony with the dry, stony shore of this cool and deep well."); October 3, 1858 ("Some particular maple among a hundred will be of a peculiarly bright and pure scarlet, and, by its difference of tint and intenser color, attract our eyes even at a distance in the midst of the crowd"); October 8, 1852 (“Nothing can exceed the brilliancy of some of the maples which stand by the shore and extend their red banners over the water.”)
Scared up three black ducks, which rose with a great noise of their wings, striking the water. See September 24, 1855 ("See coming from the south in loose array some twenty apparently black ducks . . . for a moment assumed the outline of a fluctuating harrow"); September 30, 1853 ("Friday. Saw a large flock of black ducks flying northwest in the form of a harrow."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Black Duck
The poet writes the history of his body. See August 19, 1851 ("The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind,"); May 23, 1853 ("The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected. Every new flower that opens, no doubt, expresses a new mood of the human mind.”); April 8, 1854 ("The poet deals with his privatest experience."); October 21, 1857 ("Is not the poet bound to write his own biography?")
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