The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852
Fleets of butterflies
filling the air with yellow
in their zigzag flight.
A fine misty rain
lies on the reddish grass tops
like morning cobwebs.
July 14, 2014
Awake to day of gentle rain, — very much needed; none to speak of for nearly a month, methinks. July 14, 1854
The cooler and stiller day has a valuable effect on my spirits. July 14, 1854
.
A fine, misty rain falls. It lies on the fine reddish tops of some grasses, thick and whitish like morning cobwebs. July 14, 1854
The stillness is very soothing. July 14, 1854
How deep or perhaps slaty sky-blue are those blueberries that grow in the shade in dense drooping clusters under the fresh green of oak and hickory sprouts. July 14, 1852
Saw something blue, or glaucous, in Beck Stow’s Swamp to-day; approached and discovered the Andromeda Polifolia, in the midst of the swamp at the north end, not long since out of bloom. July 14, 1853
This is another instance of a common experience. When I am shown from abroad, or hear of, or in any [way] become interested in, some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. July 14, 1853
There is an abundance of the buck-bean there also. July 14, 1853
See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road like a mackerel fleet with their small hulls and great sails now suddenly dispersing on our approach and filling the air with yellow in their zigzag flight, as when a fair wind calls schooners out of haven and disperses them over the broad ocean. July 14, 1852
I see a rose, now in its prime, by the river, in the water amid the willows and button-bushes, while others, lower on shore, are nearly out of bloom. July 14, 1853
This is another instance of a common experience. When I am shown from abroad, or hear of, or in any [way] become interested in, some plant or other thing, I am pretty sure to find it soon. July 14, 1853
There is an abundance of the buck-bean there also. July 14, 1853
See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road like a mackerel fleet with their small hulls and great sails now suddenly dispersing on our approach and filling the air with yellow in their zigzag flight, as when a fair wind calls schooners out of haven and disperses them over the broad ocean. July 14, 1852
I see a rose, now in its prime, by the river, in the water amid the willows and button-bushes, while others, lower on shore, are nearly out of bloom. July 14, 1853
The red capsules of the Hypericum ellipticum, here and there. This one of the fall-ward phenomena in still rainy days. July 14, 1854.
A very tall ragged orchis by the Heywood Brook, two feet high, almost like a white fringed one. Lower ones I have seen some time. July 14, 1853
Bass out about two days at Island. July 14, 1856.
Senecio long gone to seed and dispersed. July 14, 1856.
While drinking at Assabet Spring in woods, noticed a cherry-stone on the bottom. A bird that came to drink must have brought it half a mile. So the tree gets planted! July 14, 1856
Saw apparently my little ruby(?)-crested wren(?) on the weeds there. July 14, 1856
The creaking of the crickets seems at the very foundation of all sound. At last I cannot tell it from a ringing in my ears. It is a sound from within, not without. July 14, 1851
The creaking of the crickets seems at the very foundation of all sound. At last I cannot tell it from a ringing in my ears. It is a sound from within, not without. July 14, 1851
If I take the same walk by moonlight an hour later or earlier in the evening, it is as good as a different one. I love the night for its novelty; it is less prophaned than the day. July 14, 1851
Health is a sound relation to nature. July 14, 1854
The voice of a bear was like that of a woman in distress. July 14, 1858
The voice of a bear was like that of a woman in distress. July 14, 1858
July 14, 2019
*****
See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau:
*****
May 5, 1859 ("Near the oak beyond Jarvis land, a yellow butterfly, — how hot! this meteor dancing through the air.")
May 28, 1854 (“To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe”)
June 3, 1857 ("The bass at the Island will not bloom this year.")
June 5, 1854 (“I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.”)
June 11, 1851 ("Hardly two nights are alike.")
July 3, 1853 ("There are no flowers on bass trees commonly this year.")
July 8, 1858 (“In the course of the afternoon we heard, as we thought, a faint shout, and . . . soon Wentworth decided that it must be a bear, for they make a noise like a woman in distress.”)
July 12, 1851 ("Nature is in as rude health as when Homer sang. We may at last by our sympathies be well.")
July 13, 1854 (“In the midst of July heat and drought.”)
July 17, 1852 ("Beck Stow's Swamp! . . . deep and impenetrable, where the earth quakes for a rod around you at every step, with its open water where the swallows skim and twitter, its meadow and cotton-grass, its dense patches of dwarf andromeda, now brownish-green, with clumps of blue berry bushes, its spruces and its verdurous border of woods imbowering it on every side.")
July 17, 1856 ("Hear at distance the hum of bees from the bass with its drooping flowers at the Island, a few minutes only before sunset. It sounds like the rumbling of a distant train of cars")
July 18, 1854 ("We have very few bass trees in Concord, but walk near them at this season and they will be betrayed, though several rods off, by the wonderful susurrus of the bees, etc., which their flowers attract.")
July 19, 1851("I see yellow butterflies in pairs, pursuing each other a rod or two into the air, and now, as he had bethought himself of the danger of being devoured by a passing bird, he descends with a zigzag flight to the earth, and the other follows.")
July 19, 1856 ("It is the Hypericum ellipticum . . . whose red pods are noticed now.")
July 19, 1856 ("Fleets of yellow butterflies on road.")
July 22, 1853 ("Yellow butterflies in the road.")
July 23, 1860 ("The late rose is now in prime along the river, a pale rose-color but very delicate, keeping up the memory of roses.")
July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places.")
July 26, 1856 ("The pod of the ellipticum, when cut, smells like a bee.")
August 19, 1854 ("There is now a remarkable drought.")
August 19, 1852 ("The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.").
August 23, 1853 ("For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. "Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.”)
Walden ("Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”)
September 1, 1860 ("See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it. . . .The bird is bribed with the pericarp to take the stone with it and do this little service for Nature. Thus a bird's wing is added to the cherry-stone which was wingless, and it does not wait for winds to transport it.");
September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that ... those [seeds] the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds")
October 26, 1857.(My moods are thus periodical, not two days in my year alike.)
November 18, 1857 ("Sympathy with nature is an evidence of perfect health.”)
December 16, 1853 ("Would you be well, see that you are attuned to each mood of nature")
January 9, 1855 (“Make a splendid discovery this afternoon. Walking through Holden’s white spruce swamp, I see peeping above the snow-crust some slender delicate evergreen shoots very much like the Andromeda Polifolia, amid sphagnum, lambkill, Andromeda calyculata, blueberry bushes, etc., though there is very little to be seen above the snow. It is, I have little doubt, the Kalmia glauca var. rosmarinifolia.”)
January 23, 1858 ("To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one; . . . I do not see that I can live tolerably without affection for Nature.")
July 14, 2022
If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
you will have occasion to repeat it
with illustrations the next,
and the season and life itself is prolonged.
A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 14
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024
https://tinyurl.com/HDT14JULY
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