By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe.

August 3. 

The Hypericum Sarothra appears to be out.

12 M.   At the east window. A temperate noon.

I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano.

The music reminds me of imagined heroic ages; it suggests such ideas of human life and the field which the earth affords as the few noblest passages of poetry.

Those few interrupted strains which reach me through the trees suggest the same thoughts and aspirations that all melody, by whatever sense appreciated, has ever done.

I am affected.

What coloring variously fair and intense our life admits of! How a thought will mould and paint it! Impressed by some vague vision, as it were, elevated into a more glorious sphere of life, we no longer know this, we can deny its existence. We say we are enchanted, perhaps.

But what I am impressed by is the fact that this enchantment is no delusion. So far as truth is concerned, it is a fact such as what we call our actual existence, but it is a far higher and more glorious fact.It is evidence of such a sphere, of such possibilities.

It is its truth and reality that affect me. A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me.

By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. 

August 3, 2015

This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood.

It is possible to live a grander life here; already the steed is stamping, the knights are prancing; already our thoughts bid a proud farewell to the so-called actual life and its humble glories.

Now this is the verdict of a soul in health. But the soul diseased says that its own vision and life alone is true and sane.

What a different aspect will courage put upon the face of things! This suggests what a perpetual flow of spirit would produce.

Of course, no man was ever made so truly generous, was so expanded by any vile draught, but that he might be equally and more expanded by imbibing a saner and wholesomer draught than ever he has swallowed. There is a wine that does not intoxicate; there is a pure juice of the grape, and unfermented.

What kind of draught is that which the aspirant soul imbibes? 

In every part of Great Britain are discovered the traces of the Romans, -- their funereal urns, their lamps, their roads, their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not based on any Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization.

P. M. - To Boulder Field.

Vernonia Noveboracensis, iron-weed, by Flint's Bridge, began to open by July 31st; a tall plant with a broad fastigiate corymb of rich dark-purple thistle-like flowers, the middle ones opening first.

Saw two hay carts and teams cross the shallow part of the river in front of N. Barrett's, empty, to the Great Meadows. An interesting sight. The Great Meadows alive with farmers getting their hay. I could count four or five great loads already loaded in different parts.

Clematis Virginiana just begun.

Observed a low prostrate veronica with roundish, regularly opposite leaves, some what crenulate, and white flowers veined with purple, in damp, cool grass. Think I have not seen it before.

A houstonia still.

The huckleberries in the low ground by the river beyond Flint's are large and fresh. The black shine as with a gloss, and the blue are equally large.

Looking down into the singular bare hollows from the back of hill near here, the paths made by the cows in the sides of the hills, going round the hollows, made gracefully curving lines in the landscape, ribbing it. The curves, both the rising and falling of the path and its winding to right and left, are agreeable.

What remarkable customs still prevail at funerals! 

The chief mourner, though it may be a maiden who has lost her lover, consents to be made a sort of puppet and is by them put forward to walk behind the corpse in the street, before the eyes of all, at a time which should be sacred to grief; is, beside, compelled, as it were, to attend to the coarse and unfeeling, almost inevitably to her impertinent, words of consolation or admonition, so called, of whatever clerical gentleman may be in the neighborhood.

Friends and neighbors of the family should bury their dead. It is fitting that they should walk in procession with parade and even assumed solemnity. It is for them to pay this kind of respect to the dead, that it be not left to hirelings alone. It is soothing to the feelings of the absent mourners.

They may fitly listen to the words of the preacher, but the feelings of the mourners should be respected.

Spergularia rubra, spurry sandwort, a pretty, minute red flower spreading flat by roadside, nearly out of blossom.

Apparently Urtica dioica, but not very stinging, may have been out some time.

Hypericum mutilum, probably last part of July.

Took that interesting view from one of the boulder rocks toward Lincoln Hills, between Hubbard's Hill and Grove and Barrett's, whose back or north and wooded side is in front, a few oaks and elms in front and on the right, and some fine boulders slumbering in the foreground.  It is a peculiar part of the town, -- the old bridle-road plains further east. A great tract here of unimproved and unfrequented country, the boulders sometimes crowned with barberry bushes.

I hear crows, the robin, huckleberry-birds, young bluebirds, etc. 

The sun coming out of a cloud and shining brightly on patches of cudweed reminds me of frost on the grass in the morning.

A splendid entire rainbow after a slight shower, with two reflections of it, outermost broad red, passing through yellow to green, then narrow red, then blue or indigo (not plain what), then faint red again. It is too remarkable to be remarked on.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 3, 1852

The Hypericum Sarothra appears to be out.  See August 3, 1856 ("Sarothra apparently now in prime.") See also August 12, 1856 (“The sarothra — as well as small hypericums generally — has a lemon scent.”);  August 19, 1856 ("The small hypericums have a peculiar smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like. ); August 30, 1856("The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 p. m. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee.”); September 2, 1859 ("The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, i.e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides. "); September 19, 1852 ("The red capsules of the sarothra."); September 23, 1852 ("The sarothra in bloom") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

I hear the sound of a distant piano. See November 20, 1851 ("It is often said that melody can be heard farther than noise, and the finest melody farther than the coarsest. I think there is truth in this, and that accordingly those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more."); January 24, 1852 ("I hear the tones of my sister's piano below . It reminds me of strains which once I heard more frequently, when, possessed with the inaudible rhythm, I sought my chamber in the cold and commụned with my own thoughts"); June 18, 1852 ("I hear a man playing a clarionet far off."); December 31, 1853 ("IThe contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”); January 13, 1857 ("I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived.")

By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody. See August 6, 1852 (" We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower."); August 23, 1853 ("Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end"); Walden (" Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength."); January 12, 1855 ("What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him; if he has voice, I have ears. I can hear when he calls."); December 5, 1856 (" I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too"); February 20, 1857 ("What is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, perchance, it is more charming and significant than to any else? Certainly they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other. . . . I see that one could not be completely described without describing the other.")

Took that interesting view from one of the boulder rocks toward Lincoln Hills, some fine boulders slumbering in the foreground. . A great tract here of unimproved and unfrequented country, the boulders sometimes crowned with barberry bushes. April 21, 1852 (" In the pasture beyond the brook, where grow the barberries, huckleberries, — creeping juniper, etc., are half a dozen huge boulders, which look grandly now in the storm, covered with greenish-gray lichens, alternating with the slatish-colored rock. Slumbering, silent, . . . A certain personality, or at least brute life, they seem to have. C. calls it Boulder Field.") November 3, 1857 (" As I return down the Boulder Field, I see the now winter-colored — i.e. reddish (of oak leaves) — horizon of hills, with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, between two of the boulders. . . — as a landscape between the frame of a picture. . . .It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it")

A splendid entire rainbow. See June 22, 1852 ("What more remarkable phenomenon than a rainbow, yet how little it is remarked!"); August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek name for the world, - Kosmos, or beauty"); August 7, 1852 ("a moment when the sun was setting with splendor in the west, his light reflected far and wide through the clarified air after a rain, and a brilliant rainbow, as now, o'erarching the eastern sky."); August 9, 1851 ("It is a splendid sunset, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people come to their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings and the sky, as the sun’s rays shine through the cloud and the falling rain we are, in fact, in a rainbow.")