It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings.

September 22. 

To the Three Friends' Hill over Bear Hill. 

Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly.

I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid.

I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain, as if every fibre was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted.

What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance, — to keep it from rotting, — to fill its pores with music ! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music! When no music proceeds from the wire, on applying my ear I hear the hum within the entrails of the wood, — the oracular tree acquiring, accumulating, the prophetic fury.

The resounding wood! how much the ancients would have made of it! To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were, as it were, the manifest blessing of heaven on a work of man'! Shall we not add a tenth Muse to the immortal Nine?

And that the invention thus divinely honored and distinguished — on which the Muse has condescended to smile is this magic medium of communication for mankind!

To read that the ancients stretched a wire round the earth, attaching it to the trees of the forest, by which they sent messages by one named Electricity, father of Lightning and Magnetism, swifter far than Mercury, the stern commands of war and news of peace, and that the winds caused this wire to vibrate so that it emitted a harp-like and æolian music in all the lands through which it passed, as if to express the satisfaction of the gods in this invention. Yet this is fact, and we have yet attributed the invention to no god.

I am astonished to see how brown and sere the groundsel or "fire-weed” on hillside by Heywood's Meadow, which has been touched by frost, already is, — as if it had died long months ago, or a fire had run through it. It is a very tender plant. 

Standing on Bear Hill in Lincoln.

                                                September 22, 2017

The black birches ( I think they are ), now yellow, on the south side of Flint's Pond, on the hillside, look like flames. The chestnut trees are brownish-yellow as well as green. 

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings, through which all things are distinctly seen and the fields look as smooth as velvet.

The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze and the red drooping barberries sparkle amid the leaves.

From the hill on the south side of the pond, the forests have a singularly rounded and bowery look, clothing the hills quite down to the water's edge and leaving no shore; the ponds are like drops of dew amid and partly covering the leaves. So the great globe is luxuriously crowded without margin.

The Utricularia cornuta, or horned utricularia, on the sandy pond-shore, not affected by the frost.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1851

Three Friends Hill. See September 12, 1851 ("To the Three Friends' Hill beyond Flint's Pond. . . I go to Flint's Pond for the sake of the mountain view from the hill beyond, looking over Concord.")

How brown and sere the groundsel or "fire-weed” on hillside by Heywood's Meadow, which has been touched by frost, See August 23, 1856 ("On R. W. E.'s hillside by railroad, burnt over by the engine in the spring, the erechthites has shot up abundantly, very tall and straight, some six or seven feet high."); August 26, 1856 ("Also erechthites as abundant and rank in many places there as if it had been burnt over! So it does not necessarily imply fire."); August 27, 1851 ("Hawkweed groundsel (Senecio hieracifolius) (fireweed)"); August 30, 1859 ("The erechthites down has begun to fly."); September 9, 1852 ("The groundsel down is in the air."); September 20, 1851 ("On Monday of the present week water was frozen in a pail under the pump. . . .All tender herbs are flat in gardens and meadow"); September 20, 1852 ("The groundsel and hieracium down is in the air"); September 21, 1856 ("Was not the fireweed seed sown by the wind last fall, blown into the woods, where there was a lull which caused it to settle? Perhaps it is fitted to escape or resist fire. The wind which the fire creates may, perchance, lift it again out of harm's way."); October 2, 1857 ("The erechthites down (fire-weed) is conspicuous in sprout-lands of late, since its leaves were killed."); October 16, 1859 ("The flowers are at the mercy of the frosts. Places where erechthites grows, more or less bare, in sprout- lands, look quite black and white (black withered leaves and white down) and wintry")

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings.. See

 

These bracing fine days

when frosts come to ripen the

year, the days, like fruit.

September 22, 1854

See also September 20, 1851 ("This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, - cool and cloudless, bright days, . . . preceded by frosty mornings." ); October 10, 1857 ("The most brilliant days in the year, ushered in, perhaps, by a frosty morning, as this.") November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight on russet and frosty fields “) December 10, 1853 ("These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze. See September 20, 1851 ("This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, - - cool and cloudless, bright days, filled with the fragrance of ripe grapes, preceded by frosty mornings.")