The Library a wilderness of books.

March 16. 

Before sunrise. 

With what infinite and unwearied expectation and proclamation the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before! And the dogs bark still, and the thallus of lichens springs, so tenacious of life is nature. 

Spent the day in Cambridge Library. 

Walden is not yet melted round the edge. 

It is, perhaps, more suddenly warm this spring than usual. 

Mr. Bull thinks that the pine grosbeaks, which have been unusually numerous the past winter, have killed many branches of his elms by budding them, and that they will die and the wind bring them down, as heretofore. 

Saw a large flock of geese go over Cambridge and heard the robins in the College Yard. 

The Library a wilderness of books. 

Looking over books on Canada written within the last three hundred years, could see how one had been built upon another, each author consulting and referring to his predecessors. You could read most of them without changing your leg on the steps.

It is necessary to find out exactly what books to read on a given subject. Though there may be a thousand books written upon it, it is only important to read three or four; they will contain all that is essential, and a few pages will show which they are. Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand. 

I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature's primitive wildernesses. 

The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. 

When I looked into Purchas's Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. 

Those old books suggested a  certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. 

Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1852

Saw a large flock of geese go over Cambridge and heard the robins in the College Yard. See March 14, 1854 ("From within the house at 5.30 p. m. I hear the loud honking of geese, throw up the window, and see a large flock in disordered harrow flying more directly north or even northwest than usual. Raw, thick, misty weather"). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; Geese Overhead

Walden is not yet melted round the edge.  See March 14, 1852 ("The ice on Walden has now for some days looked white like snow, the surface being softened by the sun.");  Journal, March 18, 1852("The pond is still very little melted around the shore.");  April 1, 1852 ("Walden is all white ice, but little melted about the shores."); April 14. 1852 (" Walden is only melted two or three rods from the north shore yet."); April 19, 1852 (" Walden is clear of ice. The ice left it yesterday, then, the 18th. ");Walden. ("In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April;  in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53, the 23rd of March;  in '54, about the 7th of April.")

A wood pewee's nest at the Leaning Hemlocks.

June 19.

June 19

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

June 19, 2015

A pewee’s nest (bird apparently small pewee, nest apparently wood pewee’s) on a white maple’s nearly horizontal bough, eighteen feet above water, opposite Hemlocks; externally of lichens from the maple trunk, and hemlock twigs, very inconspicuous, like a lichen covered knot. I hear many wood pewees about here. 

Young song sparrows flutter about. 

A yellowbird’s nest saddled on a horizontal (or slanting down amid twigs) branch of a swamp white oak, within reach, six feet high, of fern down and lint; a sharp cone bottom; four eggs, just laid, pale flesh-color with brown spots; have one. 

There are a great many glaucous and also hoary and yellowish-green puffs on the Andromeda particulata now, some four inches in diameter. 

Wood tortoises united, with heads out of water. 

Did I enumerate the sharp-shinned hawk among ours? 

Mr. Bull found in his garden this morning a snapping turtle about twenty rods from the brook, which had there just made a round hole (apparently with head) 2 1/2 inches in diameter and 5+ deep, in a slanting direction. I brought her home and put her into a pen in the garden that she might lay (she weighed seven pounds five ounces), but she climbed over an upright fence of smooth stakes twenty-two inches high.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 19, 1855

A pewee’s nest (bird apparently small pewee, nest apparently wood pewee’s) on a white maple . . . See June 12, 1856 ("Apparently a small pewee nest on apple in Miles’s meadow. Bird on, and not to be frightened off. . ."); June 21, 1855 (" On an apple at R.W.E.’s a small pewee’s nest, on a horizontal branch, seven feet high, almost wholly of hair, cotton without, not incurved at edge; four eggs, pale cream-color.”) See also A Book of the Seasons: The Small Pewee

A yellowbird’s nest saddled on a . . .branch of a swamp white oak, within reach, six feet high, of fern down and lint; . . . four eggs, just laid, pale flesh-color with brown spots . . . See June 20, 1855 ("A summer yellowbird’s, saddled on an apple, of cotton-wool, lined with hair and feathers, three eggs, white with flesh-colored tinge and purplish-brown and black spots."). See also A Book of the Seasons: the Summer Yellowbird