It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature

November 13. 

8.30 A. M. — To Hill. 

I notice of late the darker green (livid ?) of the arbor vitae and other evergreens, the effect of cold. So they are never so purely bright a green as immediately after their fall. They are not perfectly ever-green. 

I hear go over, not far from the house, goldfinches, as I think, — their mewing note and ricochet flight, -— I think not redpolls, for I hear no rattling notes. Also hear a robin’s note. 

Last night was quite cold, and the ground is white with frost. Thus gradually, but steadily, winter approaches. First there is the bleached grass, then the frost, then snow, the fields growing more and more hoary. There is frost not only on all the withered grass and stubble, but it is particularly thick and white and handsome around the throat of every hole and chink in the earth’s surface, the congealed breath of the earth as it were, so that you would think at first it was the entry to some woodchuck’s, or squirrel’s, or mouse’s, retreat. But it is the great dormant earth gone into winter quarters here, the earth letting off steam after the summer’s work is over. 

As I stand on the hill at 9 A. M., it looks like snow; the sky is overcast; smokes go up thickly from the village, answering to the frost in the chinks; and there is a remarkable stillness, as if it were earlier, the effect of the colder weather merely, as it were stiffening things. Leaves, twigs, birds (except the chickadee, and its feeble note seems to enhance the stillness), and insects are hushed. The few tinkling sounds — the chopping, or the like — are heard far and distinctly. It is like the calm before a hurricane or an earthquake, this stillness which precedes the winter’s setting in. 


Larches now look dark or brownish yellow. Now, on the advent of much colder weather, the last Populus tremuliformis has lost its leaves, the sheltered dogwood is withered, and even the scarlet oak may be considered as extinguished, and the larch looks brown and nearly bare, and the few leaves left here and there on the indigenous shrubs named on the 9th are being rapidly killed by the same cause, and are falling. 

Now for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows in the horizon in the early twilight. 

One hickory at least (on the hill) has not lost its leaves yet, i. e., has a good many left. So they are a month falling. 

I see some feathers of a blue jay scattered along a wood-path, and at length come to the body of the bird. What a neat and delicately ornamented creature, finer than any work of art in a lady’s boudoir, with its soft light purplish-blue crest and its dark-blue or purplish secondaries (the narrow half) finely barred with dusky. It is the more glorious to live in Concord because the jay is so splendidly painted.

A large flock of geese go over just before night. 

After expecting snow all day, —'though we did not know but it would prove rain,—we looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight, — only there was no moon. Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth. 

Of course frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs. 

It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature. The light reflected from bare twigs at this season — i. e., since they began to be bare, in the latter part of October — is not only like that from gossamer, but like that which will ere long be reflected from the ice that will incrust them. So the bleached herbage of the fields is like frost, and frost like snow, and one prepares for the other.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1858

I think not redpolls, for I hear no rattling notes. See November 13, 1852 ("When startled, they went off with a jingling sound somewhat like emptying a bag of coin. Is it the yellow redpoll?"); September 19, 1854 ("Did I see a returned yellow redpoll fly by? "); November 21, 1852 ("The commonest bird I see and hear nowadays is that little red crowned or fronted bird I described the 13th. I hear now more music from them. They have a mewing note which reminds me of a canary-bird. They make very good forerunners of winter. Is it not the {lesser redpoll}?”); December 11, 1855 ("Standing there, though in this bare November landscape, I am reminded of the incredible phenomenon of small birds in winter. ... The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. Now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser redpolls.")


Now, on the advent of much colder weather, the last Populus tremuliformis has lost its leaves. See October 25, 1858 ("Aspens (tremuliformis) generally bare"); October 29, 1858 ("Am surprised to see, by the path to Baker Farm, a very tall and slender large Populus tremuliformis still thickly clothed with leaves which are merely yellowish greén."); November 10, 1853 ("There are still a few leaves on the large Populus tremuliformis, but they will be all gone in a day or two. They have turned quite yellow.")

Now for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows in the horizon in the early twilight. See November 17, 1858 ("The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights" would be a theme for me. “)

A large flock of geese go over just before night. See November 8 , 1857 ("About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest"); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 14, 1858 ('The principal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days.") ; November 18, 1854 ("Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while.”); November 30, 1857 (“You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. . . . According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky.”)

It is wonderful what gradation and harmony there is in nature. See Walden ("Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."): January 26, 1858 (" Nature loves gradation")

The pensive shores of evening skirt the great western continent of the night.

January 8

Gilpin, in his essay on the "Art of Sketching Landscape," says: "When you have finished your sketch therefore with Indian ink, as far as you propose, tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue. It may be the rosy tint of morning; or the more ruddy one of evening; or it may incline more to a yellowish, or a greyish cast . . . By washing this tint over your whole drawing, you lay a foundation for harmony." 

I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head. 

We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day. Our mood may then possess the whole landscape, or be in harmony with it, as the hue of twilight prevails over the whole scene. 

Are we more than crepuscular in our intellectual and spiritual life? Have we awakened to broad noon? The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of the night. 

P. M. — To the Spruce Swamp in front of J. Farmer's. 

Can go across both rivers now. New routes are more practicable. 

Stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. How curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hindhead! I ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. 

It is so close to the bark I do not see its feet. It looks behind as if it had on a black cassock open behind and showing a white undergarment between the shoulders and down the back. 

It is briskly and incessantly tapping all round the dead limbs, but rarely twice in a place, as if to sound the tree and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. 

How much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tapping and inspecting it! He it is that scatters those fragments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. What a lichenist he must be! Or rather, perhaps it is fungi makes his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. 

How briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now flitting with a rippling sound of his wings to another tree! 

The lower two-thirds of the white spruce has its branches retraced or turned downward, and then curving upward at the extremities, as much as the white pine commonly slants upwards. Above it is so thick that you cannot see through it. All the black spruce that I know hereabouts stand on higher land than this. 

Saw two squirrel-nests in the thick top of a spruce. It was a foot in diameter, of coarse grass and bark fibres, with very thick bottom and sides and a scarcely distinguishable entrance, lined with fine fibres of bark, probably inner bark of maple, very warm. Probably a red squirrel's, for I heard one winding up his clock. Many white pine cones had been eaten in the neighborhood.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 8, 1854

Gilpin. William Gilpin, English writer, printmaker, clergyman and schoolmaster, best known as one of the originators of the idea of the picturesque.

I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head. See January 6, 1854 ("There was a low, narrow, clear segment of sky in the west at sunset, or just after (all the rest overcast), of the coppery yellow, perhaps, of some of Gilpin's pictures, all spotted coarsely with clouds like a leopard's skin."); September 18, 1858 ("Some long amber clouds in the horizon, all on fire with gold, were more glittering than any jewelry. . . .And when you looked with head inverted the effect was increased tenfold, till it seemed a world of enchantment.")

The morning hope is soon lost in what becomes the routine of the day, and we do not recover ourselves again until we land on the pensive shores of evening, shores which skirt the great western continent of the night. See July 3, 1840 ("We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves"), and Zphx, Against the night.; See also The hour before sunset, and Seasons of the day  and

This Morning

Oh, this life,

the now,

this morning,

which I

can turn

into forever

by simply

loving

what is here,

is gone

by noon.

~ David Budbill (Happy Life)

Probably a red squirrel's [nest] , for I heard one winding up his clock. See March 18, 1857 ("A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock.");  March 30, 1859 ("He makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one another, that you would think they came from half a dozen creatures."); September 24, 1857 ("A red squirrel chiding you from his concealment in some pine-top. . . . is the sound most native to the locality.");  November 7, 1855 ("A red one runs along the trees to scold at me, boldly or carelessly, with a chuckling, bird like note and that other peculiar sound at intervals, between a purr and a grunt."); January 17, 1860 ("In the fall they construct a nest of grass and bark-fibres, moss, etc., in one of the [white pine] trees for winter use, and so apparently have two resources") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel

A sensitive soul will be continually trying its strings to see if they are in tune.

September 12. 

I was struck this afternoon with the beauty of the Aster corymbosus with its corymbed flowers, with seven or eight long slender white rays pointed at both ends, ready to curl, shaving-like, and purplish disks, — one of the more interesting asters. 

The Smilacina racemosa berries are well red now; probably with the two- leaved. 

It occurred to me when I awoke this morning, feeling regret for intemperance of the day before in eating fruit, which had dulled my sensibilities, that man was to be treated as a musical instrument, and if any viol was to be made of sound timber and kept well tuned always, it was he, so that when the bow of events is drawn across him he may vibrate and resound in perfect harmony. 

A sensitive soul will be continually trying its strings to see if they are in tune. A man's body must be rasped down exactly to a shaving. It is of far more importance than the wood of a Cremona violin.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 12, 1853


A sensitive soul will be continually trying its strings to see if they are in tune. See July 16, 1851 ("This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us. . .,");  March 13, 1853 ("a poet must sustain his body with his poetry."); March 30, 1853 (" when the walker . . . sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart.”); December 11, 1855 ("To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery.")