Undistracted, the first bluebird comes to warble.

February 27.

Pleasant and warm, the ground half bare. Walking down the Boston road under the hill this side Clark's, it occurs to me that I have just heard a bluebird. I stop and listen to hear it again, but cannot tell whither it comes.

Now it seems to come from Pratt's house, where the window is open. I walk that way.

Messer is shingling Clark's barn. I get to the elm near Minott's, and I hear one warble distinctly.

Miss Minott and Miss Potter have both died within a fortnight past. The cottage on the hillside seems strangely deserted.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 27, 1861

I have just heard a bluebird . . . but cannot tell whither it comes. See March 22, 1855 ("The bluebird faintly warbles, with such ventriloquism that I thought him further off."); February 24, 1857 ("[A]s I cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, I that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air.")

It is very pleasant and warm , and the ground half bare. As I am walking down the Boston road under the hill this side Clark's, it occurs to me that I have just heard the twitter of a bluebird. ( C. heard one the 26th. ) 

I stop and listen to hear it again, but cannot tell whether it comes from the buttonwoods high over my head or from the lower trees on the hill top. It is not the complete bluebird warble, but the twitter only. 

And now it seems to come from Pratt's house, where the window is open, and I am not sure but it is a caged bird. I walk that way, and now think that I distinguish the minstrel in a black speck in the top of a great elm on the Common. 

Messer is shingling Clark's barn; so, to make sure, I cross over and ask him if he has heard a bluebird to-day , and he says he has several times. When I get to the elm near Minott's I hear one warble distinctly.

Miss Minott and Miss Potter have both died within a fortnight past, and the cottage on the hillside seems strangely deserted; but the first bluebird comes to warble there as usual.

 Mother hears a robin to-day. 

Buttonwood sap flows fast from wounds made last fall.

 

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

November 28 

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds —tree sparrows and chickadees — than usual about the house. 

November 28, 2023

There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape.

In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me; that is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here. 

here is the track of 

a sportsman and his dog in 

my secluded path

But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him! 

I asked Coombs the other night if he had been a-hunting lately. He said he had not been out but once this fall. He went out the other day with a companion, and they came near getting a fox. They broke his leg. He has evidently been looking forward to some such success all summer. Having done thus much, he can afford to sit awhile by the stove at the post-office. He is plotting now how to break his head. 

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. 

And all the years that I have known Walden these striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 28, 1858


A regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow"}

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? See November 13, 1858 (“Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.”); November 29, 1858 ("The snow has taken all the November out of the sky."); January 26, 1855 ("This morning it snows again,—a fine dry snow with no wind to speak of, giving a wintry aspect to the landscape . . . What changes in the aspect of the earth! ")

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me.  See  November 15, 1858 ("You are now reminded occasionally in your walks that you have contemporaries, and perchance predecessors. I see the track of a fox . . . and, in the wood-path, of a man and a dog."); December 12, 1859 ("[In the winter] you see the tracks of those who had preceded you, and so are more reminded of them than in summer."); compare January 19, 1852 ("It is pleasant to make the first tracks in this road through the woods . . . the fine, dry snow blowing and drifting still.")

Here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path See November 15, 1858 ("I see by the cakes or balls of snow that have dropped from his shoes that a man has passed. This would be known for a man and a dog’s track in any part of the world. Five toes in a bundle, somewhat diamond-shape, forming a sort of rosette, are the print of the dog.")

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. See November 28, 1859 ("Goodwin is cutting out a few cords of dead wood in the midst of E. Hubbard's old lot."); See also October 22, 1853 ("One-eyed John Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a hand-cart . . . — though he is regarded by most as a vicious character, — whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, — thus to obtain his winter's wood, — charmed me unspeakably . . . Goodwin stands on the solid earth"); See November 4, 1858 ("I took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his winter's wood; for this is one of the phenomena of the season.")

These striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! See November 26, 1858
("Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows . . .shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch . . . They have about seven transverse dusky bars like a perch! Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? "); November 27, 1858 ("I got seventeen more of those little bream of yesterday. “); November 30, 1858 ("How wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it! For more than two centuries men have fished here and have not distinguished this permanent settler of the township. When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it. But there it dwells and has dwelt permanently, who can tell how long?")

November 28. A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 28

So sudden a change –

the russet earth painted white

to the horizon. 

I cannot now walk

without leaving tracks behind.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

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 © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-581128

The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth.

November 4

November 4, 2018

A rainy day. 

Called to C. from the outside of his house the other afternoon in the rain. At length he put his head out the attic window, and I inquired if he didn’t want to take a walk, but he excused himself, saying that he had a cold. “But,” added he, “you can take so much the longer walk. Double it.” 

On the 1st, when I stood on Poplar Hill, I saw a man, far off by the edge of the river, splitting billets off a stump. Suspecting who it was, I took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his winter's wood; for this is one of the phenomena of the season. As surely as the ants which he disturbs go into winter quarters in the stump when the weather becomes cool, so does G. revisit the stumpy shores with his axe. As usual, his powder-flask peeped out from a pocket on his breast, his gun was slanted-over a stump near by, and his boat lay a little further along. He had been at work laying wall still further off, and now, near the end of the day, betook himself to those pursuits which he loved better still. It would be no amusement to me to see a gentleman buy his winter wood. It is to see G. get his. I helped him tip over a stump or two. He said that the owner of the land had given him leave to get them out, but it seemed to me a condescension for him to ask any man’s leave to grub up these stumps. The stumps to those who can use them, I say, — to those who will split them. He might as well ask leave of the farmer to shoot the musquash and the meadow-hen, or I might as well ask leave to look at the landscape. Near by were large hollows in the ground, now grassed over, where he had got out white oak stumps in previous years. But, strange to say, the town does not like to have him get his fuel in this way. They would rather the stumps would rot in the ground, or be floated down-stream to the sea. They have almost without dissent agreed on a different mode of living, with their division of labor. They would have him stick to laying wall, and buy corded wood for his fuel, as they do. He has drawn up an old bridge sleeper and cut his name in it for security, and now he gets into his boat and pushes off in the twilight, saying he will go and see what Mr. Musquash is about. 

When the Haverhill fishermen told me that they could distinguish the Concord River stuff (i. e. driftwood) I see they were right, for much of it is chestnut rails, and of these they have but few, and those in the southern part of New Hampshire. 

If, about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of the town and look over the forest, you will see, amid the brown of other oaks, which are now withered, and the green of the pines, the bright-red tops or crescents of the scarlet oaks, very equally and thickly distributed on all sides, even to the horizon. Complete trees standing exposed on the edges of the forest, where you have never suspected them, or their tops only in the recesses of the forest surface, or perhaps towering above the surrounding trees, or reflecting a warm rose red from the very edge of the horizon in favorable lights. All this you will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it, — if you look for it. 

Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is at this season sere and brown. Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray (continued) as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed to us all our lives. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, —not a grain more. 

The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else. 

In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name. 

Take one of our selectmen and put him on the highest hill in the township, and tell him to look! What, probably, would he see? What would he select to look at? Sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting on the glasses that suited him best, aye, using a spy-glass if he liked, straining his optic nerve to its utmost, and making a full report. Of course, he would see a Brocken spectre of himself. 

Now take Julius Caesar, or Emanuel Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there! Let them compare notes afterward. Would it appear that they had enjoyed the same prospect? For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at our elbows. It does not appear that anybody saw Shakespeare when he was about in England looking off, but only some of his raiment. 

Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so it is with him that shoots at beauty. Not till the sky falls will he catch larks, unless he is a trained sportsman. He will not bag any if he does not already know its seasons and haunts and the color of its wing, —if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. 

The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, — which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, — paddles for miles against a head wind, and therefore he gets them. He had them half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. 

The fisherman, too, dreams of fish, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. The hen scratches, and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the hawk. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows. It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it, with the feathers on. He will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there. Twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty.

H.D Thoreau, Journal, November 4, 1858

Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax . . .one of the phenomena of the season.  See October 29,1857 ("Melvin asked if I had seen “Pink-eye,” meaning Goodwin.");  November 28, 1859 ("Goodwin is cutting out a few cords of dead wood in the midst of E. Hubbard's old lot. . . . while Abel Brooks is hastening home from the woods with his basket half full of chips ")

The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. See Autumnal Tints. and February 22, 1859 ("Go to Worcester to lecture in a parlor") Also October 31, 1858 ("After walking for a couple of hours the other day through the woods, I came to the base of a tall aspen, which I do not remember to have seen before")

You will see, if you are prepared to see it, — if you look for it. See  July 2 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”) . Also November 6, 1853 (“It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.”); April 8, 1856 ("Most countrymen might paddle five miles along the river now and not see one muskrat, while a sportsman a quarter of a mile before or behind would be shooting one or more every five minutes.”);  September 2, 1856; ("It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood,. . .”); September 9, 1858 (“A man sees only what concerns him.”);  Autumnal tints.("Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them”); February 25, 1859 ("I am more than ever convinced . . . that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.");January 5, 1860("A man receives only what he is ready to receive. . . . He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be. A man tracks himself through life, apprehending only what he already half knows.”);  Compare March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. “); March 29, 1853 (“It is not till we are completely lost, or turned around, --for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, --do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.”); June 14, 1853 (". . . you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.”) ; December 11, 1855; ("I saw this familiar fact at a different angle. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.”)

Before I see it,

the idea of a thing

occupies my thoughts.

 

How unexplored still are the realms of nature -- what we know and have seen is always an insignificant portion.

July 24. 

Friday. 

As we paddled along, we saw many peetweets, also the common iris or blue flag, along the rocky shore, and here and afterwards great fields of epilobium or fire-weed, a mass of color. . . . 

P. said that Bematinichtik meant high land generally and no particular height. . . .

Near this island, or rather some miles southwest of it, on the mainland, where we stopped to stretch our legs and look at the vegetation, I measured a canoe birch, five and a half feet in circumference at two and a half from the ground. . . . 

I was disappointed to find my clothes under my india-rubber coat as completely wetted by perspiration as they could have been by rain, and that this would always be the consequence of working in such a garment, at least in warm weather. . . . 

We looked down on the unpretending buildings and grounds of the Kineo House, as on a little flat map, oblong-square, at our feet. . . . 

It [the phosphorescent wood] suggested to me how unexplored still are the realms of nature, that what we know and have seen is always an insignificant portion. We may any day take a walk as strange as Dante's imaginary one to L' Inferno or Paradiso.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 24, 1857

See The Maine Woods ("About four o'clock the next morning (July 24), though it was quite cloudy, accompanied by the landlord to the water's edge, in the twilight, we launched our canoe from a rock on the Moosehead Lake. . . . Think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that great lake, a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it! . . . [We] were soon partly under the lee of the mountain, about a mile north of the Kineo House, having paddled about twenty miles. It was now about noon. . . . The clouds breaking away a little, we had a glorious wild view, as we ascended, of the broad lake with its fluctuating surface and numerous forest-clad islands, extending beyond our sight both north and south, and the boundless forest undulating away from its shores on every side . . . From the summit of the precipice which forms the southern and eastern sides of this mountain peninsula, and is its most remarkable feature, being described as five or six hundred feet high, we looked, and probably might have jumped, down to the water, or to the seemingly dwarfish trees on the narrow neck of land which connects it with the main. It is a dangerous place to try the steadiness of your nerves. . . . Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light . . . phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. . . .I did not regret my not having seen this before, since I now saw it under circumstances so favorable. I was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more like it. . . . I let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature. . . . It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before.")

The common iris or blue flag. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Flag Iris (Versicolor)

Phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. See August 8, 1857 ("Speaking with Dr. Reynolds about the phosphorescence which I saw in Maine, etc., etc., he said that he had seen the will-o'-the-wisp, a small blue flame, like burning alcohol, a few inches in diameter, over a bog, which moved when the bog was shaken.")

What we know and have seen is always an insignificant portion. We may any day take a walk as strange as Dante's imaginary one . . . See March 29, 1853 (“ a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to...appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.”); June 14, 1853(". . . that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions”); December 11, 1855; (" It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. .”); September 2, 1856 and note ("It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, . . . My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things.") and note to July 2, 1857 ("We find only the world we look for.")

About the last of October

If, about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may see


 -- well, what I have endeavored to describe.

October 23, 2016

All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it, -- if you look for it.

Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere and brown.

Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives.


The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine.

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, — not a grain more.

The actual objects which one man will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth.

We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, — and then we can hardly see anything else.

In my botanical rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality, — no nearer than Hudson's Bay, — and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it, and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name.

A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most sees only their shadows. 

I have found that it required a different intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants, even when they were closely allied, as Juncaceae and Gramineae: when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the midst of them. 

How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. 

And so is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing, — if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in corn-fields. 

The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it with the feathers on.

H. D. Thoreau, Autumnal Tints (1862) 

See November 4, 1858 ("The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different. The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else.")
See also July 2 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”);  September 9, 1858 (“It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants, as, for example, Juncaceoa and Gramineoe; even; i. e., I find that when I am looking for the former, I do not see the latter in their midst. How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He as it were tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk.”);  November 2, 1858 ("Consider the beauty of the earth, and not merely of a few impounded herbs? However, you will not see these splendors, whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, unless you are prepared to see them. The gardener can see only the gardener’s garden, wherever he goes. The beauty of the earth answers exactly to your demand and appreciation.") November 4, 1858 ("Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray (continued) as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed to us all our lives.. . . We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical rambles I find that first the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may at first seem very foreign to this locality, and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it and expecting it unconsciously, and at length I surely see it, and it is henceforth an actual neighbor of mine. This is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I could name.”); February 25, 1859 ("All the criticism which I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints at Worcester on the 22d was that I assumed that my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, — that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.")

Also January 5, 1860 ("A man receives only what he is ready to receive. . . .He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be.”) August 5, 1851 ("The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”); November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going.The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work.)

April 8, 1856 ("Most countrymen might paddle five miles along the river now and not see one muskrat, while a sportsman a quarter of a mile before or behind would be shooting one or more every five minutes.”); September 24, 1859 (“ A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. . . . I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover").

Cool breezy evening with a prolonged white twilight.

September 29

September 29, 2018

P. M. —— To Lee’s Bridge via Mt. Misery and return by Conantum.

Yesterday was quite warm, requiring the thinnest coat. To-day is cooler. 

The elm leaves have in some places more than half fallen and strew the ground with thick rustling beds, — as front of Hubbard’s, — perhaps earlier than usual. 

Bass berries dry and brown. 

Now is the time to gather barberries. 

Looking from the Cliffs, the young oak plain is now probably as brightly colored as it will be. The bright reds appear here to be next the ground, the lower parts of these young trees, and I find on descending that it is commonly so as yet with the scarlet oak, which is the brightest. It is the lower half or two thirds which have changed, and this is surmounted by the slender, still green top. In many cases these leaves have only begun to be sprinkled with bloody spots and stains, — sometimes as if one had cast up a quart of blood from beneath and stained them.

I now see the effect of that long drought on some young oaks, especially black oaks. Their leaves are in many in stances all turned to a clear and uniform brown, having so far lost their vitality, but still plump and full veined and not yet withered. Many are so affected and, of course, show no bright tints. They are hastening to a premature decay. The tops of many young white oaks which had turned are already withered, apparently by frost.

See two either pigeon or sparrow hawks, apparently male and female, the one much larger than the other. 

I see in many places the fallen leaves quite thickly covering the ground in the woods. 

A large flock of crows wandering about and cawing as usual at this season. 

I hear a very pleasant and now unusual strain on the sunny side of an oak wood from many — I think F. hyemalis, though I do not get a clear view of them. Even their slight jingling strain is remarkable at this still season. 

The catbird still mews. 

I see two ducks alternately diving in smooth water near the shore of Fair Haven Pond. Sometimes both are under at once. 

The milkweed down is flying at Clematis Ditch. 

This evening is quite cool and breezy, with a prolonged white twilight, quite Septemberish. 

When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have said attaches to them, they are so simple and remote. Their knowledge is felt to be all terrestrial and to concern the earth alone. It suggests that the same is the case with every object, however familiar; our so-called knowledge of it is equally vulgar and remote. 

One might say that all views through a telescope or microscope were purely visionary, for it is only by his eye and not by any other sense —not by his whole man —that the beholder is there where he is presumed to be. It is a disruptive mode of viewing as far as the beholder is concerned.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 29, 1854

Yesterday was quite warm, requiring the thinnest coat.  See September 3, 1852 ("A warm night.  A thin coat sufficient."); September 9, 1851 ("A sultry night; a thin coat is enough."); September 14, 1851 ("A great change in the weather from sultry to cold, from one thin coat to a thick coat or two thin ones."); September 14, 1859 ("When cooler weather and frosts arrive . . . we shift from the shady to the sunny side of the house, and sit there in an extra coat for warmth.") September 28, 1852 ("It has been too cold for the thinnest coat since the middle of September"); October 2, 1852 ("A very warm day after the frosts, so that I wish — though I am afraid to wear — a thin coat")

The elm leaves have in some places more than half fallen and strew the ground with thick rustling beds. See September 28, 1853 ("The elm leaves are falling"); September 28, 1857 ("Had one of those sudden cool gusts, which . . . caused the elms to labor and drop many leaves, early in afternoon."); October 1, 1858 ("The harvest of elm leaves is come, or at hand.")

Bass berries dry and brown.See September 30, 1859 ("Some acorns (swamp white oak) are browned on the trees, and some bass berries.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood

Looking from the Cliffs, the young oak plain is now probably as brightly colored as it will be. See September 24, 1854 ("On the shrub oak plain under Cliffs, the young white oaks are generally now tending to a dull inward red. The ilicifolia generally green stil , with a few yellowish or else scarlet leaves. The young black oaks with many red , scarlet , or yellowish leaves."); September 25, 1854 ("On the shrub oak plain, as seen from Cliffs, the red at least balances the green. It looks like a rich, shaggy rug now, before the woods are changed."); October 2, 1852 ("From Cliffs the shrub oak plain has now a bright-red ground, perhaps of maples."); October 13, 1852 ("The shrub oak plain is now a deep red, with grayish, withered, apparently white oak leaves intermixed."); January 30, 1853 (" What I have called the Shrub Oak Plain contains comparatively few shrub oaks, — rather, young red and white and, it may be, some scarlet (?).")

Now is the time to gather barberries. See September 29, 1853 ("Barberry ripe.") See also September 28, 1852 ("Children are now gathering barberries, — just the right time.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Common Barberry

A large flock of crows wandering about and cawing as usual at this season.See September 22, 1860 ("See a large flock of crows."); October 6, 1860 ("The crow, methinks, is our only large bird that hovers and circles about in flocks in an irregular and straggling manner, filling the air over your head and sporting in it as if at home here."); October 9, 1858 ("Crows fly over and caw at you now.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

The catbird still mews. See September 21, 1854 ("Hear the chewink and the cluck of the thrasher."); September 25, 1855 ("Meanwhile the catbird mews in the alders by my side");September 25, 1858 ("The catbird still mews occasionally, and the chewink is heard faintly."); October 4, 1857 ("Hear a catbird and chewink, both faint.") 

The milkweed down is flying at Clematis Ditch. See September 10, 1860 ("If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by.") September 24, 1852 ("At Clematis Brook I perceive that the pods or follicles of the Asclepias Syriaca . . . already bursting . . .How many myriads go sailing away at this season, high over hill and meadow and river, on various tacks until the wind lulls, to plant their race in new localities, who can tell how many miles distant! And for this end these silken streamers have been perfecting all summer, snugly packed in this light chest, — a perfect adaptation to this end, a prophecy not only of the fall but of future springs. Who could believe in prophecies . . .that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds?")

This evening is quite cool and breezy, with a prolonged white twilight, quite Septemberish. See August 19, 1853 ("Now, while off Conantum, we have a cool, white, autumnal twilight, and as we pass the Hubbard Bridge, see the first stars."); August 28, 1853 ("A cool, white, autumnal evening."); August 30, 1856 ("A cold white horizon sky in the north, forerunner of the fall of the year."); September 11, 1854 "This is a cold evening with a white twilight, and threatens frost, the first in these respects decidedly autumnal evening."); October 27, 1858 (“The cool, white twilights of that season which is itself the twilight of the year.”); November 2, 1853("We come home in the autumn twilight . . . clear white light, which penetrates the woods”); November 14, 1853 ("the clear, white, leafless twilight of November”)

When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have said attaches to them. See November 21, 1850(" I begin to see ... an object when I cease to understand it."); August 5, 1851 ("The astronomer is as blind to the significant phenomena, or the significance of phenomena . . . The question is not what you look at, but what you see."); February 18, 1852 ("I am grateful to the man who introduces order among the clouds. Yet I look up into the heavens so fancy free, I am almost glad not to know any law for the winds."); January 21, 1853 ("if I am elevated in the least toward the heavens, I do not accept their classification of them. I am not to be distracted by the names which they have imposed. The sun which I know is not Apollo, nor is the evening star Venus. The heavens should be as new, at least, as the world is new . . . Nobody sees the stars now. They study astronomy "); September 29, 1858 ("What astronomer can calculate the orbit of my thistle-down?");  October 4, 1859 ("It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.")

Cool breezy evening

with a prolonged white twilight –

quite Septemberish.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Cool breezy evening 

with a prolonged white twilight.

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/hdt-540929

What a man can know

An indefinite

sense of glory and grandeur

of the universe.

A novel surprise

that all that he knew before

is insufficient.

A revelation

like sun lighting up the mist -- 

a man can know this.

Yet man cannot know,

cannot look serenely in

the face of the sun.

~Zphx 2014-08-13 (See Lighting up the mist and Journal 2/27/1851)

The wooded shore is all lit up with the tender bright green of birches.

May 17. 

The water is now tepid in the morning to the hands, as I slip my hands down the paddle. 

Hear the wood pewee, the warm weather sound. 

I sail up the stream, but the wind is hardly powerful enough to overcome the current, and sometimes I am almost at a standstill where the stream is most contracted and swiftest, and there I sit carelessly waiting for the struggle between wind and current to decide itself. 

It is a pleasing delay, to be referred to the elements, and meanwhile I survey the shrubs on shore.

The large green keys of the white maples are now conspicuous, looking like the wings of insects. 

Azalea nudiflora in woods begins to leaf now.

May 17, 2016

There is a surprising change since I last passed up the Assabet; the fields are now clothed with so dark and rich a green, and the wooded shore is all lit up with the tender, bright green of birches fluttering in the wind and shining in the light, and red maple keys are seen at a distance against the tender green of birches and other trees.

The birches burst out suddenly into leaf and make a great show. It is the first to clothe large tracts of deciduous woodlands with green, and perchance it marks an epoch in the season, the transition decidedly and generally from bare twigs to leaves. When the birches have put on their green sacks, then a new season has come. The light reflected from their tender yellowish green is like sunlight.

A rill empties in above the stone-heaps, and I see where it ran out of June-berry Meadow, and I am impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. 

Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? 

The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 17, 1854

Hear the wood pewee, the warm weather sound. See May 17, 1853 ("I hear the wood pewee, — pe-a-wai. The heat of yesterday has brought him on. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Arrival of the Eastern Wood Pewee

The large green keys of the white maples are now conspicuous, looking like the wings of insects. See . May 29, 1854 ("The white maple keys have begun to fall and float down the stream like the wings of great insects")See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Maple Keys

Azalea nudiflora in woods begins to leaf now.  See note to May 31, 1853 ("We went on down the brook, – Melvin and I and his dog, – and crossed the river in his boat, and he conducted me to where the Azalea nudiflora grew,")

A new season has come. The light reflected from their tender yellowish green is like sunlight. See May 17, 1852 ("The sun on the young foliage of birches, alders, etc., on the opposite side of the pond has an enchanting effect. The sunshine has a double effect . . . The birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree, and they are like silvery and green spangles in the sun . . . The woods putting forth new leaves; it is a memorable season. So hopeful! These young leaves have the beauty of flowers."); May 17, 1857 ("Brches are among the handsomest trees when in bloom. The bunches of numerous rich golden catkins, hanging straight down on all sides and trembling in the breeze, contrast agreeably with the graceful attitude of the tree, commonly more or less inclined, the leaves not being enough expanded to conceal them in the least. They should be seen against evergreens on a hillside, — something so light and airy, so graceful. What nymphs are they? ")

The wooded shore is

all lit up with the tender

bright green of birches 

fluttering in the wind and

shining in the light. 

The light reflected 

from their tender yellowish 

green is like sunlight. 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  The tender bright green of birches

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

tinyurl.com/hdt-540517

Noticing buds

November 6.

It is surprising how little most of us are contented to know about the sparrows which drift about in the air before us just before the first snows. These little sparrows with white in tail, perhaps the prevailing bird of late, have flitted before me so many falls and springs, yet they have been strangers to me. 

I have not inquired whence they came or whither they were going, or what their habits are. It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.

The witch-hazel spray is peculiar and interesting, with little knubs at short intervals, zig zag, crinkle-crankle. How happens it? Did the leaves grow so close? The bud is long against the stem, with a neck to it. 

The fever bush has small roundish buds, two or three commonly together, probably the blossom-buds. 

The alternate cornel, small, very dark reddish buds, on forking, smooth, slender twigs at long intervals. 

The panicled andromeda, minute pointed red buds, hugging the curving stems.

The plump, roundish, club-shaped, well-protected buds of the alders, and rich purplish or mulberry catkins, three, four, or five together. 

The red maple buds, showing three or more sets of scales. 

The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry. 

The four-sided, long spear-head-shaped buds of the Viburnum Lentago, at the end of forked twigs, probably blossom-buds, with minute leaf-buds lower on sides of twigs.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 6, 1853

The sparrows which drift about in the air before us just before the first snows. These little sparrows with white in tail, perhaps the prevailing bird of late. See November 1, 1851 ("At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about."); November 2, 1853 ("What are those sparrows in loose flocks which I have seen two or three weeks, . . .whitish over and beneath the eye, and some white observed in tail when they fly?. . . Can they be the grass-bird ? They resemble it in marking. They are much larger than the tree sparrows. Methinks it is a very common fall bird."); November 4, 1860 (" Thus the birch begins to shed its seed about the time our winter birds arrive from the north."); November 4, 1855("See some large flocks of F. hyemalis . . . rise in a body from the ground and fly to the trees as you approach. There are a few tree sparrows with them."); November 5, 1854 ("I think it is the fox-colored sparrow I see in flocks and hear sing now by wood-sides."): November 7, 1855 (" I hear a few tree sparrows in one place on the trees and bushes near the river, — a clear, chinking chirp and a half-strain.”)

It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us... See November 8, 1857 ("How silently and unobserved by most do these changes take place!"); November 4, 1858 ("We cannot see any thing until we are possessed with the idea of it.”); November 3, 1861 ("All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most."); See also January 5, 1860 ("A man receives only what he is ready to receive . . . He does not observe the phenomenon that cannot be linked with the rest which he has observed, however novel and remarkable it may be. A man tracks himself through life, apprehending only what he already half knows.”)

. . .unless our genius directs our attention that way. See June 23, 1851 ("My genius makes distinctions which my understanding cannot, and which my senses do not report.”); March 21, 1853 ("We become, as it were, pliant and ductile again to strange but memorable influences; - we are led a little way by our genius.”); March 22, 1853 ("I am waked by my genius, surprised to find myself expecting the dawn in so serene and joyful and expectant a mood.”); September 2, 1856 ("It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood").

Buds. See October 30, 1853 ("Now, now is the time to look at the buds.”); November 4, 1854 ("The shad-bush buds have expanded into small leaflets already.”);  December 1, 1852 ("At this season I observe the form of the buds which are prepared for spring."); December 6, 1856 ("Our eyes go searching along the stems for what is most vivacious and characteristic, the concentrated summer gone into winter quarters."); January 12, 1855 ("Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. The summer is all packed in them.")

The four-sided, long spear-head-shaped buds of the Viburnum Lentago. See April 11, 1852 ("Is that the Viburnum Lentago with the spear-shaped buds?"). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Viburnum lentago  (nannyberry)

November 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 6

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Noticing buds

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