Though fitted to drain Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels.

April 19.

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. 

My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to! Though, with respect to our channels, our valleys, and the country we are fitted to drain, we are Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels. 

The arbor-vita: by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom. 

I notice acorns sprouted. 

My birch wine now, after a week or more, has become pretty clear and colorless again, the brown part having settled and now coating the glass. 

Helped Mr. Emerson set out in Sleepy Hollow two over-cup oaks, one beech, and two arbor-vitaes. 

As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. I put one which had been open all winter into water, and in an hour or two it shut up nearly as tight as at first.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1856

I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. . . . See March 17, 1852  ("I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual"); July 16, 1851(" I am astonished. I am daily intoxicated. There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion -- . . . I am dealt with by superior powers"); May 24, 1851 ("My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place”).

A pitch pine cone which had been open all winter shut up. Compare January 25, 1856 ("A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

April 12.

Surveying for Parks in Lincoln. 

April 12, 2019

A white frost this morning, after the clear moonlight. 

I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work, and am somewhat listless or abandoned after it, reposing, that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.

The music of the spheres is but another name for the Vulcanic force. May not such a record as this be kept on one page of the Book of Life : "A man was melted to-day " 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 12, 1854

The clear moonlight. See April 11, 1854 ("Evening on river. Fine full moon; river smooth.. . . This the first moon to walk by. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April Moonlight

It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light. See April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey"); April 12, 1858 ("The woods are all alive with pine warblers now. Their note is the music to which I survey."); September 2, 1851 ("It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart."); November 18 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); November 20, 1851 ("Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at evening, somewhat weary at last, and . . . I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. "); April 30, 1856 (" Again, it is with the side of the ear that you hear . . . You would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself to your work.”); May 12, 1857 ("Methinks I hear these sounds, have these reminiscences, only when well employed."); November 18, 1857 ("You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. ") October 4, 1859 ("You have got to be in a different state from common.") ; Walden ([W]e are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day.

It is from out the

shadow of my toil that I

look into the light.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, From out of the Shadow

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-540412

A mental spring thaw.

March 21.

It is a genial and reassuring day; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. The softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. 

I sit down by a wall to see if I can muse again. We become, as it were, pliant and ductile again to strange but memorable influences; – we are led a little way by our genius. 

We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.  

Might not my Journal be called "Field Notes?" 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 21, 1853


Winter breaks up within us . . . and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels. See December 26, 1854 ("I feel the winter breaking up in me; if I were home I would try to write poetry."); January 31, 1854 ("We too have our thaws. They come to our January moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression."); March 9, 1852 ("[T]he air excites me. When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”)

March 21.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 21

Frost comes out of me,

thoughts like a freshet pour down

unwonted channels.