The Bedford sunrise bell.

September 13 

Railroad causeway, before sunrise.

Here is a morning after a warm, clear, moonlight night almost entirely without dew or fog.

It has been a little breezy through the night, it is true; but why so great a difference between this and other mornings of late? I can walk in any direction in the fields without wetting my feet.

I see the same rays in the dun, buff, or fawn-colored sky now, just twenty minutes before sunrise, though they do not extend quite so far as at sundown the other night. Why these rays? What is it divides the light of the sun? Is it thus divided by distant inequalities in the surface of the earth, behind which the other parts are concealed, and since the morning atmosphere is clearer they do not reach so far?

Some small island clouds are the first to look red.

The cross-leaved polygala emits its fragrance as if at will. You are quite sure you smelled it and are ravished with its sweet fragrance, but now it has no smell. You must not hold it too near, but hold it on all sides and at all distances, and there will perchance be wafted to you sooner or later a very sweet and penetrating fragrance. What it is like you cannot surely tell, for you do not enjoy it long enough nor in volume enough to compare it. 

It is very likely that you will not discover any fragrance while you are rudely smelling at it; you can only remember that you once perceived it.

Both this and the caducous polygala are now somewhat faded.

Now the sun is risen. The sky is almost perfectly clear this morning; not a cloud in the horizon.

The morning is not pensive like the evening, but joyous and youthful, and its blush is soon gone. It is unfallen day.

The Bedford sunrise bell rings sweetly and musically at this hour, when there is no bustle in the village to drown it. Bedford deserves a vote of thanks from Concord for it. It is a great good at these still and sacred hours, when towns can hear each other. It would be nought at noon.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 13, 1851

The cross-leaved polygala emits its fragrance as if at will.  See August 27, 1851 ("Polygala cruciata, cross-leaved polygala, has a very sweet but intermittent fragrance, as of checkerberry and mayflowers combined.");); July 13, 1852 ("The Polygala sanguinea and P. cruciata in Blister's meadow, both numerous and well out. The last has a fugacious (?) spicy scent, in which, methinks, I detect the scent of nutmegs. Afterward I find that it is the lower part of the stem and root which is most highly scented, like checkerberry, and not fugacious"); see also August 13, 1856 ("The root of the Polygala verticillata also has the checkerberry odor.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Polygala

The morning is not pensive like the evening, but joyous and youthful, and its blush is soon gone. See July 3, 1840 (We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves.); July 18, 1851 ("It is a test question affecting the youth of a person , — Have you knowledge of the morning? Do you sympathize with that season of nature? Are you abroad early, brushing the dews aside ? If the sun rises on you slumbering, if you do not hear the morning cock-crow, if you do not witness the blushes of Aurora, if you are not acquainted with Venus as the morning star, what relation have you to wisdom and purity? "); December 29, 1851 ("What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us by letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! . . . This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle."); March 17, 1852 (“There is a moment in the dawn,. . . when we see things more truly than at any other time.”); June 13, 1852 ("All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early-opened, hopeful eyes"); June 17, 1852 ("Perhaps these mornings are the most memorable in the year, — after a sultry night and before a sultry day, — when, especially, the morning is the most glorious season of the day, when its coolness is most refreshing and you enjoy the glory of the summer gilded or silvered with dews, without the torrid summer's sun or the obscuring haze."); August 31, 1852 ("Morning is full of promise and vigor. Evening is pensive."); January 26, 1853 (“ I look back . . . not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough.”); March 31, 1852("How can one help being an early riser and walker in that season when the birds begin to twitter and sing in the morning? March 22, 1853 ("As soon as these spring mornings arrive in which the birds sing, I am sure to be an early riser.. . .expecting the dawn in so serene and joyful and expectant a mood."); January 8, 1854 ("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."); Walden (“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say . . . Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”); Walden (“ Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”); Walden ("We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”); February 25, 1859 ("Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,— know that the morning and spring of your life are past.")

The Bedford sunrise bell rings sweetly and musically at this hour. See January 2, 1842 ("The ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that is heard within the church."); August 8, 1851 (“I hear the nine o'clock bell ringing in Bedford. Pleasantly sounds the voice of one village to another. ”); January 2, 1853 ("The bells are particularly sweet this morning."); January 21, 1853 ("In this stillness and at this distance, I hear the nine-o'clock bell in Bedford five miles off, which I might never hear in the village, but here its music surmounts the village din and has something very sweet and noble and inspiring in it, associated, in fact, with the hooting of owls."); ; April 15, 1855 ("The sound of church bells . . ., sounds very sweet to us on the water this still day").  See also  March 3, 1841 ("Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness , as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice, the crowing of cocks in the morning, and the barking of dogs in the night, which indicates her sound state. God's voice is but a clear bell sound. I drink in a wonderful health, a cordial, in sound. The effect of the slightest tinkling in the horizon measures my own soundness. I thank God for sound; it always mounts, and makes me mount. I think I will not trouble myself for any wealth, when I can be so cheaply enriched.") See also Basho:

As the sound fades,

the scent of flowers comes up –

the evening bell.

September 13. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  September 13

Now it has no smell

a fragance you remember –

the sunrise bell.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The Bedford sunrise bell

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 ©  2009-2026

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season.

January 30.  

Buda  January 30 2021

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. 

Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.

On Cliffs.

The westering sun is yet high above the horizon, but, concealed by clouds, shoots down to earth on every side vast misty rays like the frame of a tent, to which clouds perchance are the canvas, under which a whole country rests. 

BTV February 1, 2023

The northern and southern rays appear very much slanted and long; those between us and the west, steeper and shorter.

What I have called the Shrub Oak Plain contains comparatively few shrub oaks, — rather, young red and white and, it may be, some scarlet (?).

The shrub oak leaf is the firmest and best preserved. The white oak is the most sere and curled and brittle, frequently with discolored, mould-like spots.

H. D Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1853

The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. See November 8, 1858 ("The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence."); January 9, 1853 ("On the face of the Cliff the crowfoot buds lie unexpanded just beneath the surface"); January 25, 1853 ("The buttercup leaves appear everywhere when the ground is bare.);  February 18, 1857 ("The snow is nearly all gone, and . . . I step excited over the moist mossy ground, dotted with the green stars of thistles, crowfoot, etc., the outsides of which are withered."); February 23, 1860 ("I walk over the moist Nawshawtuct hillside and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup"); February 28, 1857 ("At the Cliff, the tower-mustard, early crowfoot, and perhaps buttercup appear to have started of late.")

The westering sun, concealed by clouds, shoots down to earth on every side vast misty rays. See August 9, 1851 ("It was a splendid sunset that day, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people went to their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings and the sky. . . We were in the westernmost edge of the shower at the moment the sun was setting, and its rays shone through the cloud and the falling rain. We were, in fact, in a rainbow.")

The shrub oak leaf is the firmest and best preserved. The white oak is the most sere and curled and brittle. See 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."); November 3, 1852 ("The shrub oak plain is all withered."); May 14, 1855 ("All the oak leaves off the shrub oak plain, except apparently a few white oaks.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 30

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 ©  2009-2023