An island in a pond.

May 25.

A fine, freshening air, a little hazy, that bathes and washes everything, saving the day from extreme heat. 

Walked to the hills south of Wayland by the road by Deacon Farrar’s. 

First vista just beyond Merron's (?), looking west down a valley, with a verdant columned elm at the extremity of the vale and the blue hills and horizon beyond. These are the resting-places in a walk. We love to see any part of the earth tinged with blue, cerulean, the color of the sky, the celestial color. 

I wonder that houses are not oftener located mainly that they may command particular rare prospects, every convenience yielding to this. The farmer would never suspect what it was you were buying, and such sites would be the cheapest of any. 

A site where you might avail yourself of the art of Nature for three thousand years, which could never be materially changed or taken from you, a noble inheritance for your children. The true sites for human dwellings are unimproved. They command no price in the market. 

Men will pay something to look into a travelling showman's box, but not to look upon the fairest prospects on the earth. A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth. The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood. Where men of enlarged views may be educated. An unchangeable kind of wealth, a real estate.

. . .

See Bunker Hill Monument and Charlestown from the Wayland hills, and westward, or west by south, an island in a pond.

What is the orange-yellow aster-like flower of the meadows now in blossom with a sweet-smelling stem when bruised ?

Now, at 8.30 o'clock P.M., I hear the dreaming of the frogs.  So it seems to me, and so significantly passes my life away. It is like the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 25, 1851

Dreaming of the frogs. See June 13, 1851 ("The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,- the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog, and the bullfrog."); May 25, 1852 ("I hear the first troonk of a bullfrog.”) ; May 25, 1855 ("Hear . . . the summer spray frog, amid the ring of toads.”); May 25, 1859 ("Hear within a day or two what I call the sprayey note of the toad, different and later than its early ring.") May 25, 1860 ("5 P.M. the toads ring loud and numerously.”) See also May 13, 1860 ("It is so warm that I hear the peculiar sprayey note of the toad generally at night."); May 16, 1853 ("Nature appears to have passed a crisis. . .. The sprayey dream of the toad has a new sound"); June 12, 1855 (“I hear the toad, which I have called “spray frog” falsely, still. . . .A peculiarly rich, sprayey dreamer, now at 2 P. M.! . . . This rich, sprayey note possesses all the shore. It diffuses itself far and wide over the water and enters into every crevice of the noon, and you cannot tell whence it proceeds”)

So significantly passes my life away. See July 19, 1851 ("I may say I am unborn. If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle? If life is a waiting, so be it."); August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned."); November 12, 1859 ("I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream.")

Man is our contemporary.

May 21. 

The existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. Man, the crowning fact, the god we know.

It is a fact few have realized.

The standing miracle to man is man.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 21, 1851

Only that thought and that expression are good which are musical.

***

I think that we are not commonly aware that man is our contemporary, — that in this strange, outlandish world, so barren, so prosaic, fit not to live in but merely to pass through, that even here so divine a creature as man does actually live. 

Man, the crowning fact, the god we know. 

While the earth supports so rare an inhabitant, there is somewhat to cheer us. 

Who shall say that there is no God, if there is a just man. 

It is only within a year that it has occurred to me that there is such a being actually existing on the globe. 

Now that I perceive that it is so, many questions assume a new aspect. 

We have not only the idea and vision of the divine ourselves, but we have brothers, it seems, who have this idea also. 

Methinks my neighbor is better than I, and his thought is better than mine. 

There is a representative of the divinity on earth, of [whom] all things fair and noble are to be expected. 

We have the material of heaven here. 

I think that the standing miracle to man is man. 

Behind the paling yonder, come rain or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man, an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thoughts.

The revelations of nature are infinitely glorious and cheering, hinting to us of a remote future, of possibilities untold; but startlingly near to us some day we find a fellow-man. . . .

From nature we turn astonished to this near but supernatural fact. 

I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. 

It is a fact which few have realized. 

I can go to my neighbors and meet on ground as elevated as we could expect to meet upon if we were now in heaven. . . . 

I do not think that man can understand the importance of man's existence, its bearing on the other phenomena of life, until it shall become a remembrance to him the survivor that such a being or such a race once existed on the earth. 

Imagine yourself alone in the world, a musing, wondering, reflecting spirit, lost in thought, and imagine thereafter the creation of man— man made in the image of God!


***

You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.

The nodding trillium, or wake-robin, in Conant's Swamp.

May 19

Find the Arum triphyllum and the nodding trillium, or wake-robin, in Conant's Swamp. 

Sinclair says the hornbeam is called "swamp beech" in Vermont. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 19, 1851

May 19.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 19

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 © 2009-2021

The turning-point between winter and summer is reached.

May 18.

MAY 18, 2013

Sunday.

Lady’s-slipper almost fully blossomed.

The log of a canoe birch on Fair Haven, cut down the last winter, more than a foot in diameter at the stump; one foot in diameter at ten feet from the ground. I observed that all parts of the epidermis exposed to the air and light were white, but the inner surfaces  freshly exposed, were a buff or salmon-color. Sinclair says that in winter it is white throughout. But this was cut before the sap flowed? ? ! Was there any sap in the log? I counted about fifty rings.

The shrub oaks are now blossoming.

The scarlet tanagers are come.

The oak leaves of all colors are just expanding, and are more beautiful than most flowers.

The hickory buds are almost leaves.

The landscape has a new life and light infused into it.

The deciduous trees are springing, to countenance the pines, which are evergreen.

It seems to take but one summer day to fetch the summer in. The turning-point between winter and summer is reached.

The birds are in full blast.

There is a peculiar freshness about the landscape; you scent the fragrance of new leaves, of hickory and sassafras, etc. And to the eye the forest presents the tenderest green.

The blooming of the apple trees is becoming general.

I think that I have made out two kinds of poplar, the Populus tremuloides, or American aspen, and the P. grandidentata, or large American aspen , whose young leaves are downy. 

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, May 18, 1851

There is a peculiar freshness about the landscape. Lady's-slipper almost fully blossomed. The scarlet tanagers are come. The oak leaves of all colors are just expanding, and are more beautiful than most flowers. The hickory buds are almost leaves. The birds are in full blast. The blooming of the apple trees is becoming general. You scent the fragrance of new leaves.The turning-point between winter and summer is reached. The landscape has a new life and light infused into it. And to the eye the forest presents the tenderest green

The turning-point between winter and summer is reached. Compare March 30, 1860 ("[Y]ou seem to be crossing the threshold between winter and summer. As I walk the street I realize that a new season has arrived.”)

The landscape has a new life and light infused into it. And to the eye the forest presents the tenderest green. See May 18, 1852 ("This tender foliage, putting so much light and life into the landscape, is the remarkable feature at this date. The week when the deciduous trees are generally and conspicuously expanding their leaves.”); May 17, 1854 (“The wooded shore is all lit up with the tender, bright green of birches fluttering in the wind and shining in the light”); see also  May 19, 1860 (“See a green snake, a very vivid yellow green, of the same color with the tender foliage at present, and as if his colors had been heightened by the rain.”);

The scarlet tanagers are come. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Scarlet Tanager

Taking the ether

May 12
at the watering hole

May 12.

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You are told that it will make you unconscious, but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious until he has experienced it. 

How far removed from the state of consciousness and all that we call "this world"!  You are a sane mind without organs, - groping for organs.  You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in the winter. 

The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another, - a greater space than you ever travelled.

If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether; you go beyond the furthest star.

H. D . Thoreau, Journal, May 12, 1851

See January 26, 1856 (“When I took the ether my consciousness amounted to this: I put my finger on myself in order to keep the place, otherwise I should never have returned to this world.”)

By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses . You are told that it will make you unconscious , but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious — how far removed from the state of consciousness and all that we call “ this world ” – until he has experienced it . The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another , – a greater space than you ever travelled . You are a sane mind without organs , – groping for organs , — which if it did not soon recover its old senses would get new ones . You expand like a seed in the ground . You exist in your roots , like a tree in the winter . If you have an inclination to travel , take the ether ; you go beyond the furthest star . 

It is not necessary for them to take ether , who in their sane and waking hours are ever translated by a thought ; nor for them to see with their hindheads , who some times see from their foreheads ; nor listen to the spirit ual knockings , who attend to the intimations of reason and conscience .

Hear the snipe

May 10.

Hear the snipe over the meadows this evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 10, 1851

See note to April 9, 1858 ("Persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is. This “booming” of the snipe is our regular village serenade.") Also  Walden (Spring) ("Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.")

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 10

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 ©  2009-2021