The vast wild earth.

May 3. 

5 a. m. — To Cliffs. A great brassy moon going down in the west.

A flock of neat sparrows, small, striped-throated, whitish over eye, on an apple tree by J. Potter's. At Hayden's orchard, quite a concert from some small sparrows, forked-tailed, many jingling together like canaries. Their note still somewhat like the chip-sparrow's. Can it be this?

Fair Haven. How cheering and glorious any landscape viewed from an eminence! For every one has its horizon and sky. It is so easy to take wide views. Snow on the mountains. 

The wood thrush reminds me of cool mountain springs and morning walks. 

That oven-birdish note which I heard here on May 1st I now find to have been uttered by the black and white warbler or creeper. He has a habit of looking under the branches. 

The towhee finch is the loudest singer here now.

Looking from the Cliff, now, about 6 A.M.  the landscape is as if seen in a mirage, the Cliff being both in shadow and in the fresh and dewy sunshine (not much dew yet). Cool sunlight. The landscape lies in a fresh morning light; the earth and water smell fresh and new; the,   water is marked by a few smooth streaks. 

The white pine is beautiful in the morning light--the early sun light and the dew on it -- before the water is rippled and the morning song of the birds is quenched.

Evening.--The moon is full. The air is filled with a certain luminous, liquid, white light. You can see the moonlight, as it were, reflected from the atmosphere,- which some might mistake for a haze, - a glow of mellow light,  as if the air were a very thin but transparent liquid, not dry, as in winter, nor gross, as in summer.  The sky  has depth, and not merely distance.  The sky is not so withdrawn, clear, tight, and cold as last moon.

I go along the side of Fair Haven Hill. The clock strikes distinctly, showing the wind is easterly. There is a grand, rich, musical echo trembling on the air long after the clock has ceased to strike, like a vast organ, filling the air with a trembling music like a flower of sound. Nature adopts it. Beautiful is sound. 

From the Hill the river is a broad blue stream exactly the color of the heavens which it reflects. Sit on the Cliff with comfort, in greatcoat.  All the tawny and russet earth--for no green is seen on the ground at this hour--  sending only this faint multitudinous sound (of frogs) to heaven. The vast, wild earth.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 3, 1852 

How cheering and glorious any landscape viewed from an eminence! See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Seen from a Hillside

The clock strikes distinctly, showing the wind is easterly. See August 8, 1851 ("I hear the nine o'clock bell ringing in Bedford. Pleasantly sounds the voice of one village to another."); January 21, 1853 ("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 18, 1852 ("An east wind. I hear the clock strike plainly ten or eleven P.M.") and An East Wind. See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Bells and Whistles and April 5, 1855 ("[W]e on the water hear the loud and musical sound of bells ringing for church in the surrounding towns."); April 15, 1855 ("The sound of church bells sounds very sweet to us on the water this still day. It is the song of the villages."); September 13, 1851 ("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. ");