A peaceful landscape

October 13. 

It is a clear, warm, rather Indian-summer day, and they are gathering the apples in the orchard. The warmth is more required, and we welcome and appreciate it all. The chickadees take heart, too, and sing above these warm rocks.

Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke. 

This is a sudden and important change. The autumnal tints have already lost their brightness. It lasts but a day or two.

Fair Haven Pond, methinks, never looks so handsome as at this season, framed with the autumn-tinted woods and hills. The water or lake, from however distant a point seen, is always the center of the landscape. Birches, hickories, aspens, in the distance, are like small flames on the hillsides about the pond.

Fair Haven lies more open and can be seen from more distant points than any of our ponds. The air is singularly fine-grained; the mountains are more distinct from the rest of the earth and slightly purple. Far amid the western hills there rises a pure white smoke. There is no disturbing sound.

How peaceful great nature!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 13, 1852


Fair Haven Pond, methinks, never looks so handsome as at this season, framed with the autumn-tinted woods and hills. See October 3, 1858 ("Looking all around Fair Haven Pond yesterday, where the maples were glowing amid the evergreens, my eyes invariably rested on a particular small maple of the purest and intensest scarlet. ") October 22, 1857 (" Look from the high hill, just before sundown, over the pond. The mountains are a mere cold slate-color. But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it?")

The air is singularly fine-grained; the mountains are more distinct from the rest of the earth and slightly purple. See October 20,1852 (“I see the mountains in sunshine, all the more attractive from the cold I feel here, with a tinge of purple on them.”); September 22, 1854 (“[A]s the sun is preparing to dip below the horizon, the thin haze in the atmosphere north and south along the west horizon reflects a purple tinge and bathes the mountains with the same, like a bloom on fruits. ”)

P. M.— To Cliffs.

Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows, where, crowded together, at a distance they look like smoke.

This is a sudden and important change, produced mainly, I suppose, by the rain of Sunday, 10th.

The autumnal tints have commonly already lost their brightness.

It lasts but a day or two.

Corn-spurry and spotted polygonum and polygala.

Fair Haven Pond, methinks, never looks so handsome as at this season.

It is a sufficiently clear and warm, rather Indian-summer day, and they are gathering the apples in the orchard.

The warmth is more required, and we welcome and appreciate it all.

The shrub oak plain is now a deep red, with grayish, withered, apparently white oak leaves intermixed.

The chickadees take heart, too, and sing above these warm rocks.

Birches, hickories, aspens, etc., in the distance, are like innumerable small flames on the hillsides about the pond.

The pond is now most beautifully framed with the autumn-tinted woods and hills.

The water or lake, from however distant a point seen, is always the centre of the landscape.

Fair Haven lies more open and can be seen from more distant points than any of our ponds.

The air is singularly fine-grained; the sward looks short and firm.

The mountains are more distinct from the rest of the earth and slightly impurpled.

Seeming to lie up more.

How peaceful great nature! There is no disturbing sound, but far amid the western hills there rises a pure white smoke in constant volumes.

That handsome kind of sedge ( ?) which lasts through the winter must be the Scirpus Eriophorum, red cotton- grass of Bigelow, and wool-grass (under bulrush and club-rush) of Gray.