... This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. Then the dews begin to descend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities; and home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for supper. ...
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 14, 1853
That favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. See May 23, 1853 ("In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me,"); December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”); January 7, 1857 (" I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine"; January 27, 1860 (" that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open.")
.And home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you. See note to June 13, 1854 ("When I have stayed out thus late many miles from home . . . I have felt that I was not far from home after all."); May 23, 1853 ("When the chaste and pensive eve draws on...a certain lateness ... releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. I have passed the Rubicon of staying out. I have said to myself, that way is not homeward; I will wander further from what I have called my home — to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me, . . .") See also Walking ("We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”) and Walking ("Some, however, would derive the word [saunter] from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywheré For this is the secret of successful sauntering.")
June 14. P. M. — To White Pond. Herd's-grass heads. The warmest afternoon as yet. Ground getting dry, it is so long since we had any rain to speak of. C. says he saw a "lurker" yesterday in the woods on the Marlborough road. He heard a distressing noise like a man sneezing but long continued, but at length found it was a man wheezing. He was oldish and grizzled, the stumps of his grizzled beard about an inch long, and his clothes in the worst possible condition, — a wretched-looking creature, an escaped convict hiding in the woods, perhaps. He appeared holding on to his paunch, and wheezing as if it would kill him. He appeared to have come straight through the swamp, and — what was most interesting about him, and proved him to be a lurker of the first class, — one of our party, as C. said, — he kept straight through a field of rye which was fully grown, not re garding it in the least; and, though C. tried to con ceal himself on the edge of the rye, fearing to hurt his feelings if the man should mistake him for the proprietor, yet they met, and the lurker, giving him a short bow, disappeared in the woods on the opposite side of the road. He went through everything. Went to the Harrington Bathing-Place. Drank at the Tarbell Spring first. The swamp-pink by to-morrow. The Allium Canadense in Tarbell's meadow. Wild meadow garlic, with its head of bulbs and a few flower- buds, not yet; apparently with cultivated onion. The desert at Dugan's is all scored over with tor toise-tracks, — two parallel dotted lines four or five inches apart, the impressions being nearly a half-inch deep, with the distinct mark of the tail making a wav ing line between. It looks as if twenty tortoises had spent a night travelling over it; and here and there there were marks of a slight digging, but I found no eggs. They came out of the brook near by. Perhaps they select such a bare sandy tract for their encounters, where there is no grass to impede them. Perhaps it makes the most remarkable track of any creature. Sometimes the sand appeared as if dabbled and patted for a foot or more in diameter. Heard the first locust from amid the shrubs by the roadside. He comes with heat. Snake-sloughs are 249 found nowadays ; whitish and bleached they are. Beyond the rye-field on the Marlborough road, the oaks were extensively cut off by the frost some weeks ago. They are all dry and red for half a mile, — young trees eight or ten feet high, — as if a fire had run through them after they had grown two or three inches ; and young red leaves are beginning to appear on them. Since the maples and birches are untouched (some times a maple!), it looks as if the fire had run in veins. Yet most travellers, if they did not ride close to them, would not notice them, perhaps being used as yet even to a wintry landscape. Is that the indigo-bird that sings, between here and White Pond, a-chit chit- chit awee? Perhaps the andromeda swamp on this path is as handsome as any, appearing so far down from the hills and still so level. I observed the cotton of aphides on the alders yesterday and to-day. How regularly these phenomena appear ! — even the stains or spots or galls on leaves, as that bright yellow on blackberry leaves, now common, and those crimson ring-spots on maple leaves I see to-day, exactly the same pattern with last year's, and the crimson frost ing on the black birch leaves I saw the other day. Then there are the huckleberry-apples, and the large green puffs on the panicled andromeda, and also I see now the very light or whitish solid and juicy apples on the swamp-pink, with a fungus-like smell when broken. Erigeron annuus{?),x some white, some purplish, common now and daisylike. I put it rather early on the 9th.
On the Strawberry Hill on the further side of White Pond, about fifty feet above the pond and a dozen rods from it, found a painted tortoise laying her eggs. Her posterior was inserted into a slight cavity she had dug in the sandy hillside. There were three eggs al ready laid, the top of them hardly two inches below the surface. She had dug down about one and a half or two inches, somewhat in the form of the hind part of her shell, and then under the turf up the hill about two and a half inches, enlarging the cavity slightly within, leaving a neck of an oval form about seven eighths of an inch by one and a quarter inches, apparently packing the eggs with her tail. She lay still where I put her, while I examined her eggs, and I replaced her in the hole. A little further on, I saw where such a deposit had been broken up, apparently by a skunk, and the egg-shells strewn about. The whole hole about three inches deep. The three eggs already laid, about one inch long, cream-colored or slightly flesh-color, easily indented with the finger, but a little elastic, not exactly elliptical, but slightly larger at one end.
C. says his dog chased a woodchuck yesterday, and it climbed up into an oak and sat on a limb ten or twelve feet high. He killed a young rabbit. Took another bath at the cove in White Pond. We had already bathed in the North River at Harrington's. It is about 5 p. m. The pond is perfectly smooth and very beautiful now. Its shores are still almost entirely uninjured by the axe. While we are dressing, the bullfrogs in this cove, it is so late in the day, are 251 beginning to trump. They utter a short, laughable, belching sound from time to time and then break into a powerful trump as the whim takes them. The dog lies flat on his belly the while to cool him. We took an old leaky boat and a forked stick which had made part of a fence, and pushed out to see the shores from the middle of the pond. There sit the great paddocks in their yellow vests, imperturbable by the sides of the boat. See now the great stems of trees on the bottom and the stones curiously strewn about. Now we cross the bar to this cove ; now we are leaving the edge of the heart-leaves, whose long, clean, slender, thread like stems rise from the bottom still where six feet deep; and now the stones on the bottom grow dim, as if a mildew formed about them, and now the bottom is lost in the dim greenness of the water. How beautifully the northeast (?) shore curves ! The pines and other trees so perfect on their water side. There is no rawness nor imperfection to the edge of the wood in this case, as where an axe has cleared, or a cultivated field abuts on it; but the eye rises by natural gradations from the low shrubs, the alders, of the shore to the higher trees. It is a natural selvage. It is comparatively unaffected by man. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.1 Such curves in a wood bordering on a field do not affect us as when it is a winding shore of a lake. This is a firmer edge. It will not be so easily torn. Our boat leaked so, — faster and faster as it sank deeper and tipped with the water in it, — that we were obliged to turn to the shore. The blue flag (Iris versi color) grows in this pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shores, and is very beautiful, — not too high-colored, — especially its reflections in the water. There was something [in] its bluish blade which harmonized with the greenish water.1 The pollen of the pine yellowed the driftwood on the shore and the stems of bushes which stood in the water, and in little flakes extended out some distance on the surface, until at four or five rods in this cove it was suddenly and distinctly bounded by an invisible fence on the surface; but in the middle, as deep down as you could [see], there appeared some fine white par ticles in the water, either this or something else and perhaps some ova of fishes. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the sweet flag, here grows the blue flag in the water, thinly about the shore. The color of the flower harmonizes singularly with the water.2 With our boat's prow to the shore, we sat half an hour this evening listening to the bullfrogs. Their belching is my dumping sound more hoarsely heard near at hand. What imperturbable fellows! One sits perfectly still behind some blades of grass while the dog is chasing others within two feet. Some are quite handsome, large, spotted fellows. We see here and there light-colored greenish-white spots on the bottom where a fish, a bream perhaps, has picked away all the dead wood and leaves for her nest over a space of eight een inches or more. Young breams from one to three 1 [Walden, p. 221; Riv. 312.] 2 [Ibid.] 253 inches long, light-colored and transparent, are swimming about, and here and there a leech in the shallow water, moving s**~>*~^s as serpents are represented to do. Large devil's-needles are buzzing back and forth. They skim along the edge of the blue flags, apparently quite round this cove or further, like hen-harriers beating the bush for game. And now comes a hummingbird humming from the woods and alights on the blossom of a blue flag. The bullfrogs begin with one or two notes and with each peal add another trill to their trump, — er-roonk, er-er-roonk, er-er-er-roonk, etc. I am amused to hear one after another, and then an unexpectedly deep and confident bass, as if he had charged himself with more wind than the rest. And now, as if by a general agreement, they all trump together, making a deafening noise. Sometimes one jumps up a foot out of water in the midst of these concerts. What are they about? Suddenly a tree-toad in the overhang ing woods begins, and another answers, and another, with loud, ringing notes such as I never heard before, and in three minutes they are all silent again. A red eye sings on a tree-top, and a cuckoo is heard far in the wood.
These are the evening sounds.
As we look over the water now, the opposite woods are seen dimly through what appears not so much the condensing dew and mist as the dry haziness of the afternoon, now settled and condensed. The woods on the opposite shore have not the distinctness they had an hour before, but perhaps a more agreeable dimness, a sort of gloaming or settling and thickening of the haze over the water, which melts tree into tree and masses them agreeably. The trees no longer bright and distinct, — a bluish mistiness. This appears to be an earlier gloaming before sun set, such as by and by is universal. Went through the woods along the old canal to Haynes's pasture, from the height of which we looked down on the rich New Hampshire wood we had come out of. The ground rising within the wood gave it the appearance of woods rising by successive stages from a smaller growth on the edge to stately trees in the middle, and Nobscot was seen in the southwest through the blue furnace mist.
This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. Then the dews begin to descend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities ; and home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for supper.
The wood thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain with all his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, — the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say! There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson's "Seasons" and Homer.
The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness. Probably the tortoise leaves her eggs thus near the surface and in sand that they may receive the great est heat from the sand, being just deep enough for the sand to receive and retain it and not part with it at night, — not so deep as to be cool.
June 14. P. M. — To White Pond. Herd's-grass heads. The warmest afternoon as yet. Ground getting dry, it is so long since we had any rain to speak of. C. says he saw a "lurker" yesterday in the woods on the Marlborough road. He heard a distressing noise like a man sneezing but long continued, but at length found it was a man wheezing. He was oldish and grizzled, the stumps of his grizzled beard about an inch long, and his clothes in the worst possible condition, — a wretched-looking creature, an escaped convict hiding in the woods, perhaps. He appeared holding on to his paunch, and wheezing as if it would kill him. He appeared to have come straight through the swamp, and — what was most interesting about him, and proved him to be a lurker of the first class, — one of our party, as C. said, — he kept straight through a field of rye which was fully grown, not re garding it in the least; and, though C. tried to con ceal himself on the edge of the rye, fearing to hurt his feelings if the man should mistake him for the proprietor, yet they met, and the lurker, giving him a short bow, disappeared in the woods on the opposite side of the road. He went through everything. Went to the Harrington Bathing-Place. Drank at the Tarbell Spring first. The swamp-pink by to-morrow. The Allium Canadense in Tarbell's meadow. Wild meadow garlic, with its head of bulbs and a few flower- buds, not yet; apparently with cultivated onion. The desert at Dugan's is all scored over with tor toise-tracks, — two parallel dotted lines four or five inches apart, the impressions being nearly a half-inch deep, with the distinct mark of the tail making a wav ing line between. It looks as if twenty tortoises had spent a night travelling over it; and here and there there were marks of a slight digging, but I found no eggs. They came out of the brook near by. Perhaps they select such a bare sandy tract for their encounters, where there is no grass to impede them. Perhaps it makes the most remarkable track of any creature. Sometimes the sand appeared as if dabbled and patted for a foot or more in diameter. Heard the first locust from amid the shrubs by the roadside. He comes with heat. Snake-sloughs are 249 found nowadays ; whitish and bleached they are. Beyond the rye-field on the Marlborough road, the oaks were extensively cut off by the frost some weeks ago. They are all dry and red for half a mile, — young trees eight or ten feet high, — as if a fire had run through them after they had grown two or three inches ; and young red leaves are beginning to appear on them. Since the maples and birches are untouched (some times a maple!), it looks as if the fire had run in veins. Yet most travellers, if they did not ride close to them, would not notice them, perhaps being used as yet even to a wintry landscape. Is that the indigo-bird that sings, between here and White Pond, a-chit chit- chit awee? Perhaps the andromeda swamp on this path is as handsome as any, appearing so far down from the hills and still so level. I observed the cotton of aphides on the alders yesterday and to-day. How regularly these phenomena appear ! — even the stains or spots or galls on leaves, as that bright yellow on blackberry leaves, now common, and those crimson ring-spots on maple leaves I see to-day, exactly the same pattern with last year's, and the crimson frost ing on the black birch leaves I saw the other day. Then there are the huckleberry-apples, and the large green puffs on the panicled andromeda, and also I see now the very light or whitish solid and juicy apples on the swamp-pink, with a fungus-like smell when broken. Erigeron annuus{?),x some white, some purplish, common now and daisylike. I put it rather early on the 9th.
On the Strawberry Hill on the further side of White Pond, about fifty feet above the pond and a dozen rods from it, found a painted tortoise laying her eggs. Her posterior was inserted into a slight cavity she had dug in the sandy hillside. There were three eggs al ready laid, the top of them hardly two inches below the surface. She had dug down about one and a half or two inches, somewhat in the form of the hind part of her shell, and then under the turf up the hill about two and a half inches, enlarging the cavity slightly within, leaving a neck of an oval form about seven eighths of an inch by one and a quarter inches, apparently packing the eggs with her tail. She lay still where I put her, while I examined her eggs, and I replaced her in the hole. A little further on, I saw where such a deposit had been broken up, apparently by a skunk, and the egg-shells strewn about. The whole hole about three inches deep. The three eggs already laid, about one inch long, cream-colored or slightly flesh-color, easily indented with the finger, but a little elastic, not exactly elliptical, but slightly larger at one end.
C. says his dog chased a woodchuck yesterday, and it climbed up into an oak and sat on a limb ten or twelve feet high. He killed a young rabbit. Took another bath at the cove in White Pond. We had already bathed in the North River at Harrington's. It is about 5 p. m. The pond is perfectly smooth and very beautiful now. Its shores are still almost entirely uninjured by the axe. While we are dressing, the bullfrogs in this cove, it is so late in the day, are 251 beginning to trump. They utter a short, laughable, belching sound from time to time and then break into a powerful trump as the whim takes them. The dog lies flat on his belly the while to cool him. We took an old leaky boat and a forked stick which had made part of a fence, and pushed out to see the shores from the middle of the pond. There sit the great paddocks in their yellow vests, imperturbable by the sides of the boat. See now the great stems of trees on the bottom and the stones curiously strewn about. Now we cross the bar to this cove ; now we are leaving the edge of the heart-leaves, whose long, clean, slender, thread like stems rise from the bottom still where six feet deep; and now the stones on the bottom grow dim, as if a mildew formed about them, and now the bottom is lost in the dim greenness of the water. How beautifully the northeast (?) shore curves ! The pines and other trees so perfect on their water side. There is no rawness nor imperfection to the edge of the wood in this case, as where an axe has cleared, or a cultivated field abuts on it; but the eye rises by natural gradations from the low shrubs, the alders, of the shore to the higher trees. It is a natural selvage. It is comparatively unaffected by man. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.1 Such curves in a wood bordering on a field do not affect us as when it is a winding shore of a lake. This is a firmer edge. It will not be so easily torn. Our boat leaked so, — faster and faster as it sank deeper and tipped with the water in it, — that we were obliged to turn to the shore. The blue flag (Iris versi color) grows in this pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shores, and is very beautiful, — not too high-colored, — especially its reflections in the water. There was something [in] its bluish blade which harmonized with the greenish water.1 The pollen of the pine yellowed the driftwood on the shore and the stems of bushes which stood in the water, and in little flakes extended out some distance on the surface, until at four or five rods in this cove it was suddenly and distinctly bounded by an invisible fence on the surface; but in the middle, as deep down as you could [see], there appeared some fine white par ticles in the water, either this or something else and perhaps some ova of fishes. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the sweet flag, here grows the blue flag in the water, thinly about the shore. The color of the flower harmonizes singularly with the water.2 With our boat's prow to the shore, we sat half an hour this evening listening to the bullfrogs. Their belching is my dumping sound more hoarsely heard near at hand. What imperturbable fellows! One sits perfectly still behind some blades of grass while the dog is chasing others within two feet. Some are quite handsome, large, spotted fellows. We see here and there light-colored greenish-white spots on the bottom where a fish, a bream perhaps, has picked away all the dead wood and leaves for her nest over a space of eight een inches or more. Young breams from one to three 1 [Walden, p. 221; Riv. 312.] 2 [Ibid.] 253 inches long, light-colored and transparent, are swimming about, and here and there a leech in the shallow water, moving s**~>*~^s as serpents are represented to do. Large devil's-needles are buzzing back and forth. They skim along the edge of the blue flags, apparently quite round this cove or further, like hen-harriers beating the bush for game. And now comes a hummingbird humming from the woods and alights on the blossom of a blue flag. The bullfrogs begin with one or two notes and with each peal add another trill to their trump, — er-roonk, er-er-roonk, er-er-er-roonk, etc. I am amused to hear one after another, and then an unexpectedly deep and confident bass, as if he had charged himself with more wind than the rest. And now, as if by a general agreement, they all trump together, making a deafening noise. Sometimes one jumps up a foot out of water in the midst of these concerts. What are they about? Suddenly a tree-toad in the overhang ing woods begins, and another answers, and another, with loud, ringing notes such as I never heard before, and in three minutes they are all silent again. A red eye sings on a tree-top, and a cuckoo is heard far in the wood.
These are the evening sounds.
As we look over the water now, the opposite woods are seen dimly through what appears not so much the condensing dew and mist as the dry haziness of the afternoon, now settled and condensed. The woods on the opposite shore have not the distinctness they had an hour before, but perhaps a more agreeable dimness, a sort of gloaming or settling and thickening of the haze over the water, which melts tree into tree and masses them agreeably. The trees no longer bright and distinct, — a bluish mistiness. This appears to be an earlier gloaming before sun set, such as by and by is universal. Went through the woods along the old canal to Haynes's pasture, from the height of which we looked down on the rich New Hampshire wood we had come out of. The ground rising within the wood gave it the appearance of woods rising by successive stages from a smaller growth on the edge to stately trees in the middle, and Nobscot was seen in the southwest through the blue furnace mist.
This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before. Then the dews begin to descend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities ; and home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for supper.
The wood thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain with all his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, — the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say! There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson's "Seasons" and Homer.
The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness. Probably the tortoise leaves her eggs thus near the surface and in sand that they may receive the great est heat from the sand, being just deep enough for the sand to receive and retain it and not part with it at night, — not so deep as to be cool.
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