To Cliffs. I perceive the scent of the earliest ripe apples in my walk. How it surpasses all their flavors! When I come out on to the wet rock by the juniper, all green with moss and with the driving mists beneath me, — for the sun did not come out till seven, — it reminds me of mountain-tops which I have visited.
In the low woodland paths full of rank weeds, there are countless great fungi of various forms and colors, the produce of the warm rains and muggy weather of a week ago, now rapidly dissolving. The ground is covered with foul spots where they have dissolved, and for most of my walk the air is tainted with a musty, carrion like odor, in some places very offensive, so that I at first suspected a dead horse or cow. They impress me like humors or pimples on the face of the earth, toddy- blossoms, by which it gets rid of its corrupt blood. A sort of excrement they are.
It never occurred to me before to-day that those different forms belong to one species. Some I see just pushing up in the form of blunt cones, thrusting the leaves aside, and, further along, some which are perfectly flat on top, probably the same in full bloom, and others decaying and curved up into a basin at the edges.
This misty and musty dog-day weather has lasted now nearly a month.
Locust days, — sultry and sweltering. I hear them even till sunset. The usually invisible but far-heard locust. The toads probably ceased about the time I last spoke of them. Bullfrogs, also, I have not heard for a long time. I hear no wood thrushes for a week. The pea-wai still, and sometimes the golden robin. Methinks the reign of the milkweeds is over.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 14, 1853
I perceive the scent of the earliest ripe apples in my walk. See August 18, 1852 ("Ripe apples here and there scent the air.”); August 9, 1851 ("Now the earliest apples begin to be ripe, but none are so good to eat as some to smell.”)
This misty and musty dog-day weather has lasted now nearly a month. See August 14, 1852 ("There is such a haze that I cannot see the mountains.”); July 30, 1856 (“The atmosphere thick, mildewy, cloudy. It is difficult to dry anything. The sun is obscured, yet we expect no rain”)
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| August 14, 2013 |
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