Clear, cool dry weather

August 30.

Another great fog this morning, which lasts till 8.30. After so much dry and warm weather, cool weather has suddenly come, and this has produced these two larger fogs than for a long time.  

The clearness of the air makes it delicious to gaze in any direction. Though there has been no rain, the valleys are emptied of haze, and I see with new pleasure to distant hillsides and farmhouses and a river-reach shining in the sun, and to the mountains in the horizon.  

I go along through J. Hosmer's meadow near the river, it is so dry. Blue-eyed grass still. Dogwood leaves have fairly begun to turn. A few small maples are scarlet along the meadow. 

Coolness and clarity go together.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 30, 1854

The valleys are emptied of haze, and I see with new pleasure to distant hillsides and farmhouses and a river-reach shining in the sun, and to the mountains in the horizon. See August 25, 1854 (“I think I never saw the haze so thick as now . . . The sun is shorn of his beams by the haze before 5 o'clock P.M., round and red, and is soon completely concealed, apparently by the haze alone.”); August 22, 1854 (“The haze, accompanied by much wind, is so thick this forenoon that the sun is obscured as by a cloud. I see no rays of sunlight.. . . The haze is so thick that we can hardly see more than a mile.”); August 19, 1854 (“There is such a haze we see not further than our Annursnack, which is blue as a mountain.”); August 13, 1854 ("Now the mountains are concealed by the dog-day haze . . .”)