These terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light.

March 9

March 9, 2015

A cloudy, rain-threatening day, not windy and rather warmer than yesterday. 

Painted the bottom of my boat. 

P. M. — To Andromeda Ponds. 

Scare up a rabbit on the hillside by these ponds, which was gnawing a smooth sumach. See also where they have gnawed the red maple, sweet-fern, Populus grandidentata, white and other oaks (taking off considerable twigs at four or five cuts), amelanchier, and sallow; but they seem to prefer the smooth sumach to any of these. With this variety of cheap diet they are not likely to starve. 

I get a few drops of the sweet red maple juice which has run down the main stem where a rabbit had nibbled off close a twig. The rabbit, indeed, lives, but the sumach may be killed. 

The heart-wood of the poison-dogwood, when I break it down with my hand, has a singular rotten, yellow look and a spirituous or apothecary odor.

I clamber over those great white pine masts which lie in all directions one upon another on the hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods have been laid waste. 

I am struck, in favorable lights, with the jewel-like brilliancy of the sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine, thickly as a shield, as if pine-wood nymphs had seasonably wept there the fall of the tree. The perfect sincerity of these terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light, is incredible when you remember how firm their consistency. And is this that pitch which you cannot touch without being defiled?

Looking from the Cliffs, the sun being invisible, I see far more light in the reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun than I could see in the heavens from my position, and it occurred to me that the reason was that there was reflected to me from the river the view I should have got if I had stood there on the water in a more favorable position.  

I see that the mud in the road has crystallized as it dried (for it is not nearly cold enough to freeze), like the first crystals that shoot and set on water when freezing. 

I see the minute seeds of the Andromeda calyculata scattered over the melting ice of the Andromeda Ponds. 

An overcast and dark night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 9, 1855

Painted the bottom of my boat. See March 8, 1855 ("This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I calk it."); and March 15, 1854 ("Paint my boat.")

The hillside south of Fair Haven, where the woods have been laid waste. See March 6, 1855 ("There is hardly a wood lot of any consequence left but the chopper’s axe has been heard in it this season. They have even infringed fatally on White Pond, on the south of Fair Haven Pond, shaved ofl’ the topknot of the Cliffs, the Colburn farm, Beck Stow’s, etc., etc.")

These terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light.  See March 24, 1853 ("The white pine wood, freshly cut, piled by the side of the Charles Miles road, is agreeable to walk beside. I like the smell of it, all ready for the borers, and the rich light-yellow color of the freshly split wood and the purple color of the sap at the ends of the quarters, from which distill perfectly clear and crystalline tears, colorless and brilliant as diamonds, tears shed for the loss of a forest in which is a world of light and purity, its life oozing out.")

I see far more light in the reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun than I could see in the heavens from my position, and it occurred to me that the reason was that there was reflected to me from the river the view I should have got if I had stood there on the water. See December 8, 1853 (“I saw from the peak the entire reflection of large white pines very distinctly against a clear white sky, though the actual tree was completely lost in night against the dark distant hillside.”);  October 14, 1857 (“ The reflection exhibits such an aspect of the hill, apparently, as you would get if your eye were placed at that part of the surface of the pond where the reflection seems to be . . .[T]he reflection is never a true copy or repetition of its substance, but a new composition”);   November 2, 1857 ("The water tells me how it looks to it seen from below.”)

Colorless as light—

crystal drops of turpentine

reflecting the world.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, These terebinthine drops

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

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