P. M. — To A. Wheeler's grape meadow.
Mimulus, not long. Hypericum corymbosum, a day or two. Rusty cotton-grass, how long ? The small hypericums are open only in the forenoon. Pursley, also, in our garden opens now not till 8 a. m., and shuts up before 12 m.
The flat euphorbia is now in prime on the sandy path beyond Potter's Desert, five-finger fungus path.
Plucked a handful of huckleberries from one bush! The Vaccinium vacillans thick enough to go picking, and probably for a day or two in some places.
Low blackberries thick enough to pick in some places, three or four days.
Thimble-berries about the 12th, and V. Pennsylvanicum much longer.
These hot afternoons I go panting through the close sprout-lands and copses, as now from Cliff Brook to Wheeler meadow, and occasionally come to sandy places a few feet in diameter where the partridges have dusted themselves.
[Gerard, the lion-killer of Algiers, speaks of seeing similar spots when tracking or patiently waiting the lion there, and his truth in this particular is a confirmation of the rest of his story. But his pursuit dwarfs this fact and makes it seem trivial.]
Shall not my pursuit also contrast with the trivialness of the partridges' dusting? It is interesting to find that the same phenomena, however simple, occur in different parts of the globe.
I have found an arrowhead or two in such places even.
Far in warm, sandy woods in hot weather, when not a breath of air is stirring, I come upon these still sandier and warmer spots where the partridges have dusted themselves, now all still and deserted, and am not relieved, yet pleased to find that I have been preceded, by any creature.
Grapes ready to stew.
Mr. Russell writes me to-day that he visited the locality of the Magnolia glauca the 18th, on Cape Ann, and saw lingering still a few flowers and flower-buds. It is quite open and rising above the bushes.
The brook cress might be called river cress, for it is very abundant rising above the surface in all the shallower parts of the river.
Verbena hastata, apparently several days.
Sonchus, some time.
This has been a peculiarly fine afternoon. When I look about casually, am surprised at the fairness of the landscape. Though warm, it is clear and fresh, and the air imparts to all surfaces a peculiar fine glaucous color, full of light, without mistiness, like the under side of the Salix lucida (?) leaves at present. Not only the under sides of the leaves, but the very afternoon landscape, has become glaucous.
Now, when the fashionable world goes to Saratoga, Nahant, and Newport, we frequent our oldest haunts with new love and reverence and sail into new ports with each fresh varnish of the air.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 21, 1856
We frequent our oldest haunts with new love and reverence. See August 30, 1856 (“[T]here are square rods in Middlesex County as purely primitive and wild as they were a thousand years ago, which have escaped the plow and the axe and the scythe and the cranberry-rake, little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization, wild as a square rod on the moon, supposing it to be uninhabited. I believe almost in the personality of such planetary matter, feel something akin to reverence for it, can even worship it as terrene, titanic matter extant in my day. We are so different we admire each other, we healthily attract one another. I love it as a maiden”)
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