Artificial, denaturalized persons cannot handle nature without being poisoned.

August 6. 

Copious and continuous rain in the night, deluging, soaking rain, with thunder and lightning, beating down the crops; and this morning it is cooler and clearer and windier. 

P. M. — To Walden. 

The wind, or motion of the air, makes it much cooler on the railroad causeway or hills, but in the woods it is as close and melting as before. 

Solidago altissima, a small specimen, a day or two. Apios tuberosa, some days. Rubus hispidus ripe. Middle umbels of the bristly aralia ripe. 

Desmodium nudiflorum, some time out at Peak. It is sometimes three feet high! Holly berries ripe. Clethra, how long? Some anychia shows green seed. Desmodium rotundifolium, some days at least.

Cynoglossum Morisoni mostly gone to seed, roadside, at grape-vine just beyond my bean-field. Some is five feet high. 

Aster macrophyllus, apparently two or three days, at hillside, under beaked hazel.

Eupatorium purpureum at Stow's Pool, apparently several days, but more common there the tall hollow one, whorled to top, also out. 

Hear a nuthatch. 

Hieracium scabrous. 

Artificial, denaturalized persons cannot handle nature without being poisoned. If city-bred girls visit their country cousins, — go a-berrying with them, — they are sure to return covered with blueberry bumps at least. They exhaust all the lotions of the country apothecary for a week after. Unnamable poisons infect the air, as if they were pursued by imps. I have known those who forbade their children going into the woods at all.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, August 6, 1856

The wind, or motion of the air, makes it much cooler on the railroad causeway or hills, but in the woods it is as close and melting as before. See August 6, 1854 ("The sun is quite hot to-day, but the wind is cool . . .Methinks that after this date there is commonly a vein of coolness in the wind.”)

Hieracium scabrous. See July 21, 1851 ("The rough hawkweed, too, resembling in its flower the autumnal dandelion.”); August 21, 1851 (" I have now found all the hawkweeds. Singular these genera of plants, plants manifestly related yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a natural history in a new sense.”)

If city-bred girls visit their country cousins, — go a-berrying with them, — they are sure to return covered with blueberry bumps at least. August 6, 1851 ("We in the country make no report of the seals and sharks in our neighborhood to those in the city. We send them only our huckleberries, not free wild thoughts.”)

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

 

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 © 2009-2021