Genius has evanescent boundaries

February 16. 

8 a.m. — To Lee house site again. 

It was a rough-cast house when I first knew it. The fire still glowing among the bricks in the cellar. Richard Barrett says he remembers the inscription and the date 1650, but not the rest distinctly. I find that this recess was not in the cellar, but on the west side of the parlor, which was on the same level with the upper cellar at the west end of the house. It was on the back side of a cupboard (in that parlor), which was a few inches deep at the bottom and sloped back to a foot perhaps at top, or on the brick jog three inches at bottom and five and a half at top, and had shelves. The sitting-room of late was on the same level, the west side of this chimney. 

The old part of the chimney, judging from the clay and the size of the brick, was seven feet wide east and west and about ten north and south. There was the back side of an old oven visible on the south side (late the front of the house) under the stairs (that had been), which had been filled up with the large bricks in clay. 

The chimney above and behind the oven and this recess had been filled in with great stones, many much bigger than one's head, packed in clay mixed with the coarsest meadow-hay. Sometimes there were masses of pure clay and hay a foot in diameter. There was a very great proportion of the hay, consisting of cut-grass, three-sided carex, ferns, and still stouter woody stems, apparently a piece of corn-husk one inch wide and several long. And impressions in the clay of various plants, — grasses, ferns, etc., — exactly like those in coal in character. These are perhaps the oldest pressed plants in Concord. I have a mass eight or nine inches in diameter which is apparently one third vegetable. About these stones there is generally only the width (four and one quarter inches) of one brick, so that the chimney was a mere shell. 

Though the inscription was in a coarse mortar mixed with straw, the sooty bricks over which it was spread were laid in a better mortar, without straw, and yet the mass of the bricks directly above this recess, in the chimney, were all laid in clay. Perhaps they had used plastering there instead of clay because it was a fireplace. A thin coating of whiter and finer mortar or plastering without straw had been spread over the sloping and rounded chimney above the recess and on each side and below it, and this covered many small bricks mingled with the large ones, and though this looked more modern, the straw-mixed mortar of the inscription overlapped at the top about a foot, proving the coarser mortar the more recent. 

The inscription, then, was made after the chimney was built, when some alteration was made, and a small brick had come to be used. Yet so long ago that straw was mixed with the mortar. 

If that recess was an old fireplace, then, apparently, the first house fronted east, for the oven was on the south side. 

A boy who was at the fire said to me, "This was the chimney in which the cat was burned up; she ran into a stove, and we heard her cries in the midst of the fire." Parker says there was no cat; she was drowned. 

According to Shattuck, Johnson, having the period from 1645 to 1650 in view, says of Concord that it had been more populous. "The number of families at present are about 50. Their buildings are conveniently placed, chiefly in one straite street under a sunny banke in a low level," etc. (History, page 18.) 

According to Shattuck (page 14), Governor Winthrop "selected (judiciously, I think) a lot in Concord [apparently in 1638], which 'he intended to build upon,' near where Captain Humphrey Hunt now lives." 

I was contending some time ago that our meadows must have been wetter once than they now are, else the trees would have got up there more. I see that Shattuck says under 1654 (page 33), "The meadows were some what drier, and ceased to be a subject of frequent complaint." 

According to Wood's "New England's Prospect," the first settlers of Concord for meat bought "venison or rockoons" of the Indians. The latter must have been common then. The wolves robbed them of their swine.
  
A wonderfully warm day (the third one); about 2 p.m., thermometer in shade 58.

I perceive that some, commonly talented, persons are enveloped and confined by a certain crust of manners, which, though it may sometimes be a fair and transparent enamel, yet only repels and saddens the beholder, since by its rigidity it seems to repress all further expansion. They are viewed as at a distance, or like an insect under a tumbler. They have, as it were, prematurely hardened both seed and shell, and this has severely taxed, if not put a period to, the life of the plant. This is to stand upon your dignity. 

Genius has evanescent boundaries, like an altar from which incense rises. 

The former are, after all, but hardened sinners in a mild sense. The pearl is a hardened sinner. Manners get to be human parchment, in which sensible books are often bound and honorable titles engrossed, though they may be very stiff and dry.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 16, 1857

To Lee house site again. See February 15, 1857 ("The Lee house, of which six weeks ago I made an accurate plan, had been completely burned up the evening before,"); February 17, 1857 ("E. Hosmer says that his father said that Dr. Lee told him that he put on the whole upper, i.e. third, story of the Lee house.")

A wonderfully warm day (the third one); about 2 p.m., thermometer in shade 58. See February 16, 1854 ("For the last month the weather has been remarkably changeable; hardly three days together alike."); February 16, 1856 ("It is the warmest day at 12 M. since the 22d of December, when the thermometer stood at 50°. To-day it is at 44. I hear the eaves running before I come out, and our thermometer at 2 P. M. is 38°. The sun is most pleasantly warm on my cheek; the melting snow shines in the ruts."); see also February 14, 1857 ("It is a fine, somewhat springlike day. . .the thermometer in the shade north of house standing 42°."); February 24, 1857 ("[It is already 40°, and by noon is between 50° and 60°.")

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Genius has evanescent boundaries . . . See   January 9, 1853.("Perhaps, all that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth ! ...If the genius visits me now I am not quite taken off my feet, but I remember how this experience is like, but less than, that I had long since."); November 6, 1853 (“It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.”);  August 30, 1856 ("I have always reaped unexpected and incalculable advantages from carrying out at last, however tardily, any little enterprise which my genius suggested to me long ago as a thing to be done, — some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course. . . . Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him."). Also May 31, 1853 ("The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations."); February 9, 1852; ("The novelty is in us, and it is also in nature. The mirage is constant . . . a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imaginations.")

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