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| October 13, 2017 |
P. M. – To Poplar Hill.
Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. When my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago.
The outside trees in the swamps lose their leaves first. The brilliancy of young oaks, especially scarlet oaks, in sprout-lands is dulled. These red maples and young scarlet oaks, etc., have been the most conspicuous and important colors, or patches of color, in the landscape.
Those most brilliant days, then, so far as the autumnal tints are concerned, are over; i. e., when we may be surprised at any turn by the sight of some incredibly bright and dazzling tree or grove of trees.
I noticed the first large white oaks wholly changed to a salmon-color, but not brilliant like those sprout land fires. Are very large oaks never brilliant in their tints? [Yes.]
The hickories on Poplar Hill have not lost any of their brilliancy, generally speaking. Some are quite green even. I look down into a mocker-nut, whose recesses and greater part are pure yellow, and from this you pass through a ruddy orange in the more exposed leaves to a rich crispy brown in the leaves of the extreme twigs about the clusters of round green nuts.
The red of oaks, etc., is far more general now than three or four days ago, but it is also much duller, so that some maples that were a bright scarlet can now hardly be distinguished by their color from oaks, which have just turned red.
The Great Fields from this hill are pale-brown, often hoary — there is not yellow enough for russet — pastures, with very large red or purple patches of black berry vines.
You can only appreciate the effect of these by a strong and peculiar intention of the eye. We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there.
The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow, i. e. north side the hill, are at the height of their change and are falling. Maybe they are later than on the south side of hills. They are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground.
Pinweeds are brown; how long? Some of the large ash trees, both a black and white, are quite bare of leaves already. With the red maples, then.
Looking from this hill, green begins to look as rare and interesting as any color, — you may say begins to be a color by itself, —and I distinguish green streaks and patches of grass on most hillsides.
See a pretty large flock of tree sparrows, very lively and tame, drifting along and pursuing each other along a bushy fence and ditch like driving snow. Two pursuing each other would curve upward like a breaker in the air and drop into the hedge again.
Some white willows are very fresh and green yet. This has been the ninth of those wonderful days, and one of the warmest. I am obliged to sit with my window wide open all the evening as well as all day. It is the earlier Indian summer.
Our cherry trees have now turned to mostly a red orange color.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 13, 1857
Maple . . . look smoky in the swamps. See October 13, 1855 ("The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows."); October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.")
Those most brilliant days, then, so far as the autumnal tints are concerned, are over. . . See October 13,1852 ("The autumnal tints have already lost their brightness. It lasts but a day or two.")
We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there. See note to July 2 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”)
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