Glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there.

November 4. 

Glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there.

P. M. —To Pine Hill via Spanish Brook. 

I leave the railroad at Walden Crossing and follow the path to Spanish Brook. 

How swift Nature is to repair the damage that man does! When he has cut down a tree and left only a white-topped and bleeding stump, she comes at once to the rescue with her chemistry, and covers it decently with a fresh coat of gray, and in course of time she adds a thick coat of green cup and bright cockscomb lichens, and it be comes an object of new interest to the lover of nature! Suppose it were always to remain a raw stump instead! It becomes a shell on which this humble vegetation spreads and displays itself, and we forget the death of the larger in the life of the less. 

I see in the path some rank thimble-berry shoots covered with that peculiar hoary bloom very thickly. It is only rubbed off in a few places down to the purple skin, by some passing hunter perchance. It is a very singular and delicate outer coat, surely, for a plant to wear. I find that I can write my name in it with a pointed stick very distinctly, each stroke, however fine, going down to the purple. It is a new kind of enamelled card. 

What is this bloom, and what purpose does it serve? Is there anything analogous in animated nature? It is the coup de grace, the last touch and perfection of any work, a thin elysian veil cast over it, through which it may be viewed. It is breathed on by the artist, and thereafter his work is not to be touched without injury. It is the evidence of a ripe and completed work, on which the unexhausted artist has breathed out of his superfluous genius, and his work looks through it as a veil. 

If it is a poem, it must be invested with a similar bloom by the imagination of the reader. It is the subsidence of superfluous ripeness. Like a fruit preserved in its own sugar. It is the handle by which the imagination grasps it. 

I frequently see a spreading pitch pine on whose lower and horizontal limbs the falling needles have lodged, forming thick and unsightly masses, where anon the snow will collect and make a close canopy. The evergreens, with their leaves, are, of course, more likely to catch this litter than the deciduous trees, and the pines especially, because their lower branches are oftener horizontal and flat, beside being unyielding to the wind. Robins build there. 

I notice the new and as yet unswollen scales of willow catkins or buds (the first [?] by the pond) quite yellow in the sun, but nearer I find that half are turned black. 

The evergreen ferns and lycopodiums, etc., on the forest floor, though partly fallen, represent the evergreen trees among humbler plants. 

I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length, or half a mile, — I sit high. 

The sun is once or twice its diameter above the horizon, and the mountains north of it stand out grand and distinct, a decided purple. But when I look critically, I distinguish a whitish mist — such is the color of the denser air—about their lower parts, while their tops are dark-blue. (So the mountains too have a bloom on them; and is not the bloom on fruits equivalent to that blue veil of air which distance gives to many objects?) 

I see one glistening reflection on the dusky and leafy northwestern earth, seven or eight miles off, betraying a window there, though no house can be seen. It twinkles incessantly, as from a waving surface. This, probably, is the undulation of the air. 

Now that the sun is actually setting, the mountains are dark-blue from top to bottom. As usual, a small cloud attends the sun to the portals of the day and reflects this brightness to us, now that he is gone. But those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 4, 1857

. . .where anon the snow will collect and make a close canopy. See November 4, 1851 (“[These little cheerful hemlocks] remind me of winter, the snows which are to come . . .”)

I notice the new and as yet unswollen scales of willow catkins or buds. .  . See October 30, 1853 ("Now, now is the time to look at the buds.”); November 4, 1854 (“The shad-bush buds have expanded into small leaflets already.”).

I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening.  See November 25, 1857 ("I shiver about awhile on Pine Hill, waiting for the sun to set."); November 30, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden.”)

Grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! See September 12, 1851("It is worth the while to see the mountains in the horizon once a day."):August 14, 1854(“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon.");October 22, 1857 (“But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ”); May 17, 1858 ("I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence.")