The poet has made the best roots in his native soil of any man, and is the hardest to transplant.

November 20. 

November 20, 1857

High wind in the night, shaking the house, apparently from the northwest.

About 9.30 A. M., though there is very little cloud, I see a few flakes of snow, two or three only, like flocks of gossamer, straggling in a slanting direction to the ground, unnoticed by most, in a rather raw air. 

At ten there is a little more. The children in the next yard have seen it and are excited. They are searching to see if any rests on the ground. 

In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home. If an equal emotion is excited by a familiar homely phenomenon as by the Pyramids, there is no advantage in seeing the Pyramids. It is on the whole better, as it is simpler, to use the common language. We require that the reporter be very permanently planted before the facts which he observes, not a mere passer-by; hence the facts cannot be too homely. 

A man is worth most to himself and to others, whether as an observer, or poet, or neighbor, or friend, where he is most himself, most contented and at home.

There his life is the most intense and he loses the fewest moments. Familiar and surrounding objects are the best symbols and illustrations of his life. If a man who has had deep experiences should endeavor to describe them in a book of travels, it would be to use the language of a wandering tribe instead of a universal language. 

The poet has made the best roots in his native soil of any man, and is the hardest to transplant. 

The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself. If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We only need travel enough to give our intellects an airing. 

In spite of Malthus and the rest, there will be plenty of room in this world, if every man will mind his own business. I have not heard of any planet running against another yet.

P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp. 

Some bank swallows’ nests are exposed by the caving of the bank at Clamshell. The very smallest hole is about two and a half inches wide horizontally, by barely one high. All are much wider than high (vertically). One nest, with an egg in it still, is completely exposed. The cavity at the end is shaped like a thick hoe-cake or lens, about six inches wide and two plus thick, vertically. The nest is a regular but shallow one made simply of stubble, about five inches in diameter, and three quarters of an inch deep. 

I see many pollywogs in cold pools now. 

I enter the Ministerial Swamp at the road below Tarbell’s. The water andromeda leaves are brown now, except where protected by trees. In some places where many of the bright-crimson shoots of high blueberry are seen together, they have a very pretty effect, a crimson vigor to stand above the snow. 

Where the larches stand thick with their dark boles and stems, the ground is thickly strewn with their fine and peculiarly dark brown leaves, chaff-like, i. e. darker than those of other pines, perhaps like black walnut or cherry shavings. As where other evergreens stand thick, little or nothing grows beneath. 

I see where squirrels (apparently) have eaten and stripped the spruce cones. 

I distinguished where the earth was cast out in cutting ditches through this swamp long ago, and this earth is covered and concealed with a thick growth of cup and cockscomb lichens. 

In this light-lying earth, in one place, I see where some creature some time ago has pawed out much comb of some kind of bee (probably for the honey?), making a hole as big as my head, and this torn comb lies about. 

Returning through Harrington's land, I see, me thinks, two gentlemen plowing a field, as if to try an agricultural experiment, — for, it being cold and windy, both plowman and driver have their coats on, — but when I get closer, I hear the driver speak in a peculiarly sharp and petulant manner to the plow man as they are turning the land furrow, and I know at once that they belong to those two races which are so slow to amalgamate. Thus my little idyl is disturbed. 

I see a partridge on the ground under a white oak by Tarbell's black birches, looking just like a snag.This is the second time I have seen them in such a place. Are they not after acorns? 

In the large Tommy Wheeler field, Ranunculus bulbosus in full bloom! 

I hear again the soft rippling of the Assabet under those black birches, which Tappan once remarked on. It is not so steep a fall as to be hoarse. 

The hardy tree sparrow has taken the place of the chipping and song sparrow, so much like the former that most do not know it is another. His faint lisping chip will keep our spirits up till another spring. 

I observed this afternoon how some bullocks had a little sportiveness forced upon them. They were running down a steep declivity to water, when, feeling themselves unusually impelled by gravity downward, they took the hint even as boys do, flourished round gratuitously, tossing their hind quarters into the air and shaking their heads at each other, but what increases the ludicrousness of it to me is the fact that such capers are never accompanied by a smile. Who does not believe that their step is less elastic, their movement more awkward, for their long domesticity?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 20, 1857

High wind in the night, shaking the house. . . See October 17, 1857 ("Very high wind in the night, shaking the house. I feel it taking hold under the eaves, which project at the end of the house, each time with a jerk.") October 24, 1853 ("Just after dark, high southerly winds arise. . . blowing the rain against the windows and roof and shaking the house."); November 25, 1860 (“The house was shaken by wind last night, and there was a general deficiency of bedclothes.”); February 10, 1860 ("A very strong and a cold northwest wind to-day, shaking the house,. . . — consumes wood and yet we are cold, and drives the smoke down the chimney"); February 29, 1852 (“High winds last night and this morning. The house shakes, and the beds and tables rock.”); March 18, 1854 (“Never felt it shake the house so much. . .”); June 2, 1855 (“The wind shakes the house night and day.”)

About 9.30 A. M., I see a few flakes of snow. At ten there is a little more. The children in the next yard are searching to see if any rests on the ground. See November 8, 1853 (“Our first snow,. . . The children greet it with a shout when they come out at recess.”)

We only need travel enough to give our intellects an airing. See September 7, 1851 ("The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper."); May 6, 1854 ("It matters not where or how far you travel, — the farther commonly the worse, — but how much alive you are.");  March 11, 1856 ("Only that travelling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better");September 21, 1856 ("I have within a week found in Concord two of the new plants I found up-country. Such is the advantage of going abroad, — to enable to detect your own plants. I detected them first abroad, because there I was looking for the strange.")

I see a partridge on the ground under a white oak by Tarbell's black birches, looking just like a snag.See January 31, 1855 ("As I skate near the shore under Lee’s Cliff, I see what I take to be some scrags or knotty stubs of a dead limb lying on the bank beneath a white oak, close by me. Yet while I look directly at them I can not but admire their close resemblance to partridges. . . .")

I hear again the soft rippling of the Assabet under those black birches . . . It is not so steep a fall as to be hoarse. April 11, 1856 ("The current of the Assabet is so much swifter, and its channel so much steeper than that of the main stream, that, while a stranger frequently cannot tell which way the latter flows by his eye, you can perceive the declination of the channel of the former within a very short distance, even between one side of a tree and another. You perceive the waters heaped on the upper side of rocks and trees, and even twigs that trail in the stream.")

Bullocks had a little sportiveness forced upon them. . flourished round gratuitously, tossing their hind quarters into the air and shaking their heads at each other. See November 21, 1850 ("I saw a herd of a dozen cows and young steers and oxen on Conantum this afternoon, running about and frisking in unwieldy sport . . . shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down the hill.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 20

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 ©  2009-2022