To see a remote landscape between two near rocks!

November 3. 

November 3, 1857

P. M. – To the Easterbrooks moraine via Ponkawtasset-top.

Islands, pale-brown grassy isles, are appearing again in the meadow as the water goes down. From this hilltop, looking down-stream over the Great Meadows away from the sun, the water is rather dark, it being windy, but about the shores of the grassy isles is a lighter-colored smooth space. 

Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen.

There is a wild pear tree on the east side of Ponkawtasset, which I find to be four and a half feet in circumference at four feet from the ground.

Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig, but the latter often curve upward more than the other. 

I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, – robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. 

Follow up the Boulder Field northward, and it terminates in that moraine. As I return down the Boulder Field, I see the now winter-colored — i.e. reddish (of oak leaves) — horizon of hills, with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, between two of the boulders, which are a dozen rods from me, a dozen feet high, and nearly as much apart, — as a landscape between the frame of a picture. But what a picture frame! These two great slumbering masses of rock, reposing like a pair of mastodons on the surface of the pasture, completely shutting out a mile of the horizon on each side, while between their adjacent sides, which are nearly perpendicular, I see to the now purified, dry, reddish, leafy horizon, with a faint tinge of blue from the distance. 

To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! I want no other gilding to my picture-frame. There they lie, as perchance they tumbled and split from off an iceberg. What better frame could you have? The globe itself, here named pasture, for ground and foreground, two great boulders for the sides of the frame, and the sky itself for the top! And for artists and subject, God and Nature! Such pictures cost nothing but eyes, and it will not bankrupt one to own them. They were not stolen by any conqueror as spoils of war, and none can doubt but they are really the works of an old master. What more, pray, will you see between any two slips of gilded wood in that pasture you call Europe and browse in sometimes? 

It is singular that several of those rocks should be thus split into twins. Even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and parallel, having a path between them. 

It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it! And yet I suppose they are considered an incumbrance only by the owner. 

I came along the path that comes out just this side the lime-kiln. 

Coming by Ebby Hubbard’s thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. It seems, then, that no wood is so dense but that the rays of the setting sun may penetrate twenty rods into it. 

The other day (November 1st), I stood on the sunny side of such a wood at the same season, or a little earlier. Then I saw the lit sides of the tree stems all aglow with their lichens, and observed their black shadows behind. Now I see chiefly the dark stems massed together, and it is the warm sunlight that is reduced to a pencil of light; i. e., then light was the rule and shadow the exception, now shadow the rule and light the exception. 

I notice some old cow-droppings in a pasture, which are decidedly pink. Even these trivial objects awaken agreeable associations in my mind, connected not only with my own actual rambles but with what I have read of the prairies and pampas and Eastern land of grass, the great pastures of the world.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 3, 1857

It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. See  November 1, 1860  ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air."); November 7, 1855 ("gossamer on the grass. . . revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”); November 11, 1858 ("Gossamer reflecting the light is another November phenomenon (as well as October)."); November 13,1855 (" I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences.”); November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November"); November 19, 1853 (“This, too, is a gossamer day, though it is not particularly calm. . . .”);  November 28, 1856 ("sunlight reflected from the many ascending twigs of bare young chestnuts and birches... remind me of the lines of gossamer at this season, being almost exactly similar to the eye. It is a true November phenomenon.").  Also November 3, 1853 ("There are very few phenomena which can be described indifferently as occurring at different seasons of the year . . . ")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! See November 1, 1852 ("To see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture. ")

Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen. See November 3, 1858 ("The pitch pine fallen and falling leaves now and for some time have not been bright or yellow, but brown.")

Spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. See  May 29, 1858 ("I mistook dense groves of little barberries in the droppings of cows in the Boulder Field for apple trees at first. So the cows eat barberries, and help disperse or disseminate them exactly as they do the apple! That helps account for the spread of the barberry, then."); June 28, 1858 ("I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced"); October 20, 1857 ("The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them."); October 18, 1857 ("I see many robins on barberry bushes, probably after berries.")  February 4, 1856. ("I have often wondered how red cedars could have sprung up in some pastures which I knew to be miles distant from the nearest fruit-bearing cedar, but it now occurs to me that these and barberries, etc., may be planted by the crows, and probably other birds."). Also September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that such seeds as these will turn out to be more sought after by birds and quadrupeds, and so transported by them, than those lighter ones furnished with a pappus and transported by the wind; and that those the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds."); September 23, 1860 ("It is evident, then, that the fox eats huckleberries and so contributes very much to the dispersion of this shrub, for there were a number of entire berries in its dung in both the last two I chanced to notice. To spread these seeds, Nature employs not only a great many birds but this restless ranger the fox.")


Coming by Ebby Hubbard’s thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. Compare April 29, 1852 ("Coming home over the Corner road, the sun, now getting low, is reflected very bright and silvery from the water on the meadows, seen through the pines of Hubbard's Grove.")