What kind of life it must be that is lived always in sight of mountains..

May 17. 

Louring and more or less rainy. 

P. M. – To Ledum Swamp. 

Near Baeomyces Bank, I see the Salix humilis showing its down or cotton, and also the S. tristis. Probably the last is wholly out of bloom some time. These, then, have ripe seed before the white maple. 

It rains gently from time to time as I walk, but I see a farmer with his boys, John Hosmer, still working in the rain, bent on finishing his planting. He is slowly getting a soaking, quietly dropping manure in the furrows. 

This rain is good for thought. It is especially agreeable to me as I enter the wood and hear the soothing dripping on the leaves. It domiciliates me in nature. The woods are the more like a house for the rain; the few slight noises sound more hollow in them; the birds hop nearer; the very trees seem still and pensive. The clouds are but a higher roof. The clouds and rain confine me to near objects, the surface of the earth and the trees. 

On the first holdings up in the intervals of the rain, the chewink is heard again, and the huckleberry-bird, and the evergreen-forest note, etc. 

I am coming in sight of the Charles Miles house. What a pleasant sandy road, soaking up the rain, that from the woods to the Miles house! The house becomes a controlling feature in the landscape when there is but one or two in sight. 

The red maple tops ten days ago looked like red paint scaling off, when seen against houses. Now they have acquired a browner red. 

The Populus grandidentata now shows large, silvery, downy, but still folded, leafets. 

You are more than paid for a wet coat and feet, not only by the exhilaration that the fertile moist air imparts, but by the increased fragrance and more gem-like character of expanding buds and leafets in the rain. All vegetation is now fuller of life and expression, some what like lichens in wet weather, and the grass. Buds are set in syrup or amber. 

May 17, 2018

Measured the large apple tree in front of the Charles Miles house. It is nine feet and ten inches in circumference at two and a half feet from the ground, the smallest place below the branches, which are now four, — once five, one being cut, — starting at about five feet from the ground, and each as big as a good-sized modern tree. The top is large. The trunk looks healthy and is scarcely larger at the ground than where measured. It is large for an oak, a sturdy-looking tree, reminding one of the portly bodies of some of our grandfathers. It is not grafted. Once stood by the fence. 

While I was measuring the tree, Puffer came along, and I had a long talk with him, standing under the tree in the cool sprinkling rain till we shivered. He said that he had seen pout-spawn attached to the under side of the white lily pads! ! He thought he knew it from having seen it in their bodies. He thought that the pickerel spawn was dropped in deep water and was devoured by pouts and eels. Wondered where eels bred, and how, for he never detected any spawn in them. Had been told (like Witherell) that they gendered into, i.e. copulated with, the clam. 

Told of a winter some fifteen years ago when there was a freshet in February, and the snapping turtles thought it was spring and came up with it on to the meadows; but it froze, and the ice settled on them and killed them when the water went down, and they were found dead in great numbers in the spring, — one that must have weighed one hundred pounds. Had seen pickerel that had been frozen four or five hours brought to life in water. 

Said that the black snake laid eight or ten eggs in a field. Once killed a very large water adder, and counted over sixty little snakes in it an inch or two long, and that was not all. Once he was going along, saw a water adder and heard a low sound which it made with its mouth, and he saw as many as twenty-five little snakes run into its mouth. 

Says the foxes eat the Emys picta, which I believe he called grass turtles. He had seen where they had opened them. But they could not get at the box turtle. Found some young stake-drivers as he was mowing. 

When the hummingbird flew about the room yesterday, his body and tail hung in a singular manner be tween the wings, swinging back and forth with a sort of oscillating motion, not hanging directly down, but yet pulsating or teetering up and down. 

I see a chewink flit low across the road with its peculiar flirting, undulating motion. 

I thought yesterday that the view of the mountains from the bare hill on the Lincoln side of Flint's Pond was very grand. Surely they do not look so grand any where within twenty miles of them. 

And I reflected what kind of life it must be that is lived always in sight of them. I looked round at some windows in the middle of Lincoln and considered that such was the privilege of the inhabitants of these chambers; but their blinds were closed, and I have but little doubt that they are blind to the beauty and sublimity of this prospect. 

I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence.

Ranunculus acris, apparently in a day or two. 

Rhodora at Clamshell well out. 

Just after hearing my night-warbler I see two birds on a tree. 

The one which I examined — as well as I could without a glass — had a white throat with a white spot on his wings, was dark above and moved from time to time like a creeper, and it was about the creeper's size. [The plate of Sylvia Canadensis in New York Reports has since reminded me of this.]

The other bird, which I did not examine particularly, was a little larger and more tawny. [Perhaps golden-crowned thrush. ]  

It is remarkable how little way most men get in their account of the mysteries of nature. Puffer, after describing the habits of a snake or turtle, – some peculiarity which struck him in its behavior, — would say with a remarkable air as if he were communicating or suggesting something, possibly explaining something, “Now I take it that is Nature; Nature did that.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 17, 1858 

The clouds and rain confine me to near objects, the surface of the earth and the trees. See August 4, 1854 ("Rain and mist contract our horizon and we notice near and small objects"); September 20, 1857 ("The outlines of trees are more conspicuous and interesting such a day as this, being seen distinctly against the near misty background, – distinct and dark. "); December 16, 1855 ("The mist makes the near trees dark and noticeable, like pictures, and makes the houses more interesting, revealing but one at a time."); ;February 6, 1852 (A mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker and more primitive.); November 29, 1850 ("The trees and shrubs look larger than usual when seen through the mist...As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes.") See also November 7, 1855 ("I find it good to be out this still, dark, mizzling afternoon . . .The world and my life are simplified. ")