Friday.
At 6 A. M. we began to descend.
Near the upper edge of the wood, I heard, as I had done in ascending, a very peculiar lively and interesting strain from some bird, which note was new to me. At the same time I caught sight of a bird with a very conspicuous deep-orange throat and otherwise dark, with some streaks along the head. This may have been the Blackburnian warbler, if it was not too large for that, and may have been the singer.
We descended or continued along the base of the mountain southward, taking the road to the State Line Station and Winchendon, through the west part of Rindge.
It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression. The lofty beaked promontory which, when you were on the summit, appeared so far off and almost equal to it, seen now against the latter, scarcely deepens the tinge of bluish, misty gray on its side.
The mountain has several spurs or ridges, bare and rocky, running from it, with a considerable depression between the central peak and them; i.e., they attain their greatest height half a mile or more from the central apex. There is such a spur, for instance, running off southward about a mile. When we looked back from four or five miles distant on the south, this, which had appeared like an independent summit, was almost totally lost to our view against the general misty gray of the side of the principal summit.
We should not have suspected its existence if we had not just come from it, and though the mountain ranges northeasterly and southwesterly, or not far from north and south, and is much the longest in that direction, it now presented a pretty regular pyramidal outline with a broad base, as if it were broadest east and west.
That is, when you are on the mountain, the different peaks and ridges appear more independent; indeed, there is a bewildering variety of ridge and valley and peak, but when you have with drawn a few miles, you are surprised at the more or less pyramidal outline of the mountain and that the lower spurs and peaks are all subordinated to the central and principal one.
The summit appears to rise and the surrounding peaks to subside, though some new prominences appear. Even at this short distance the mountain has lost most of its rough and jagged outline, considerable ravines are smoothed over, and large boulders which you must go a long way round make no impression on the eye, being swallowed up in the air.
We had at first thought of returning to the railroad at Fitzwilliam, passing over Gap Mountain, which is in Troy and Fitzwilliam quite near Monadnock, but concluded to go to Winchendon, passing through the western part of Rindge to the State Line Station, the latter part of the road being roundabout. We crossed the line between Jaffrey and Rindge three or four miles from the mountain.
Got a very good view of the mountain from a high hill over which the road ran in the western part of Rindge.
But the most interesting part of this walk was the three miles along the railroad between State Line and Winchendon Station. It was the best timbered region we saw, though its trees are rapidly falling. The railroad runs very straight for long distances here through a primitive forest.
To my surprise I heard the tea-lea of the myrtle-bird here, as in Maine, and suppose that it breeds in this primitive wood. There was no house near the railroad but at one point, and then a quarter of a mile off. The red elder was in full bloom and filled the air with its fragrance.
I saw some of the handsomest white pines here that I ever saw, – even in Maine, — close by the railroad. One by which I stood was at least three and a half feet in diameter at two feet from the ground, and, like several others about it, rose perfectly straight without any kind of limb to the height of sixty feet at least.
What struck me most in these trees, as I was passing by, was not merely their great size, for they appeared less than they were, but their perfect perpendicularity, roundness, and apparent smoothness, tapering very little, like artificial columns of a new style. Their trunks were so very round that for that reason they appeared smoother than they were, marked with interrupted bands of light-colored lichens.
Their regular beauty made such an impression that I was forced to turn aside and contemplate them. They were so round and perpendicular that my eyes slid off, and they made such an impression of finish and even polish as if they had had an enamelled surface. Indeed they were less rough than I might have expected.
Beneath them grew the Trillium pictum and clintonia, both in bloom.
For last expedition to Monadnock, vide September, 1852.
I find the Cornus florida out in my pitcher when I get home June 4th, though it was not out on Island May 31st, and it is well out on Island when I look June 6th. I will say, therefore, that it opened June 3d.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 4, 1858
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