Start for White Mountains

July 2. 

A. M. —Start for White Mountains in a private carriage with Edward Hoar. 

Notice in a shallow pool on a rock on a hilltop, in road in North Chelmsford, a rather peculiar-looking Alisma Plantago, with long reddish petioles, just budded. 

Spent the noon close by the old Dunstable graveyard, by a small stream north of it. Red lilies were abundantly in bloom in the burying-ground and by the river. Mr. Weld’s monument is a large, thick, naturally flat rock, lying flat over the grave. Noticed the monument of Josiah Willard, Esq., “Captain of Fort Dummer.” Died 1750, aged 58. 

Walked to and along the river and bathed in it. There were harebells, well out, and much Apocynum cannabinum, well out, apparently like ours, prevailing along the steep sandy and stony shore. A marked peculiarity in this species is that the upper branches rise above the flowers. Also get the A. androsoemifolium, quite downy beneath. 

The Smilacina stellata going to seed, quite common in the copse on top of the bank. 

What a relief and expansion of my thoughts when I come out from that inland position by the graveyard to this broad river’s shore! This vista was incredible there. Suddenly I see a broad reach of blue beneath, with its curves and headlands, liberating me from the. more terrene earth. What a difference it makes whether I spend my four hours’ nooning between the hills by yonder roadside, or on the brink of this fair river, within a quarter of a mile of that! Here the earth is fluid to my thought, the sky is reflected from beneath, and around yonder cape is the highway to other continents. This current allies me to all the world. Be careful to sit in an elevating and inspiring place. There my thoughts were confined and trivial, and I hid myself from the gaze of travellers. Here they are expanded and elevated, and I am charmed by the beautiful river reach. It is equal to a different season and country and creates a different mood. 

As you travel northward from Concord, probably the reaches of the Merrimack River, looking up or down them from the bank, will be the first inspiring sight. There is something in the scenery of a broad river equivalent to culture and civilization. Its channel conducts our thoughts as well as bodies to classic and famous ports, and allies us to all that is fair and great. I like to remember that at the end of half a day’s walk I can stand on the bank of the Merrimack. It is just wide enough to interrupt the land and lead my eye and thoughts down its channel to the sea. 

A river is superior to a lake in its liberating influence. It has motion and indefinite length. A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, it may be unused as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current it is a slightly fluttering wing. River towns are winged towns. 

I returned through the grass up the winding channel of our little brook to the camp again. Along the brook, in the rank grass and weeds, grew abundantly a slender umbelliferous plant mostly just out of bloom, one and a half to four feet high.

Either Thaspium aureum or Cryptotoenia Canadensis (Sison).

Saw also the scouring-rush, apparently just beginning to bloom! 

In the southern part of Merrimack, passed a singular “Horseshoe Pond” between the road and the river on the interval. Belknap says in his History, speaking of the changes in river-courses, “In some places these ancient channels are converted into ponds, which, from their curved form, are called horseshoe ponds.” 

Put up at tavern in Merrimack, some miles after passing over a pretty high, flat-topped hill in road, whence we saw the mountains (with a steep descent to the interval on right). 

7 P. M. — I walked by a path through the wood north east to the Merrimack, crossing two branches of Babboosuck Brook, on which were handsome rocky falls in the woods. 

The wood thrush sings almost wherever I go, eternally reconsecrating the world, morning and evening, for us. And again it seems habitable and more than habitable to us.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 2, 1858

Apocynum cannabinum, well out, apparently like ours, prevailing along the steep sandy and stony shore. See July 11, 1857 ("Apocynum cannabinum, with its small white flowers and narrow sepals")\ and note to September 2, 1856 ("Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on it, aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it.")


The wood thrush sings almost wherever I go, eternally reconsecrating the world, morning and evening, for us. See  August 12, 1851 ( "The wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods.") See also May 10, 1858 ("Toward night wood thrush ennobles the wood and the world with his strain."); May 17, 1853 ("The wood thrush . . . touches a depth in me which no other bird's song does.."); June 22, 1853 ("I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination."); July 5, 1852 ("The wood thrush's . . is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening").