For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour. The coolness concentrated your thought, however. As I could not command a sunny window, I went abroad on the morning of the 15th and lay in the sun in the fields in my thin coat, though it was rather cool even there. I feel as if this coolness would do me good.
If it only makes my life more pensive!
Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It saves my life from being trivial.
My life flows with a deeper current, no longer as a shallow and brawling stream, parched and shrunken by the summer heats. This coolness comes to condense the dews and clear the atmosphere. The stillness seems more deep and significant. Each sound seems to come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature, as if nature had acquired some character and mind. The cricket, the gurgling stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe.
My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.
I see a goldfinch go twittering through the still, louring day, and am reminded of the peeping flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season. Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! that in the trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might be ripe also! that I could match nature always with my moods ! that in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish!
Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety ! What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds ! For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it.
And then to think of those I love among men, who will know that I love them though I tell them not! I some times feel as if I were rewarded merely for expecting better hours. I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me.
I am not so poor: I can smell the ripening apples; the very rills are deep; the autumnal flowers, the Trichostema dichotomum, — not only its bright blue flower above the sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, — feed my spirit, endear the earth to me, make me value myself and rejoice; the quivering of pigeons' wings reminds me of the tough fibre of the air which they rend.
I thank you, God. I do not deserve anything, I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers.
But I cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends I have. It seems to me that I am more rewarded for my expectations than for anything I do or can do. Ah, I would not tread on a cricket in whose song is such a revelation, so soothing and cheering to my ear!
Oh, keep my senses pure! And why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away. The seeds of the summer are getting dry and falling from a thousand nodding heads. If I did not know you through thick and thin, how should I know you at all?
Ah, the very brooks seem fuller of reflections than they were! Ah, such provoking sibylline sentences they are! The shallowest is all at once unfathomable. How can that depth be fathomed where a man may see himself reflected?
The rill I stopped to drink at I drink in more than I expected. I satisfy and still provoke the thirst of thirsts.
Nut Meadow Brook where it crosses the road beyond Jenny Dugan's that was. I do not drink in vain. I mark that brook as if I had swallowed a water snake that would live in my stomach. I have swallowed something worth the while. The day is not what it was before I stooped to drink. Ah, I shall hear from that draught! It is not in vain that I have drunk.
I have drunk an arrowhead. It flows from where all fountains rise. How many ova have I swallowed? Who knows what will be hatched within me? There were some seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water, which are expanding in me.
The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him, — to suckle monsters.
The snake in my stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water. When was it that I swallowed a snake? I have got rid of the snake in my stomach. I drank of stagnant waters once. That accounts for it. I caught him by the throat and drew him out, and had a well day after all. Is there not such a thing as getting rid of the snake which you have swallowed when young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which has worried you in your waking hours and in your sleep ever since, and appropriated the life that was yours? Will he not ascend into your mouth at the sound of running water? Then catch him boldly by the head and draw him out, though you may think his tail be curled about your vitals.
The farmers are just finishing their meadow-haying. (To-day is Sunday.) Those who have early potatoes may be digging them, or doing any other job which the haying has obliged them to postpone. For six weeks or more this has been the farmer's work, to shave the surface of the fields and meadows clean. This is done all over the country. The razor is passed over these parts of nature's face the country over. A thirteenth labor which methinks would have broken the back of Hercules, would have given him a memorable sweat, accomplished with what sweating of scythes and early and late! I chance know one young man who has lost his life in this season's campaign, by overdoing. In haying time some men take double wages, and they are engaged long before in the spring. To shave all the fields and meadows of New England clean ! If men did this but once, and not every year, we should never hear the last of that labor; it would be more famous in each farmer's case than Buonaparte's road over the Simplon. It has no other bulletin but the truthful "Farmer's Almanac." Ask them where scythe-snaths are made and sold, and rifles too, if it is not a real labor. In its very weapons and its passes it has the semblance of war. Mexico was won with less exertion and less true valor than are required to do one season's haying in New England. The former work was done by those who played truant and ran away from the latter. Those Mexicans were mown down more easily than the summer's crop of grass in many a farmer's fields. Is there not some work in New England men ? This haying is no work for marines, nor for deserters; nor for United States troops, so called, nor for West Point cadets. It would wilt them, and they would desert. Have they not deserted? and run off to West Point?
Every field is a battle-field to the mower, — a pitched battle too, — and whole winrows of dead have covered it in the course of the season. Early and late the farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time, Time's weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch. It is the summer's enterprise. And if we were a more poetic people, horns would be blown to celebrate its completion. There might be a Hay makers' Day. New England's peaceful battles. At Bunker Hill there were some who stood at the rail- fence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.1 They have not yet quitted the field. They stand there still; they alone have not retreated.
The Polygala sanguinea, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red or purple heads.
The dandelion still blossoms, and the lupine still, belated.
I have been to Tarbell's Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough road. It has promised rain all day; cloudy and still and rather cool; from time to time a few drops gently spit ting, but no shower. The landscape wears a sober autumnal look. I hear a drop or two on my hat. I wear a thick coat. The birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet. The swallows skim low over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing near me as if I scared up insects for them. I see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump.
Tarbell's Swamp is mainly composed of low and even but dense beds of Andromeda calyculata, or dwarf andromeda, which bears the early flower in the spring. Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?) andromeda; also pitch pines, birches, hardhack, and the common alder (Alnus serrulata), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry; and probably the Rhodora Canadensis might be found. The lead-colored berries of the Viburnum dentatum now. Cow -wheat and indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway cinquefoil.
I detected a wild apple on the Marlborough road by its fragrance, in the thick woods; small stems, four inches in diameter, falling over or leaning like rays on every side; a clean white fruit, the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid. The fruit covered the ground. It is unusual to meet with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods. It seemed admirable to me. One of the noblest of fruits. With green specks under the skin.
Prenanthes alba, white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert and variously shaped leaves; neottia; and hypericum.
I hear the rain (11 p. m.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves. The melons needed it. Their leaves were curled and their fruit stinted.
I am less somnolent for the cool season. I wake to a perennial day.
The hayer's work is done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns nor ringing of bells. He celebrates it by going about the work he had postponed "till after haying"! If all this steadiness and valor were spent upon some still worthier enterprise!!
All men's employments, all trades and professions, in some of their aspects are attractive. Hence the boy I resolved to be a minister and make cider, not thinking, boy as he was, how little fun there was in being a minister, willing to purchase that pleasure at any price.
When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge, their bench on the new planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with no railing yet to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that I would be a carpenter and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place to work. One of the men had a fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he looked at from time to time.
John Potter told me that those root fences on the Corner road were at least sixty or seventy years old.
I see a solitary goldfinch now and then.
Hieracium Marianum or scabrum; H. Kalmii or Canadense; Marlborough road. Leontodon autumriale passim.
H. D.. Thoreau , Journal, August 17, 1851
I can smell the ripening apples. August 9, 1851 ("Now the earliest apples begin to be ripe, but none are so good to eat as some to smell.")
The Trichostema dichotomum [blue-curls], — not only its bright blue flower above the sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, -- feed my spirit. See July 31, 1856 ("Trichostema has now for some time been springing up in the fields, giving out its aromatic scent when bruised, and I see one ready to open.");:August 9, 1851 ("The Trichostema dichotomum is quite beautiful now in the cool of the morning."); August 11, 1853 ("Evening draws on while I am gathering bundles of pennyroyal on the further Conantum height. I find it amid the stubble mixed with blue-curls and, as fast as I get my hand full, tie it into a fragrant bundle.”); August 13, 1856 (“Is there not now a prevalence of aromatic herbs in prime? — The polygala roots, blue-curls, wormwood, pennyroyal, . . . etc., etc. Does not the season require this tonic?“)
I thank you, God. . . .I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. . . .the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. See June 22, 1851 ("We live and rejoice. I awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it ? . . .I feel my Maker blessing me.")
When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge. See August 8, 1851 ("The planks and railing of Hubbard's Bridge are removed."); August 12, 1851 ("Sitting on the sleepers of Hubbard’s Bridge, which is being repaired, now, 3 o’clock A. M")
The coolness
concentrated ,your thought, however.
As 1 could not
command a sunny window, I went abroad on the morning of the 15th and lay in the
sun in the fields in my thin coat, though it was rather cool even there.
I feel as if this
coolness would do me good.
If it only makes my life more pensive!
Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness ?
There is a
certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek.
It is positively
joyful to me.
It saves my life from
being trivial.
My life flows with a
deeper current, no longer as a shallow and brawling stream, parched and
shrunken by the summer heats.
This coolness comes
to condense the dews and clear the atmosphere.
The stillness seems
more deep and significant.
Each sound seems to
come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature, as if nature: had acquired
some character and mind.
The cricket, the
gurgling stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet
encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe.
My heart leaps into
my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods.
I, whose life was but
yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my
spirituality, through my hearing.
I see a goldfinch go
twittering through the still, louring day, and am reminded of the peeping
flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season.
Ah! if I could so
live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! that in the
trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might he ripe also! that
I could match nature always with my moods! that in each season when some part
of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail
to flourish!
Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety!
What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds!
For
joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it.
And then to think of
those I love among men, who will know that I love them though I tell them not!
I sometimes feel as if I were rewarded merely for expecting
better hours.
I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me.
I am not so poor : I
can smell the ripening apples; the very rills are deep; the autumnal flowers,
the Trichostetna dichotomum, -not only its bright blue flower above the sand,
but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, - feed my spirit,
endear the earth to me, make me value myself and rejoice; the quivering of
pigeons' wings reminds me of the tough fibre of the air which they rend.
I thank you, God.
I do not deserve
anything, I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice.
I am impure and
worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared
for me, and my path is strewn with flowers.
But I cannot thank
the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends I have.
It seems to me that I
am more rewarded for my expectations than for anything I do or can do.
Ah, I would not tread on a cricket in whose song is such a revelation, so soothing and cheering to my car!
Oh, keep my senses pure!
And why should I speak to my friends ? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they?
We will meet, then, far away.
The seeds of the
summer are getting dry and falling from a thousand nodding heads.
If I did not know you through thick and thin, how should I know you at all ?
Ah, the very brooks seem fuller of reflections than they were!
Ah, such provoking sibylline sentences they are!
The shallowest is all at once unfathomable.
How can that depth be fathomed where a man may see himself reflected ?
The rill I stopped to drink at
I drink in more than I expected.
I satisfy and still
provoke the thirst of thirsts.
Nut Meadow Brook
where it crosses the road beyond Jenny Dugan's that was.
I do not drink in
vain.
I mark that brook as
if I had swallowed a water snake that would live in my stomach.
I have swallowed
something worth the while.
The day is not what
it was before I stooped to drink.
Ah, I shall hear from that draught!
It is not in vain that I have drunk.
I have drunk an
arrowhead.
It flows from where
all fountains rise.
How many ova have I swallowed?
Who knows what will be hatched within me?
There were some seeds of
thought, methinks, floating in that water, which are expanding in me.
The man must not
drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have
all nature reborn in him, - to suckle monsters.
The snake in my
stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water.
When was it that I swallowed a snake?
I have got rid of the snake in my stomach.
I drank of stagnant
waters once.
That accounts for it.
I caught him by the
throat and drew him out, and had a well day after all.
Is there not such a thing as getting rid of the snake which you have swallowed when young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which has worried you in your waking hours and in your sleep ever since, and appropriated the life that was yours ?
Will he not ascend into your mouth at the sound of running water-
Then catch him boldly by the head and draw him out, though you may think his tail
be curled about your vitals.
The farmers are just
finishing their meadow-haying.
(To-day is Sunday.)
Those who have early potatoes may be digging them, or doing any other job which
the haying has obliged them to postpone.
For six weeks or more
this has been the farmer's work, to shave the surface of the fields and meadows
clean.
This is done all over
the country.
The razor is passed
over these parts of nature's face the country over.
A thirteenth labor
which methinks would have broken the back of Hercules, would have given him a
memorable sweat, accomplished with what sweating of scythes and early and late!
I chance [to] know one young man who has lost his life in this season's
campaign, by overdoing.
In haying time some
men take double wages, and they are engaged long before in the spring.
To shave all the
fields and meadows of New England clean! If men did this but once, and not
every year, we should never hear the last of that labor ; it would be more
famous in each farmer's case than Buonaparte's road over the Simplon.
It has no other
bulletin but the truthful "Farmer's Almanac.
" Ask them where scythe-snaths are made and sold, and
rifles too, if it is not a real labor.
In its very weapons
and its passes it has the semblance of war.
Mexico was won with
less exertion and less true valor than are required to do one season's baying
in New England.
The former work was
done by those who played truant and ran awav from the latter.
Those Mexicans were
mown dowT1 more easily than the summer's crop of grass in many a, Farmer's
fields.
Is there not some work in New England men`
Haying is no work for marines, nor for
deserters ; nor for United States troops, so called, nor for West Point cadets.
It would wilt them,
and they would desert.
[lave they not
deserted ? and run off to West Point?
Every field is a battle-field to the mower, - a pitched
battle too, - and whole winrows of dead have covered it in the course of the
season.
Earlv and late the
farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time, Time's
weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch.
It is the summer's
enterprise.
And if we were a more
poetic people, horns would be blown to celebrate its completion.
There might be a
Haymakers' Day.
New England's
peaceful battles.
At Bunker Hill there
were some who stood at the railfence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.
' They have not yet quitted the field.
They stand there
still ; they alone have not retreated.
The Polygala
sanguinea, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red or purple heads.
The dandelion still
blossoms, and the lupine still, belated.
I have been to
Tarbell's Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough
road.
It has promised rain
all day ; cloudy and still and rather cool ; from time to time a few drops
gently spitting, but no shower.
The landscape wears a
sober autumnal look.
I hear a drop or two
on my hat.
I wear a thick coat.
The birds seem to
know that it will not rain just yet.
The swallows skim low
over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing
near me as if I scared up insects for them.
I see where a
squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump.
Tarbell's Swamp is
mainly composed of low and even but dense beds of Andromeda calyculata, or
dwarf a dromeda, which bears the *early flower in the spring.
' Stark and his
companions met the enemy in the hay-field.
Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?) andromeda ; also pitch pines, birches, hardback, and the common alder (Alms serrulata), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry ; and probably the Rhodora Canadensis might be found.
The lead-colored
berries of the Viburnum dentatum now.
Cow-wheat and
indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway cinquefoil.
I detected a wild
apple on the Marlborough road by its fragrance, in the thick woods ; small
stems, four inches in diameter, falling over or leaning like rays on every
side; a clean white fruit, the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid.
The fruit covered the
ground.
It is unusual to meet
with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods.
It seemed admirable
to me.
One of the noblest of
fruits.
With green specks
under the skin.
Prenanthes alba,
white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert and variously shaped
leaves ; neottia ; and hypericum.
I hear the rain (11 P.M.)
distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves.
The melons needed it.
Their leaves were
curled and their fruit stinted.
I am less somnolent
for the cool season.
I wake to a perennial
day.
The hayer's work is
done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns nor ringing of bells.
He celebrates it by going about the work he had postponed "till after haying"!
If all this steadiness and valor were spent upon some still worthier enterprise!!
All men's employments, mens trades and professions, in some of their aspects are attractive.
When I saw the
carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge, their bench on the new
planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with no railing yet
to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that 1 would be a carpenter
and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place to work.
One of the men had a
fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he looked at from time to time.
John Potter told me
that those root fences on the Corner road were at least sixty or seventy years
old.
I see a solitary goldfinch now and then.
Hieracium Marianum or
scabrum ; H. Kalmii or Canadense ; Marlborough road. Leontodon autumnale passim.
***
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