The spring thus advances and recedes repeatedly, — its pendulum oscillates, — while it is carried steadily forward.

April 6.

Rainy, more or less, — April weather. 

April 6, 2020

I am struck by the fact that at this season all vegetable growth is confined to the warm days; during the cold ones it is stationary, or even killed. Vegetation thus comes forward rather by fits and starts than by a steady progress. 

Some flowers would blossom tomorrow if it were as warm as to-day, but cold weather intervening may detain them a week or more. The spring thus advances and recedes repeatedly, — its pendulum oscillates, — while it is carried steadily forward. 

Animal life is to its extent subject to a similar law. It is in warm and calm days that most birds arrive and reptiles and insects and men come forth. 

A toad has been seen dead on the sidewalk, flattened.

H. D.Thoreau, Journal, April 6, 1860

Vegetation thus comes forward rather by fits and starts than by a steady progress . . .The spring thus advances and recedes repeatedly. See April 6, 1853 ("One thing I may depend on : there has been no idling with the flowers. They advance as steadily as a clock. Nature loses not a moment, takes no vacation.");  See also  April 28, 1852 ("This year, at least, one flower hardly precedes another, but as soon as the storms are over and pleasant weather comes, all blossom at once, having been retarded so long.");  September 13, 1852 ("How earnestly and rapidly each creature, each flower, is fulfilling its part while its day lasts! Nature never lost a day, nor a moment. . . . The plant waits a whole year, and then blossoms the instant it is ready and the earth is ready for it, without the conception of delay.); April 24 1854 ("The summer approaches by almost insensibly increasing lieferungs of heat"); March 23, 1856 ("How many springs I have had this same experience! I am encouraged, for I recognize this steady persistency and recovery of Nature as a quality of myself."); September 17, 1857 (“How perfectly each plant has its turn! – as if the seasons revolved for it alone.!” ); March 8, 1860 ("In some respects our spring, in its beginning, fluctuates a whole month, so far as it respects ice and snow, walking, sleighing, etc., etc.; for some years winter may be said to end about the first of March, and other years it may extend into April."); November 8, 1860 ("Consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly.") 

A toad has been seen dead on the sidewalk, flattened. See April 5, 1857 ("This, then, is apparently the way with the toads. They very early hop out from under walls on to sidewalks in the warmer nights, long before they are heard to ring, and are often frozen and then crushed there."); April 2, 1857("On the sidewalk in Cambridge I see a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture."

April 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 6

April 6, 2024

Vegetation comes

not by a steady progress

but by fits and starts.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024