This is the most sultry night we have had.

June 20.

June 20, 2020

Monday.

4 A.M.— No fog; sky mostly over cast; drought continues.

I heard the robin first (before the chip-bird) this morning. Heard the chip-bird last evening just after sunset.

10 A.M.– To Assabet Bathing-Place.

I see wood tortoises in the path; one feels full of eggs.

Those great greenish-white puffs on the panicled andromeda are now decaying.

On the swamp-pink they are solid.

The pitchers of the comandra seeds are conspicuous.

Meadow-sweet out, probably yesterday. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower.

Some of the stone nests are a foot above the water now, but uninjured. I can find nothing in them.

The bosky bank shows bright roses from its green recesses; the small white flowers of the panicled andromeda; beneath, yellow lilies.

Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything else that we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, – perfectly fresh and pure, before the insects have discovered it.

How admirable its purity! how innocently sweet its fragrance!

How significant that the rich, black mud of our dead stream produces the water-lily, — out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity!

It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematical of purity should grow in the mud.

There is also the exquisite beauty of the small sagittaria, which I find out, maybe a day or two, — three transparent crystalline white petals with a yellow eye and as many small purplish calyx-leaves, four or five inches above the same mud.

Coming home at twelve, I see that the white lilies are nearly shut.

The river has been some days full with weeds which drape and trail from my oars — I am now on foot — (the potamogeton), as if it were Charon’s boat, and this a funeral procession down the Cocytus.

8 P.M.— Up North River to Nawshawtuct.

The moon full.

Perhaps there is no more beautiful scene than that on the North River seen from the rock this side the hemlocks.

As we look up-stream, we see a crescent-shaped lake completely embosomed in the forest.

There is nothing to be seen but the smooth black mirror of the water, on which there is now the slightest discernible bluish mist, a foot high, and thick set alders and willows and the green woods without an interstice sloping steeply upward from its very sur face, like the sides of a bowl.

The river is here for half a mile completely shut in by the forest.

One hemlock, which the current has undermined, has fallen over till it lies parallel with the water, a foot or two above it and reaching two thirds across the stream, its extremity curving upward to the light, now dead.

Here it has been a year or two, and it has only taken the place of others which have successively fallen in and been carried away by the stream. One lies now cast up on the shore.

Some wild roses, so pale now in the twilight that they look exactly like great blackberry blossoms. I think these would look so at midday.

Saw a little skunk coming up the river-bank in the woods at the White Oak, a funny little fellow, about  six inches long and nearly as broad. It faced me and actually compelled me to retreat before it for five minutes. Perhaps I was between it and its hole.

Its broad black tail, tipped with white, was erect like a kitten’s. It had what looked like a broad white band drawn tight across its forehead or top-head, from which two lines of white ran down, one on each side of its back, and there was a narrow white line down its snout.

It raised its back, sometimes ran a few feet forward, sometimes backward, and repeatedly turned its tail to me, prepared to discharge its fluid like the old. Such was its instinct.

And all the while it kept up a fine grunting like a little pig or a squirrel. It reminded me that the red squirrel, the woodchuck, and the skunk all make a similar sound.

Now there are young rabbits, skunks, and probably woodchucks.

Walking amid the bushes and the ferns just after moonrise, I am refreshed with many sweet scents which I cannot trace to their source.

How the trees shoot!

The tops of young pines toward the moon are covered with fine shoots some eighteen inches long. Will they grow much more this year?

There is a peculiarly soft, creamy light round the moon, now it is low in the sky.

The bullfrogs begin about 8.30.

They lie at their length on the surface amid the pads.

I touched one’s nose with my finger, and he only gave a sudden froggish belch and moved a foot or two off.

How hard to imitate their note exactly, — its sonorousness. Here, close by, it is like er er ough, er er er ough, with a sonorous trump which these letters do not suggest.

On our return, having reached the reach by Merrick’s pasture, we get the best view of the moon in the southeast, reflected in the water, on account of the length of the reach.

The creamy light about it is also perfectly reflected; the path of insects on the surface between us and the moon is lit up like fire.

The leafy-columned elms, planted by the river at foot of Prichard’s field, are exceedingly beautiful, the moon being behind them, and I see that they are not too near together, though sometimes hardly a rod apart, their branches crossing and interlacing. Their trunks look like columns of a portico wreathed with evergreens on the evening of an illumination for some great festival.

They are the more rich, because in this creamy light you cannot distinguish the trunk from the verdure that drapes it.

This is the most sultry night we have had.

All windows and doors are open in the village and scarcely a lamp is lit.

I pass many families sitting in their yards.

The shadows of the trees and houses are too extended, now that the moon is low in the heavens, to show the richest tracery.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, June 20, 1853

I see wood tortoises in the path; one feels full of eggs. See June 23, 1858 ("Take two eggs out of the oviduct of an E. insculpta, just run over in the road. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Wood Turtle (Emys insculpta) 

Coming home at twelve, I see that the white lilies are nearly shut. See July 1, 1852 ("After eating our luncheon I can not find one open anywhere for the rest of the day."); July 11, 1852 ("It is a sufficient reason for walking in the forenoon sometimes that some flowers shut up at noon and do not open again during the day"); July 17, 1854 ("I think that I could tell when it was 12 o'clock within half an hour by the lilies.")

Perhaps there is no more beautiful scene than that on the North River seen from the rock this side the hemlocks. See March 29, 1853 ("A pleasant short voyage is that to the Leaning Hemlocks on the Assabet, just round the Island under Nawshawtuct Hill. The river here has in the course of ages gullied into the hill, at a curve, making a high and steep bank, on which a few hemlocks grow and overhang the deep, eddying basin. For as long as I can remember, one or more of these has always been slanting over the stream at various angles, being undermined by it, until one after another, from year to year, they fall in and are swept away. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, at the Leaning Hemlocks and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

I touched one’s nose with my finger. See April 18, 1858 ("Perchance you may now scratch its nose with your finger and examine it to your heart's content, for it is become as imperturbable as it was shy before. You conquer them by superior patience and immovableness; not by quickness, but by slowness; not by heat, but by coldness")

June 20. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 20

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 © 2009-2021