The tide in my thoughts,

September 3. 

daybreak, September 3, 2018

1 A. M., moon waning, to Conantum. 

A warm night. A thin coat sufficient. 

I hear an apple fall, as I go along the road. 

Meet a man going to market thus early. 

There are no mists to diversify the night. Its features are very simple. 

I hear no whip-poor-will or other bird. 

See no fireflies. 

Saw a whip- poor-will (?) flutter across the road.

Hear the dumping sound of frogs on the river meadow, and occasionally a kind of croak as from a bittern there. 

It is very dewy, and I bring home much mud on my shoes. This is a peculiarity of night, — its dews, water resuming its reign. 

Return before dawn. 

Morning and evening are more attractive than midnight. 

I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts, or what is due to the influence of the moon, from the current distractions and fluctuations. The winds which the sun has aroused go down at evening, and the lunar influence may then perchance be detected. 

Of late I have not heard the wood thrush.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 3, 1852

To separate the tide in my thoughts . . . from the current distractions and fluctuations. See  September 21, 1851 ("But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. “The moon gravitates towards the earth, and the earth reciprocally towards the moon.” This statement of the astronomer would be bald and meaningless, if it were not in fact a symbolical expression of the value of all lunar influence on man . Even the astronomer admits that “the notion of the moon's influence on terrestrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean,” but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him overflows its shores and bathes the dry land? 'Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages?");July 26, 1853 ("I mark again the sound of crickets or locusts about alders, etc. about this time when the first asters open, which makes you fruitfully meditative, helps condense your thoughts, like the mel dews in the afternoon. . . .Such little objects check the diffuse tide of our thoughts and bring it to a head, which thrills us. They are such fruits as music, poetry, love, which humanity bears") See also January 22, 1852 ("My thoughts are my company."); March 1, 1860 ("I have thoughts, as I walk, on some subject that is running in my head, but all their pertinence seems gone before I can get home to set them down"); June 6, 1857 (“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. ”); August 7, 1854 ("Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness?"); September 14, 1859 (""Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened. . . . our green and leafy and pulpy thoughts acquire color and flavor, and perchance a sweet nuttiness at last.)

Of late I have not heard the wood thrush. See August 12, 1854 ("Have not heard a wood thrush since last week of July."); August 14, 1853 ("I hear no wood thrushes for a week.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Thrush

See no fireflies. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fireflies