There was more light in the water than in the sky.

November 30

8 A. M. To river, to examine roots,

I rake up almost everywhere from the bottom of the river that very fresh and bright green ranunculus, the handsomely divided leaf.

I ascertain this morning that that white root with eyes and slaty-tinged fibres and sharp leaves rolled up, found gnawed off and floating about muskrat-houses, is the root of the great yellow lily. The leaf-stalk is yellow, while that of the white lily is a downy or mildewy blue black. The yellow lily root is, then, a principal item, it would seem, in their vegetable diet. 

I find that those large triangular or rhomboidal or shell-shaped eyes or shoulders on this root are the bases of leaf-stalks which have rotted off, but toward the upper end of the root are still seen decaying.  They are a sort of abutment on which the leaf-stalk rested, and the fine black dots on them are the bases of the fine threads or fibres of the leaf-stalk, which, in the still living leaf-stalk, are distinguished by their purple color.

These eyes, like the leaves, of course, are arranged spirally around the roots in parallel rows, in quincunx order, so that four make a diamond figure,

The slate-tinged fibres spring from the bare white intervals between the bases of the leaves, Closely packed between, and protected by the under leaf stalk, I find already the tender club-shaped yellow flower-bud a quarter of an inch in diameter, with a stem two inches long and wider than the bud. 

I am surprised to find these roots, even within to the bases of the leaves about the buds, infested with white grubs nearly half an inch long and minute, threadlike red dish and speckled worms.

Also on the fibres are transparent elliptical chrysalids, the color of a snail-shell, containing insects apparently just ready to fly,

The white lily roots are more enveloped in down and fibre, a dark-blue or blackish down.

I raked up one dark-brown root somewhat like a white lily, except that it was smooth and the leaf-stalks were very slender and the leaf-buds minute. Perhaps it was the kalmiana lily.

I raked up one live clam in deep water, and could feel them like stones on the bottom.

All these leaves are lightly rolled up in the form of arrowheads, as thus best prepared to pierce whatever obstacles the mud or water may present.

There is a vast amount of decaying vegetable matter at the bottom of the river, and what I draw up on my rake emits a very offensive odor. 

1 P. M. – Down river by boat and inland to the green house beyond Blood's.

A mild and summery afternoon with much russet light on the landscape.

I think it was a flock of low-warbling tree sparrows which I saw amid the weeds beyond the monument, though they looked larger,

I am attracted nowadays by the various withered grasses and sedges, of different shades of straw-color and of various more or less graceful forms.

That which I call fescue grass is quite interesting, gracefully bending to the zephyr, and many others are very perfect and pure.

Wool-grass is one of the largest and most conspicuous. I observe it rising thinly above the water in which it is reflected, two or three feet, and all its narrow rustling leaves stream southeasterly from the stems, though it is now quite calm, proving the prevalence of northwesterly winds.

An abundance of withered sedges and other coarse grasses, which in the summer you scarcely noticed, now cover the low grounds, -- the granary of the winter birds.

A very different end they serve from the flowers which decay so early.

Their rigid culms enable them to withstand the blasts of winter. Though divested of color, fairly bleached, they are not in the least decayed but seasoned and living like the heart-wood.

Now, first since spring, I take notice of the cladonia lichens, which the cool fall rains appear to have started.

The Callitriche verna is perfectly fresh and green, though frozen in, in the pools.

We are going across the Hunt and Mason pastures.

The twigs of young cedars with apparently staminate buds have even a strawberry-like fragrance, and what a heavenly blue have the berries! - a peculiar light blue, whose bloom rubs off, contrasting with the green or purplish-brown leaves.

I do not know so fine a pine grove as that of Mason's. The young second-growth white pines are peculiarly soft, thick, and bushy there. They branch directly at the ground and almost horizontally, for the most part four or five large stems springing from the ground together, as if they had been broken down by cattle originally. But the result is a very dark and dense, almost impenetrable, but peculiarly soft and beautiful grove, which any gentleman might covet on his estate.

We returned by the bridle-road across the pastures.

When I returned to town the other night by the Walden road through the meadows from Brister's Hill to the poorhouse, I fell to musing upon the origin of the meanders in the road; for when I looked straight before or behind me, my eye met the fences at a short distance, and it appeared that the road, instead of being built in a straight line across the meadows, as one might have expected, pursued a succession of curves like a cow-path.  In fact, it was just such a meandering path as an eye of taste requires, and the landscape-gardener consciously aims to make, and the wonder is that a body of laborers left to themselves, without instruments or geometry, and perchance intending to make a straight road, — in short, that circumstances ordinarily, — will so commonly make just such a meandering road as the eye requires.

A man advances in his walk somewhat as a river does, meanderingly, and such, too, is the progress of the race.

The law that plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and that curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight fences and highways of men and makes them conform to the line of beauty which is most agreeable to the eye at last.

There was more light in

 the water than in the sky

as we paddled home.

But to return to the walk of the day.

Though there were some clouds in the west, there was a bright silver twilight before we reached our boat.

C. remarked it descending into the hollows immediately after sunset,

A red house could hardly be distinguished at a distance, but a white one appeared to reflect light on the landscape. 

At first we saw no redness in the sky, but only some peculiar dark wisp-like clouds in the west, but on rising a hill I saw a few red stains like veins of red quartz on a ground of feldspar.

The river was perfectly smooth except the upwelling of its tide, and as we paddled home westward, the dusky yellowing sky was all reflected in it, together with the dun-colored clouds and the trees, and there was more light in the water than in the sky.

The reflections of the trees and bushes on the banks were wonderfully dark and distinct, for though frequently we could not see the real bush in the twilight against the dark bank, in the water it appeared against the sky.  We were thus often enabled to steer clear of the overhanging bushes. 

It was an evening for the muskrats to be abroad, and we saw one, which dove as he was swimming rapidly, turning over like a wheel.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1853

A flock of low-warbling tree sparrows. See December 3, 1853 ("Saw two tree sparrows on Monroe's larch by the waterside. Larger than chip-birds, with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings, not to mention bright-chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast; all beneath pale-ash. . . . uttering from time to time a faint, tinkling chip")

.I do not know so fine a pine grove as that of Mason's. See November 30, 1851 ("My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side, and in their aspect my eye finds something which addresses itself to my nature.. . .I experienced a transient gladness, at any rate, at something which I saw. I am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines, now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. Each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. A myriad white pine boughs extend themselves horizontally, one above and behind another, each bearing its burden of silvery sunlight, ")

Though frequently we could not see the real bush in the twilight against the dark bank, in the water it appeared against the sky. See November 2, 1857 ("In the reflection the tree is black against the clear whitish sky, though as I see it against the opposite woods it is a warm greenish yellow. But the river sees it against the bright sky, and hence the reflection is like ink. The water tells me how it looks to it seen from below."); November 23, 1853 ("What lifts and lightens and makes heaven of the earth is the fact that you see the reflections of the humblest weeds against the sky, but you cannot put your head low enough to see the substance so. The reflection enchants us, just as an echo does.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Reflections

It was an evening for the muskrats to be abroad, and we saw one, which dove as he was swimming rapidly, turning over like a wheel. See December 2, 1852 ("There goes a muskrat. He leaves so long a ripple behind that in this light you cannot tell where his body ends, and think him longer than he is.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

November 30. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 30

There was more light in

 the water than in the sky

as we paddled home.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  There was more light in the water than in the sky.

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-531130

Late these afternoons, yellow sunlight reflected through the clear, cold air.

November 25. 


This is November of the hardest kind, —
bare frozen ground

covered with pale-brown
or straw-colored herbage,

a strong, cold, cutting
northwest wind

which makes you seek
to cover your ears,

a perfectly clear
and cloudless sky.

***

You are surprised,
late these afternoons,

a half an hour perhaps before sunset,
after walking in the shade

or on looking round from a height,
to see the singularly bright

yellow light of the sun
reflected from pines, especially pitch pines,

or the withered oak leaves,
through the clear, cold air,

the wind, it may be, blowing
strong from the northwest.

***

A very great collection of crows
far and wide on the meadows,

evidently gathered by this cold
and blustering weather.

They flit before you in countless numbers,
flying very low 

on account of the strong northwest wind
that comes over the hill,

and a cold gleam reflected
from the back and wings of each,

as from a weather-
stained shingle.

November 25, 1857, November 25, 1858 & November 25, 1860

I sail the unexplored sea of Concord

November 23.

George Minott tells me that sixty years ago wood was only two or three dollars a cord here – and some of that hickory.

Remembers when Peter Wheeler, sixty or more years ago, cut off all at once over a hundred acres of wood stretching from Flint's Pond to Goose Pond, — since cut again in part by Britton, and owned now partly by the Stows.

Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea. 

We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great. Famous fruits imported from the tropics and sold in our markets — as oranges, lemons, pineapples, and bananas do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk, or which I have found to be palatable to an outdoor taste. 

The tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics; their fairest and sweetest parts cannot be exported nor imported. Brought here, they chiefly concern those whose walks are through the market-place. It is not the orange of Cuba, but the checkerberry of the neighboring pasture, that most delights the eye and the palate of the New England child.

What if the Concord Social Club, instead of eating oranges from Havana, should spend an hour in admiring the beauty of some wild berry from their own fields which they never attended to before?

It is not the foreignness or size or nutritive qualities of a fruit that determine its absolute value.

It is not those far-fetched fruits which the speculator imports that concerns us chiefly, but rather those which you have fetched yourself in your basket from some far hill or swamp, journeying all the long afternoon in the hold of a basket, consigned to your friends at home, the first of the season. We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of their berries, when yet more beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the surrounding fields. As some beautiful or palatable fruit is perhaps the noblest gift of nature to man, so is a fruit with which a man has in some measure identified himself by cultivating or collecting it one of the most suitable presents to a friend.

It was some compensation for Commodore Porter, who may have introduced some cannon-balls and bombshells into ports where they were not wanted, to have introduced the Valparaiso squash into the United States. I think that this eclipses his military glory.

As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna.

At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land, — and rankest of all in the cellar-holes, — and of pin weed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimble-berry, raspberry, etc., in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc., would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets.

Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reëstablish themselves.

Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more.

The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and perchance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 23, 1860 

Minott tells me that sixty years ago wood was only two or three dollars a cord here. See  February 18, 1857 ("Mr. Prichard says that when he first came to Concord wood was $2.50 per cord. Father says that good wood was $3.00 per cord"); See also April 1, 1852 ("Woodchoppers in this neighborhood get but fifty cents a cord");  June 16, 1857 ("[on Cape Cod] Wood was worth six dollars per cord.")

Over a hundred acres of wood stretching from Flint's Pond to Goose Pond, — since cut again in part by Britton, and owned now partly by the Stows. See October 16, 1860 (" I have come up here this afternoon to see the dense white pine lot beyond the pond, . . .To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here.. . .He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest-warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husbandmen."); October 26, 1860 ("It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there some twenty years ago . He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow") See also ("March 6, 1855 ("There is hardly a wood lot of any consequence left but the chopper’s axe has been heard in it this season.") See also September 28, 1857 ("They have cut down two or three of the very rare celtis trees, not found anywhere else in town. The Lord deliver us from these vandalic proprietors!").

We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. See September 3, 1853 ("Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man.. . .Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known.");  October 24, 1858 ("Round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone. "); March 28, 1859 ("Each day's feast in Nature's year is a surprise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirits. She has arranged such an order of feasts as never tires."); October 7, 1857 ("When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape.”); November 24, 1860 ("These wild fruits, whether eaten or not, are a dessert for the imagination. The south may keep her pineapples , and we will be content with our strawberries."); November 26, 1860 ("Better for us is the wild strawberry than the pineapple, the wild apple than the orange, the hazelnut or pignut than the cocoanut or almond, and not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education.")

A book which should be a memorial of October.

November 22.

Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.

The drizzling rain of yesterday has not checked the fall of the river. It was raised by the rain of Sunday, the 13th, and began to fall the 20th.

P. M. — Up river by boat.

I think it must be the white lily root I find gnawed by the rats, though the leaves are pellucid. It has large roots with eyes and many smaller rootlets attached, white tinged with a bluish slate-color. The radical leaves appear to have started again.

Turnip freshly in bloom in cultivated fields; knawel still; yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent; but I find no blossom on the Arenaria serpyllifolia.

If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely that that one makes some just demand on us which we disappoint.

I see still, here and there, a few deep-sunk yellow and decayed pads, the bleared, dulled, drowned eyes of summer.

I was just thinking it would be fine to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree and shrub and plant in autumn, in September and October, when it had got its brightest characteristic color, the intermediate ripeness in its transition from the green to the russet or brown state, outline and copy its color exactly with paint in a book, a book which should be a memorial of October, be entitled October Hues or Autunnal Tints.

I remember especially the beautiful yellow of the Populus grandidentata and the tint of the scarlet maple.

What a memento such a book would be, beginning with the earliest reddening of the leaves, woodbine and ivy, etc., etc., and the lake of radical leaves, down to the latest oaks! I might get the impression of their veins and outlines in the summer with lampblack, and after color them.

As I was returning down the river toward night, I mistook the creaking of a plow-wheel for a flock of blackbirds passing overhead, but it is too late for them.

The farmers plow considerably this month. No doubt it destroys many grubs in the earth.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1853

Geese went over yesterday, and to-day. See November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.”) See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

Yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent. See November 18, 1855 ("Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves.")

I remember especially the beautiful yellow of the Populus grandidentata. See October 25, 1858 ("The leaves of the Populus grandidentata, though half fallen and turned a pure and handsome yellow, are still wagging as fast as ever. These do not lose their color and wither on the tree . . .but they are fresh and unwilted, full of sap and fair as ever when they are first strewn on the ground. I do not think of any tree whose leaves are so fresh and fair when they fall.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)

We are made to love

November 21

One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described  February 14, 1851 

Coincidences like this are accompanied by a certain flash as of hazy lightning, flooding all the world suddenly with a tremulous serene light which it is difficult to see long at a time.  November 21, 1850

                      

  1

We are made to love

the pond and meadow as wind

to ripple water.

With its island and

meadow between the island

and the shore and its

strip of perfectly

still and smooth water in the

lee of the island,

I see Fair Haven

and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps,

sailing over it.

I do not see how

it could be improved or yet

what these things can be.

I begin to see

such an object when I cease

to understand it.

These forms and colors

so adapted to my eye,

meadow and island.

What are these things?

The hawks and ducks so aloof --

Nature so reserved.

November 21, 1850

2

I see Fair Haven Pond

with its island and meadow

between the island

and the shore and a

strip of perfectly still and

smooth water in the

lee of the island

and two hawks fish hawks perhaps

sailing over it.

I do not see how

it could be improved or yet

what these things can be.

I begin to see

such an object when I

cease to understand it.

and I see that I

did not appreciate or

realize it before --

how adapted these

forms and colors to my eye!

meadow and island!

Nature so reserved!

the hawks and ducks so aloof!

What are these things? 

I get no further than this

.

We are made to love

pond and meadow as the wind

to ripple water.

November 21, 1850

See also

• July 16, 1851(" To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes!  . . .There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself.”)
• January 26, 1852 ("Let us preserve, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.")
• April 18, 1852 (""Why should just these sights and sounds accompany our life? ")
• August 3, 1852 (" By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.")
• August 23, 1852 ("What are these rivers and hills, these hieroglyphics?")
• August 23, 1852 ("I look out at my eyes, I come to my window, and I feel and breathe the fresh air. It is a fact equally glorious with the most inward experience.")
• June 5, 1853 ("The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla")
• Walden ("Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.")
• September 4, 1854 ("Nature is stung by God and the seed of man planted in her. ")
• September 9, 1854 ("Thus the earth is the mother of all creatures. ")
• January 12, 1855 (" It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. I am part of one great creature with him; if he has voice, I have ears. I can hear when he calls. Ah, bless the Lord, O my soul! bless him for wildness, for crows that will not alight within gunshot! and bless him for hens, too, that croak and cackle in the yard! ")
• December 11, 1855 ("I am struck by the perfect confidence and success of nature")
• December 5, 1856 ("I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too")
• November 22, 1860 ("Still nature is genial to man. Still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him. Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, - the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountain- top through some new vista, - this is wealth enough for one afternoon. ")

And  also 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man 

(the anthropic principle)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 21.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  We are made to love

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 ©  2009-2023

The ice was very thin, and the holes were perfect disks.

November 19.

Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who helped me to-day, said that he used to know all about the lots, but since they’ve chopped off so much, and the woods have grown up, he finds himself lost.

Thirty or forty years ago, when he went to meeting, he knew every face in the meeting-house, even the boys and girls, they looked so much like their parents; but after ten or twelve years they would have outgrown his knowledge entirely (they would have altered so), but he knew the old folks still, because they held their own and didn't alter.

Just so he could tell the boundaries of the old wood which hadn't been cut down, but the young wood altered so much in a few years that he couldn't tell anything about it.

When I asked him why the old road which went by this swamp was so roundabout, he said he would answer me as Mr. __ did him in a similar case once, “Why, if they had made it straight, they wouldn't have left any room for improvement."

Standing by Harrington's pond-hole in the swamp, which had skimmed over, we saw that there were many holes through the thin black ice, of various sizes, from a few inches to more than a foot in diameter, all of which were perfectly circular.

Mr. H. asked me if I could account for it.

As we stood considering, we jarred the boggy ground and made a dimple in the water, and this accident, we thought, betrayed the cause of it; i.e. the circular wavelets so wore off the edges of the ice when once a hole was made.

The ice was very thin, and the holes were perfect disks.

But what jarred the ground and shook the water?

Perhaps the wind which shook the spruce and pine trees which stood in the quaking ground, as well as the little life in the water itself, and the wind on the ice and water itself.

There was a more permanent form created by the dimple, but not yet a shellfish.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 19, 1851 

Harrington's pond-hole in the swamp.(aka Harrington’s Mud-hole Harrington’s Pool) -- This boggy pool on the north edge of the Ministerial Swamp is/was notable for its uncommon bog plants – such as Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea) and Black Spruce (Picea mariana) ~ Thoreau Place Names A Guide to Place Names in Concord and Lincoln, MA in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau compiled by Ray Angelo.  See November 24, 1851 ("Found on the south side of the swamp the Lygodium palmatum, which Bigelow calls the only climbing fern in our latitude, an evergreen"); August 28, 1860 ("The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp.")

Fog

November 18. 

Fog this morning and yesterday morning, lasting till about 10 A. M.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1859

[and more on John Brown]

The growth of very old trees is feebler at last than when in middle age.

November 17

P. M .-- To Blood's woods. 

November 17, 2018

Sawed off a branch of creeping juniper two inches diameter with fifteen rings.

On one square of nine rods in Blood's wood, which seemed more dense than the average, are thirteen sizable trees. This would give about two hundred and thirty to an acre, but probably there are not more than one hundred and eighty to an acre, take the wood through.

This is but little more than one to a square rod. Yet this is a quite dense wood.

That very solid white oak stump recently sawed in this wood was evidently a seedling, the growth was so extremely slow at first. If I found the case to be the same with the other oaks here, I should feel sure that these were all seedlings and therefore had been preceded by pines or at least some dense evergreens, or possibly birches.

When I find a dense oak wood, whether sprouts or seedlings, I affirm that evergreens once stood [there] and, if man does not prevent, will grow again. This I must believe until I find a dense oak wood planted under itself or in open land.

Minot Pratt's elm is sixteen and a quarter feet circumference at three feet.

These tawny-white oaks are thus by their color and character the lions among trees, or rather, not to compare them with a foreign animal, they are the cougars or panthers – the American lions — among the trees, for nearly such is that of the cougar which walks beneath and amid or springs upon them. There is plainly this harmony between the color of our chief wild beast of the cat kind and our chief tree.

How they do things in West Acton.

As we were walking through West Acton the other afternoon, a few rods only west of the centre, on the main road, the Harvard turnpike, we saw a rock larger than a man could lift, lying in the road, exactly in the wheel-track, and were puzzled to tell how it came there, but supposed it had slipped off a drag, -- yet we noticed that it was peculiarly black.

Returning the same way in the twilight, when we had got within four or five rods of this very spot, looking up, we saw a man in the field, three or four rods on one side of that spot, running off as fast as he could.

By the time he had got out of sight over the hill it occurred to us that he was blasting rocks and had just touched one off; so, at the eleventh hour, we turned about and ran the other way, and when we had gone a few rods, off went two blasts, but fortunately none of the rocks struck us. Some time after we passed we saw the men returning. They looked out for themselves, but for nobody else.

This is the way they do things in West Acton. We now understood that the big stone was blackened by powder.

Silas Hosmer tells me how [they]sold the Heywood lot between the railroad and Fair Haven. They lotted it off in triangles, and, carrying plenty of liquor, they first treated all round, and then proceeded to sell at auction, but the purchasers, excited with liquor, were not aware when the stakes were pointed out that the lots were not as broad in the rear as in front, and the wood standing cost them as much as it should have done delivered at the door.

I frequently see the heads of teasel, called fuller's thistle, floating on our river, having come from factories above, and thus the factories which use it may distribute its seeds by means of the streams which turn their machinery, from one to another. The one who first cultivated the teasel extensively in this town is said to have obtained the seed when it was not to be purchased — the culture being monopolized — by sweeping a wagon which he had loaned to a teasel-raiser.

The growth of very old trees, as appears by calculating the bulk of wood formed, is feebler at last than when in middle age, or say in pitch pine at one hundred and sixty than at forty or fifty, especially when you consider the increased number of leaves, and this, together with the fact that old stumps send up no shoots, shows that trees are not indefinitely long-lived.

I have a section of a chestnut sprout — and not at all a rank one which has 6 rings in the first inch, or 4 rings in five eighths of an inch, but a section of a chestnut seedling has 10 rings in five eighths of an inch.

A section of a white oak sprout, far from rank, has 4 rings in first five eighths of an inch; of a seedling ditto, 16 or 17 in first five eighths of an inch; of a seed ling ditto, 8 in first five eighths of an inch; of a very slow-grown sprout, 6 – in first five eighths of an inch.

Or in the white oaks the proportion is as five to twelve.

The first seedling oak has the rough and tawny light brown bark of an old tree, while the first sprout is quite smooth-barked.

A seedling white birch has 10 rings in first seven eighths of an inch. A sprout white birch has 5 rings in first seven eighths of an inch.
The first has the white bark of an old tree; the second, a smooth and reddish bark.

When a stump is sound to the pith I can commonly tell whether it was a seedling or a sprout by the rapidity of the growth at first. A seedling, it is true, may have died down many times till it is fifteen or twenty years old, and so at last send up a more vigorous shoot than at first, but generally the difference is very marked.

 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 17, 1860

Sawed off a branch of creeping juniper. See September 4, 1853 ("The creeping juniper berries are now a hoary green but full-grown."); October 19, 1859 ("The dark-blue, or ripe, creeping juniper berries are chiefly on the lower part of the branches,")

To Blood's woods. See November 5, 1860 ("Blood's oak lot may contain about a dozen acres. It consists of red, black, white, and swamp white oaks, and a very little maple. This is quite a dense wood-lot, . . . a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old.")

These tawny-white oaks are thus by their color and character the lions among trees. See November 16, 1860 ("There is . . .a difference between most of the white oaks within Blood's wood and the pasture oaks without, — the former having a very finely divided and comparatively soft tawnyish bark, and the latter a very coarse rugged and dark - colored bark. . . . White oaks within a wood commonly, at Wetherbee's and Blood's woods, have lost the outside rough and rugged bark near the base, like a jacket or vest cast off, revealing that peculiar smooth tawny - white inner garment or shirt.")

The one who first cultivated the teasel extensively in this town is said to have obtained the seed by sweeping a wagon which he had loaned to a teasel-raiser. See September 16, 1856 ("William Monroe is said to have been the first who raised teasels about here. He was very sly about it, and fearful lest he should have competitors. At length he lent his wagon to a neighbor, who discovered some teasel seed on the bottom, which he carefully saved and planted, and so competed with Monroe.")

I admire the fine blue color of the cedar berries.

November 16. 

I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock. 

December 13, 2020

P. M. – To Nawshawtuct by boat with Sophia, up Assabet.

The river still higher than yesterday.

I paddled straight from the boat's place to the Island.

I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock and various other ferns, one the marginal (?) shield fern and one the terminal shield fern, and this other, here inserted, on the steep bank above the Hemlocks.

I admire the fine blue color of the cedar berries.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1853

By boat with Sophia, up Assabet. See October 6, 1856 ("Carried Sophia and Aunt up the Assabet"); November 14, 1855 ("Up Assabet with Sophia. A clear, bright, warm afternoon.”)

The river still higher than yesterday. See November 15, 1853 ("The river has risen yet higher than last night, so that I cut across Hubbard's meadow with ease."); See also November 14, 1855 ("The rain has raised the river an additional foot or more, and it is creeping over the meadows.")

I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock.  See October 23, 1857 ("The ferns which I can see on the bank, apparently all evergreens, are polypody at rock, marginal shield fern, terminal shield fern, and (I think it is) Aspidium spinulosum,. . .The above-named evergreen ferns are so much the more conspicuous on that pale-brown ground. They stand out all at once and are seen to be evergreen; their character appears.”);  November 17, 1858 ("The polypody on the rock is much shrivelled by the late cold") See also  November 2, 1857 (“My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. ”); November 5, 1857 ("At this season polypody is in the air. ") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Polypody, Marginal Shield Fern, Terminal Shield Fern

The Rock. Likely Egg Rock / Island Rock, "The most forwrd point on the small area that Thoreau refers to as the Island,"  an outcrop at the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury rivers where they form the Concord River.~ Ray Angelo,  Thoreau Place Names 74   See November 4, 1855 ("This forenoon the boys found a little black kitten about a third grown on the Island or Rock"); January 16, 1857 ("As I pass the Island (Egg Rock)"); June 9, 1855 (“Rhus Toxicodendron on Island Rock.”); August 9, 1856 (" I am surprised to see the Apocynum cannabinum close to the rock at the Island") 

I admire the fine blue color of the cedar berries.  See November 30, 1853 ("The twigs of young cedars with apparently staminate buds have even a strawberry-like fragrance, and what a heavenly blue have the berries! - a peculiar light blue, whose bloom rubs off, contrasting with the green or purplish-brown leaves."). Note Juniperus virginiana, sometimes known as red cedar, is a species of juniper. The berry-like female  seed cone  is dark purple-blue with a white wax cover giving an overall sky-blue color ~ wikipedia

Get yourself therefore a name.

November 15. 

Here is a rainy day, which keeps me in the house.

Asked Therien this afternoon if he had got a new idea this summer.

“Good Lord ” says he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you work with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.”

I am pleased to read in Stoever's Life of Linnæus (Trapp's translation) that his father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnæus (Linden-tree-man ) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place, “a custom,” he says, “not unfrequent in Sweden, to take fresh appellations from natural objects.”

What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patronymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name, as memorable and distinct as their characters.

It is refreshing to get to a man whom you will not be satisfied to call John's son or Johnson's son, but a new name applicable to himself alone, he being the first of his kind. We may say there have been but so many men as there are sur names, and of all the John-Smiths there has been but one true John Smith, and he of course is dead.

Get yourself therefore a name, and better a nickname than none at all.

There was one enterprising boy came to school to me whose name was “Buster,” and an honorable name it was. He was the only boy in the school, to my knowledge, who was named.

What shall we say of the comparative intellectual vigor of the ancients and moderns, when we read of Theophrastus, the father of botany, that he composed more than two hundred treatises in the third century before Christ and the seventeenth before printing, about twenty of which remain, and that these fill six volumes in folio printed at Venice? Among the last are two works on natural history and the generation of plants. What a stimulus to a literary man to read his works! They were opera, not an essay or two, which you can carry between your thumb and finger.

Dioscorides (according to Stoever), who lived in the first century after Christ, was the first to inquire into the medicinal properties of plants, “the literary father of the materia medica." His work remains.

And next comes Pliny the Elder, and “by his own avowal (?), his natural history is a compilation from about twenty five hundred (?) different authors."

Conrad Gesner, of the Sixteenth Century, the first botanist of note among the moderns; also a naturalist generally.

In this century botany first “became a regular academical study.”

I think it would be a good discipline for Channing, who writes poetry in a sublimo-lipshod style, to write Latin, for then he would be compelled to say something always, and frequently have recourse to his grammar and dictionary. Methinks that what a man might write in a dead language could be more surely translated into good sense in his own language, than his own language could be translated into good Latin, or the dead language.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 15, 1851 

Get yourself therefore a name, and better a nickname than none at all. See Walking (1861 ("Travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.. . .So every man has an original wild name. . . . Our true names are nicknames."); August 19, 1851  ("There was one original name well given, Buster Kendal"); June 4, 1856 ("He pointed out the site of “Perch” Hosmer’s house in the small field south of road this side of Cozzens’s; all smooth now. Dr. Heywood worked over him a fortnight, while the perch was dissolving in his throat. He got little compassion generally, and the nickname “Perch” into the bargain.")

Theophrastus, the father of botany, . . Dioscorides . . . Pliny the Elder.. .Conrad Gesner. See February 17, 1852 ("If you would read books on botany, go to the fathers of the science.")

November flowers

November 14. 

Still yarrow, tall buttercup, and tansy.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1852

See October 20, 1852 ("Canada snapdragon, tansy, white goldenrod, blue-stemmed goldenrod. Aster undulatus, autumnal dandelion, tall buttercup, yarrow, mayweed. "); November 3, 1853 ("To-day I see yarrow, very bright "); November 9, 1852 ("Ranunculus repens, Bidens connata (flat in a brook), yarrow, dandelion, autumnal dandelion, tansy, Aster undulatus, etc. A late three ribbed goldenrod, with large serratures in middle of the narrow leaves, ten or twelve rays. Potentilla argentea."); November 12, 1853 ("Tansy is very fresh still in some places"); November 18, 1852 ("Yarrow and tansy still. These are cold, gray days.");  November 18, 1855 ("Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves."); November 22, 1853 ("yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent"); November 23, 1852 ("Among the flowers which may be put down as lasting thus far, as I remember, in the order of their hardiness: yarrow, tansy (these very fresh and common) . . . and perhaps tall buttercup, etc."); December 6, 1852 ("Tansy still fresh."); December 12, 1852 ("Tansy still fresh yellow by the Corner Bridge."); December 19, 1859 ("Yarrow too is full of seed now")

A hard rain falling. River rising.

November 13.

It has rained hard the 11th, 12th, and 13th, and the river is at last decidedly rising.

On Friday, 10th, it was still at summer level.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 13, 1854

The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might.

November 12.

I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more.

What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveller's is but a barren and comfortless condition.

Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature, — house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.

What is a farm, house and land, office or shop, but a settlement in nature under the most favorable conditions? It is insignificant, and a merely negative good fortune, to be provided with thick garments against cold and wet, an unprofitable, weak, and defensive condition, compared with being able to extract some exhilaration, some warmth even, out of cold and wet themselves, and to clothe them with our sympathy.

The rich man buys woollens and furs, and sits naked and shivering still in spirit, besieged by cold and wet. But the poor Lord of Creation, cold and wet he makes to warm him, and be his garments.

Tansy is very fresh still in some places.

Tasted to-day a black walnut, a spherical and corrugated nut with a large meat, but of a strong oily taste.

November 12, 2020

8 P. M. — Up river to Hubbard Bathing-Place.

Moon nearly full.

A mild, almost summer evening after a very warm day, alternately clear and overcast. The meadows, with perhaps a little mist on them, look as if covered with frost in the moonlight.

At first it is quite calm, and I see only where a slight wave or piece of wet driftwood along the shore reflects a flash of light, suggesting that we have come to a season of clearer air. This occasional slight sparkling on either hand along the water ' s edge attends me.

I come out now on the water to see our little river broad and stately as the Merrimack or still larger tides, for though the shore be but a rod off, the meeting of land and water being concealed, it is as good as if a quarter of a mile distant, and the near bank is like a distant hill.

There is now and of late months no smell of muskrats, which is probably confined to the spring or rutting season.

While the sense of seeing is partly slumbering, that of hearing is more wide awake than by day, and, now that the wind is rising, I hear distinctly the chopping of every little wave under the bow of my boat.

Hear no bird, only the loud plunge of a muskrat from time to time.

The moon is wading slowly through broad squadrons of clouds, with a small coppery halo, and now she comes forth triumphant and burnishes the water far and wide, and makes the reflections more distinct.

Trees stand bare against the sky again. This the first month in which they do.

I hear one cricket singing still, faintly deep in the bank, now after one whitening of snow. His theme is life immortal. The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might.

The dark squadrons of hostile clouds have now swept over the face of the moon, and she appears unharmed and riding triumphant in her chariot. Suddenly they dwindle and melt away in her mild, and all-pervading light, dissipated like the mists of the morning. They pass away and are forgotten like bad dreams.

Landed at the bathing-place.

There is no sound of a frog from all these waters and meadows which a few months ago resounded so with them; not even a cricket or the sound of a mosquito.

I can fancy that I hear the sound of peeping hylodes ringing in my ear, but it is all fancy.

How short their year! How early they sleep! Nature is desert and iron-bound; she has shut her door. How different from the muggy nights of summer, teeming with life! That resounding life is now buried in the mud, returned into Nature's womb, and most of the birds have retreated to the warm belt of the earth.

Yet still from time to time a pickerel darts away. And still the heavens are unchanged; the same starry geometry looks down on their active and their torpid state.

And the first frog that puts his eye forth from the mud next spring shall see the same everlasting starry eyes ready to play at bo-peep with him, for they do not go into the mud.

However, you shall find the muskrats lively enough now at night, though by day their cabins appear like deserted cabins. When I paddle near one, I hear the sudden plunge of one of its inhabitants, and some times see two or three at once swimming about it. Now is their day.

It is remarkable that these peculiarly aboriginal and wild animals, whose nests are perhaps the largest of any creatures hereabouts, should still so abound in the very midst of civilization and erect their large and conspicuous cabins at the foot of our gardens. However, I notice that unless there is a strip of meadow and water on the garden side they erect their houses on the wild side of the stream.

The hylodes, as it is the first frog heard in the spring, so it is the last in the autumn. I heard it last, me thinks, about a month ago.

I do not remember any hum of insects for a long time, though I heard a cricket to-day.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 12, 1853

The meadows, with perhaps a little mist on them, look as if covered with frost in the moonlight. See November 12, 1851 ("The moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine frost crystals on the withered grass"). See also September 22, 1854 ("By moonlight all is simple.."); November 13, 1858 (“We looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight, – only there was no moon."); December 10, 1856 ("The nights are light on account of the snow, and, there being a moon, there is no distinct interval between the day and night."); and Li Po :(Thoughts in Night Quiet):

Seeing moonlight here at my bed,

and thinking it’s frost on the ground,

I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,

then back, dreaming of my old home.

Trees stand bare against the sky again. This the first month in which they do. See November 12, 1851 ("The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight.")

 

And still the heavens are unchanged; the same starry geometry looks down. See November 12, 1851 ("It is worth the while always to go to the waterside when there is but little light in the heavens and see the heavens and the stars reflected. There is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion."); See also October 28, 1852 ("After whatever revolutions in my moods and experiences, when I come forth at evening, as if from years of confinement to the house, I see the few stars which make the constellation of the Lesser Bear in the same relative position, - the everlasting geometry of the stars.") 

You shall find the muskrats lively enough now at night . .  . Now is their day. See October 7, 1852 ("The muskrats have begun to erect their cabins . . .  Do they build them in the night? "); November 7, 1858 ("I pass a musquash-house, apparently begun last night."); November 16, 1852 ("Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

The moon is wading slowly through broad squadrons of clouds, with a small coppery halo, and now she comes forth triumphant and burnishes the water far and wide, and makes the reflections more distinct. See August 12, 1851 ("The traveller’s whole employment is to calculate what cloud will obscure the moon and what she will triumph over. . . And when she has fought her way through all the squadrons of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November Moonlight

The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might. See November 12, 1851 ("The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes.") See also November 8, 1853 ("Perchance I heard the last cricket of the season yesterday. They chirp here and there at longer and longer intervals, till the snow quenches their song."); November 8, 1859 (" I hear a small z-ing cricket."); November 11, 1855 ("Frogs are rare and sluggish, as if going into winter quarters. A cricket also sounds rather rare and distinct. "); November 11, 1858 ("I afterward hear a few of the common cricket on the side of Clamshell. Thus they are confined now to the sun on the south sides of hills and woods. They are quite silent long before sunset. "); November 13, 1851 ("Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters."); November 13, 1858 ("Of course frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs."); November 15, 1859 ("I hear in several places a faint cricket note, either a fine z-ing or a distincter creak, also see and hear a grasshopper's crackling flight."); November 19, 1857 ("Turning up a stone on Fair Haven Hill, I find many small dead crickets about the edges, which have endeavored to get under it and apparently have been killed by the frost"); November 22, 1851 ("He turned over a stone, and I saw under it many crickets and ants still lively, which had gone into winter quarters there apparently. . . . That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November

November 12. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 12

The moon is a small

halo wading slowly through 

broad squadrons of clouds.

With a little mist 

and moonlight the meadows look

as covered with frost.

I hear one cricket – 

his theme is life immortal

now after one snow.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The last cricket, full of cheer and faith

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-531112