Surveying on the Great Fields to-day.

 

July 5. 

Raspberries, some days.

Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding that, in surveying on the Great Fields to-day, I was interrupted by a herd of a dozen cows, which successively passed before my line of vision, feeding forward, and I had to watch my opportunity to look between them. 

Sometimes, however, they were of use, when they passed behind a birch stake and made a favorable background against which to see it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1853

Raspberries, some days. See June 30, 1854 ("Rubus triflorus berries, some time, — the earliest fruit of a rubus.The berries are very scarce, light red, semitransparent, showing the seed, — a few (six to ten) large shining grains and rather acid. "); July 2, 1851("Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits”); July 6, 1857 (“Rubus triflorus well ripe.”)

Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding.  See September 27, 1851 ("The cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way.") See also July 5, 1852 ("How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs ; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you"); See also May 15, 1853 ("Here are ten cows feeding on the hill beside me. Why do they move about so fast as they feed? They have advanced thirty rods in ten minutes"); July 12, 1857 (“It is exceedingly sultry this afternoon, and . . . cows stand up to their bellies in the river, lashing their sides with their tails from time to time.”); July 16, 1851 ("The color of the cows on Fair Haven Hill, how fair a contrast to the hillside! How striking and wholesome their clean brick-red!"); July 17, 1856 ("Cows in their pasture, going to water or elsewhere, make a track four or five inches deep and frequently not more than ten inches wide."); A November 15, 1859 ("s I returned over the Corner Bridge I saw cows in the sun half-way down Fair Haven Hill next the Cliff, half a mile off, the declining sun so warmly reflected from their red coats that I could not for some time tell if they were not some still bright-red shrub oaks.");
October 5, 1856 (" I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, — watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully, — than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first.")

To have the leisure

to see the parallax of

cows in a pasture.

20220705

See also January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me . . . ; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes."); December 28, 1852 ("A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book . . . How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things"

I watch as cows pass 

before my line of vision 

to look between them.

July 5, 1853