I love very well this cloudy afternoon.

October 12.

October 12, 2018

Sunday.

Yesterday afternoon, saw by the brook-side above Emerson's the dwarf primrose in blossom, the Norway cinquefoil and fall dandelions which are now drying up, the houstonia, buttercups, small goldenrods, and various asters, more or less purplish.

The seeds of the bidens,-without florets, beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes, so that you are all bristling with them. Certainly they adhere to nothing so readily as to woolen cloth, as if in the creation of them the invention of woolen clothing by man had been foreseen.

How tenacious of its purpose to spread and plant its race. By all methods nature secures this end, whether by the balloon, or parachute, or hook, or barbed spear like this, or mere lightness which the winds can waft.

What are those seeds, big as skunk-cabbage seeds, amid leafless stalks like pontederia in the brooks, now bending their stems ready to plant themselves at the bottom? 

The swamp-pink buds begin to show.

Blackbirds and larks are about, and the flicker or yellow-hammer, so beautifully spotted (in the hand), and the goldfinches.

I see a cow in the meadow with a new-dropped calf by her side.

The Anemone nemorosa in bloom and the Potentilla sarmentosa, or running cinquefoil, which springs in April, now again springing.

I love very well this cloudy afternoon, 

so sober and favorable to reflection

 after so many bright ones.

What if the clouds shut out the heavens, 

provided they concentrate my thoughts 

and make a more celestial heaven below! 

I hear the crickets plainer; 

I wander less in my thoughts, 

am less dissipated; 

am aware how shallow 

was the current of my thoughts before.

Deep streams are dark, 

as if there were a cloud in their sky; 

shallow ones are bright and sparkling, 

reflecting the sun from their bottoms.

The very wind on my cheek 

seems more fraught with meaning.

Many maples around the edges of the meadows are now quite bare, like smoke.

I seem to be more constantly merged in nature; my intellectual life is more obedient to nature than formerly, but perchance less obedient to spirit. I have less memorable seasons. I exact less of myself. I am getting used to my meanness, getting to accept my low estate. O if I could be discontented with myself. If I could feel anguish at each descent.

The sweet-fern is losing its leaves.

I see where a field of oats has been cradled, by the railroad, — alternate white and dark green stripes, the width of a swath, running across the field.

I find it arises from the stubble being bent a particular way by the cradle, as the cradler advanced, and accordingly reflecting the light but one way, and if I look over the field from the other side, the first swath will be dark and the latter white.

Minott shells all his corn by hand. He has got a boxful ready for the mill.  He will not winnow it, for he says the chaff (? ) makes it lie loose and dry faster.

He tells me that Jacob Baker, who raises as fair corn as any body, gives all the corn of his own raising to his stock, and buys the flat yellow corn of the South for bread; and yet the Northern corn is worth the most per bushel.

Minott did not like this kind of farming any better than I. Baker also buys a great quantity of “shorts” below for his cows, to make more milk.

He remembers when a Prescott, who lived where E. Hosmer does, used to let his hogs run in the woods in the fall, and they grew quite fat on the acorns, etc., they found, but now there are few nuts, and it is against the law.

He tells me of places in the woods which to his eyes are unchanged since he was a boy, as natural as life.  He tells me, then, that in some respects he is still a boy.

And yet the gray squirrels were ten then to one now.

But for the most part, he says, the world is turned upside down.

P. M. – To Cliffs.

I hear Lincoln bell tolling for church.

At first I thought of the telegraph harp.

Heard at a distance, the sound of a bell acquires a certain vibratory hum, as it were from the air through which it passes, like a harp.

All music is a harp music at length, as if the atmosphere were full of strings vibrating to this music.

It is not the mere sound of the bell, but the humming in the air, that enchants me, just [as the] azure tint which much air or distance imparts delights the eye.

It is not so much the object, as the object clothed with an azure veil.

All sound heard at a great distance thus tends to produce the same music, vibrating the strings of the universal lyre.

There comes to me a melody which the air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods.

It is by no means the sound of the bell as heard near at hand, and which at this distance I can plainly distinguish, but its vibrating echoes, that portion of the sound which the elements take up and modulate,-a sound which is very much modified, sifted, and refined before it reaches my ear.

The echo is to some extent an independent sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of my voice, but it is in some measure the voice of the wood.

A cloudy, misty day with rain more or less steady. This gentle rain is fast loosening the leaves, — I see them filling the air at the least puff, — and it is also flattening down the layer which has already fallen.

The pines on Fair Haven have shed nearly all their leaves.

Butter-and-eggs still blooms.

Barrels of apples lie under the trees.

The Smiths have carried their last load of peaches to market.

To-day no part of the heavens is so clear and bright as Fair Haven Pond and the river.

Though the air [is] quite misty, yet the island wood is distinctly reflected.

Ever and anon I see the mist thickening in the southwest and concealing trees which were before seen, and revealing the direction and limits of the valleys, precursor of harder rain which soon passes again.

Minott calls the stake-driver “belcher-squelcher.” Says he has seen them when making the noise.  They go slug-toot, slug-toot, slug-toot.

Told me of his hunting gray squirrels with old Colonel Brooks's hound. How the latter came into the yard one day, and he spoke to him, patted him, went into the house, took down his gun marked London, thought he would go a-squirrel-hunting. Went over among the ledges, away from Brooks's, for Tige had a dreadful strong voice and could be heard as far as a cannon, and he was plaguy afraid Brooks would hear him. How Tige treed them on the oaks on the plain below the Cliffs. He could tell by his bark when he had treed one; he never told a lie.  And so he got six or seven.

How Tige told him from a distance that he had got one, but when he came up he could see nothing; but still he knew that Tige never told a lie, and at length he saw his head, in a crotch high up in the top of a very tall oak, and though he didn't expect to get him, he knocked him over.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 12, 1851

The seeds of the bidens,-without florets, beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes. See September 19, 1851 ("Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks, or bur-marigold, now abundant by riverside."); October 20, 1858 ("Bidens or beggar’s-ticks adhere to your clothes shot into you by myriads of unnoticed foes"); October 23, 1853 ("I find my clothes all bristling as with a chevaux-de-frise of beggar-ticks, which hold on for many days. . . . In an instant a thousand seeds of the bidens fastened themselves firmly to my clothes, and I carried them for miles, planting one here and another there.")

Certainly they adhere to nothing so readily as to woolen cloth, as if in the creation of them the invention of woolen clothing by man had been foreseen. See September 29, 1856 ("How surely the desmodium, growing on some rough cliff-side, or the bidens, on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveller, brute or human, that will transport their seeds on his coat! ")

I love very well this cloudy afternoon, so sober and favorable to reflection. See September 21, 1851 ("Moonlight is peculiarly favorable to reflection."); August 4, 1852("The singular thought-inducing stillness after a gentle rain like this");  April 4, 1853 ("We are all compact, and our thoughts collected. We walk under the clouds and mists as under a roof. One's thoughts run in a different channel from usual.")  August 7, 1853 (" It is worth the while to walk in wet weather;. . .The stillness and the shade enable you to collect and concentrate your thoughts"); November 7, 1855 ("I find it good to be out this still, dark, mizzling afternoon . . . The view is contracted by the misty rain, the water is perfectly smooth, and the stillness is favorable to reflection.")

The Norway cinquefoil. See August 30, 1851 ("I perceive in the Norway cinquefoil (Potentilla Norvegica), now nearly out of blossom, that the alternate five leaves of the calyx are closing over the seeds to protect them. There is one door closed, of the closing year.")

Many maples around the edges of the meadows are now quite bare, like smoke. See October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground."); October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps.”); October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”); October 13, 1855 ("The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows"); October 18, 1853 ("The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver. "); October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods."); October 18, 1858  ("I am struck by the magical change which has taken place in the red maple swamps . . . like the smoke that is seen where a blaze is extinguished")

I hear Lincoln bell tolling for church. . . . Heard at a distance, the sound of a bell acquires a certain vibratory hum .. the voice of the wood. See January 2, 1842 ("The ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that is heard within the church."); May 3, 1852 ("There is a grand, rich, musical echo trembling on the air long after the clock has ceased to strike, . . . filling the air with a trembling music like a flower of sound"); April 5, 1855 ("It being Fast-Day, we on the water hear the loud and musical sound of bells ringing for church in the surrounding towns."); April 15, 1855 ("The sound of church bells . . ., sounds very sweet to us on the water this still day") and  Walden ("Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood"). See also October 14, 1857 ("The reflection is never a true copy or repetition of its substance, but a new composition, and this may be the source of its novelty and attractiveness, and of this nature, too, may be the charm of an echo.")

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