By moonlight at Potter's Field toward Bear Garden Hill, 8 P. M.
The whip-poor-wills sing . . . Moonlight on Fair Haven Pond seen from the Cliffs. A sheeny lake in the midst of a boundless forest, the windy surf sounding freshly and wildly in the single pine behind you; the silence of hushed wolves in the wilderness, and, as you fancy, moose looking off from the shore of the lake.
September 5, 2019
The stars of poetry and history and unexplored nature looking down on the scene. This is my world now, with a dull whitish mark curving north ward through the forest marking the outlet to the lake.
Fair Haven by moonlight lies there like a lake in the Maine wilderness in the midst of a primitive forest untrodden by man. This light and this hour take the civilization all out of the landscape.
Even in villages dogs bay the moon; in forests like this we listen to hear wolves howl to Cynthia.
Even at this hour in the evening the crickets chirp, the small birds peep, the wind roars in the wood, as if it were just before dawn. The moonlight seems to linger as if it were giving way to the light of coming day.
The landscape seen from the slightest elevation by moonlight is seen remotely, and flattened, as it were, into mere light and shade, open field and forest, like the surface of the earth seen from the top of a mountain.
How much excited we are, how much recruited, by a great many particular fragrances! A field of ripening corn, now at night, that has been topped, with the stalks stacked up to dry, – an inexpressibly dry, rich, sweet ripening scent. I feel as if I were an ear of ripening corn myself. Is not the whole air then a compound of such odors undistinguishable? Drying corn-stalks in a field; what an herb-garden!
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 5, 1851
I feel as if I were an ear of ripening corn myself. See July 12, 1851 ("The earliest corn is beginning to show its tassels now, and I scent it as I walk, — its peculiar dry scent."); September 2, 1851 ("A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing."); September 4, 1859 ("Topping the corn, which has been going on some days, now reveals the yellow and yellowing pumpkins. This is a genuine New England scene. The earth blazes not only with sun-flowers but with sun-fruits.") September 14, 1851 ("The corn-stalks standing in stacks, in long rows along the edges of the corn-fields."); October 6, 1858 ("The corn stands bleached and faded — quite white in the twilight")
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