The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852
July 5, 2016
I came here to live.
Always there was the sound of
the morning cricket.
The sun getting low
cool wind blows up the valley
and we sit a while.
We watch as cows pass
before our line of vision
to look between them.
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| July 5, 2015 |
Saturday. Walden. - Yesterday I came here to live . . . Always there was the sound of the morning cricket. July 5, 1845
Another very hot night, and scarcely any dew this morning. July 5, 1854
There is a handsome wood-path on the east side of White Pond. The shadows of the pine stems and branches fall across the path, which is perfectly red with pine-needles. July 5, 1851
The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature. July 5, 1852
The deepest part of the river is generally rather toward one side, especially where the stream is energetic. On a curve it is generally deepest on the inside bank, and the bank most upright. July 5, 1859
We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. July 5 1852
For some days I have seen great numbers of blackish spiny caterpillars stripping the black willows, some full-grown on June 30th and some now not more than three quarters of an inch long. When looking at a blackbird's nest I pricked my hand smartly on them several times; in fact the nest was pretty well protected by this chevaux-de-frise. Are they the caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa? Yes; according to Harris's description, they are. July 5, 1857
There has been, amid the chips where a wood-pile stood, in our yard, a bumblebee's nest for ten days or more. Near it there was what I should have called a mouse's nest of withered grass, but this was mainly of different material and perhaps was made by the bee. It was a little heap two inches high, six long, and four wide, made of old withered grass and small bits of rags, brown paper, cotton-wool, strings, lint, and whole feathers, with a small half-closed hole at one end, at which the [bee] buzzed and showed himself if you touched the nest. I saw the cat putting out her paw there and starting back, and to-day I find the remains, apparently, of the bee dead at the entrance. On opening, I find nothing in the nest. July 5, 1857
Some fields are quite yellow with johnswort now, — a pleasing motley hue, which looks autumnal. July 5, 1852
Pink-colored yarrow. July 5, 1856
How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming! Can any house [be] said to be furnished without them ? July 5, 1852
It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had.
- We lie in the shade of locust trees.
- Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging.
- I am reminded of berrying.
- I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. .
July 5, 185/
The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. July 5, 1852
It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle-berrying. July 5, 1852
Raspberries, some days. July 5, 1853
Plucked some large luscious purple pyrus berries. july 5, 1856
Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. July 5, 1852
Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season. I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early. The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc. The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai's note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions ; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts. July 5, 1852
The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc. July 5, 1852
A kingbird’s nest in fork of a button—bush five feet high on shore (not saddled on); three young just hatched and one egg. July 5, 1856
A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. July 5, 1857
Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree.July 5, 1852
One hundred and nine swallows on telegraph-wire at bridge within eight rods, and others flying about. July 5, 1854
That new ravine at Clamshell is so enlarged that bank swallows already use its sides, and I feel some young there. July 5, 1857
Young partridges (with the old bird), as big as robins, make haste into the woods from off the railroad. July 5, 1856
Partridges big as quails July 5, 1857
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 July 5, 1852
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. July 5, 1853
I push up Well Meadow Brook a few rods, through the weeds. I see by the commotion that great numbers of fishes fled before me and concealed themselves amid the weeds or in the mud. The mud is all stirred up by them. Some ran partly ashore. Higher up, when I leave the boat and walk up the brook on the quaking shore, I find a bay and pool connected with the brook all alive with them, and observe two or three caught partly high and dry by their heedless haste, in a shallow and very weedy place. These are young pickerel two or three inches long. I suspect that all, or the greater part, are pickerel, and that they commonly breed in such still weedy basins in deep muddy meadows. July 5, 1857
Many pickerel dart away from amidst the pads, and in one place I see one or two great snap-turtles. July 5, 1856
I hear my hooting owl now just before sunset. You can fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if Nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. It reminds of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. One answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. Some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it. Yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me. July 5, 1852
The large evening-primrose below the foot of our garden. . . was not open when I went to bathe, but freshly out in the cool of the evening at sundown, as if enjoying the serenity of the hour. July 5, 1856
I notice of late the Osmunda regalis fully grown, fresh and handsome. July 5, 1860
As we come over Hubbard's Bridge between 5 and 6 P.M., the sun getting low, a cool wind blowing up the valley, we sit a while. July 5, 1851
This retired bridge is a favorite spot with me. I have witnessed many a fair sunset from it. July 5, 1851
The sun has set. . . Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day and make the attraction in our western sky . . . soon to be gilded by his parting rays. They are remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or, rather, as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. C, as usual, calls it a Mediterranean sky. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of clouds of wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon. July 5, 1852
Here is a small road running north and south along the edge of the wood, which would be a good place to walk by moonlight. July 5, 1851
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| July 5, 2017 |
June 11, 1851 ("The woodland paths are never seen to such advantage as in a moonlight night, opening before me almost against expectation as I walk, as if it were not a path, but an open, winding passage through the bushes, which my feet find")
June 15, 1858 ("The Osmunda regalis, growing in very handsome hollow circles, or sometimes only crescents or arcs of circles, is now generally a peculiarly tender green.")
June 20, 1856 ("Five young phoebes in a nest . . .just ready to fly.")
June 25, 1855 ("A phoebe’s nest, with two birds ready to fly.")
June 29, 1857 ("At Lee's Cliff, a phoebe has built her nest, and it now has five eggs in it, nearly fresh")
July 1, 1852 ("The path by the wood-side is red with the effete staminiferous flowers of the white pine")
July 2, 1851("Some of the raspberries are ripe, the most innocent and simple of fruits”)
July 6, 1857 (“Rubus triflorus well ripe.”)
July 9, 1859 ("See young kingbirds which have lately flown perched in a family on the willows, — the airy bird, lively, twittering");
July 29, 1858 ("I see nowadays . . . young swallows on the telegraph wire.")
August 27, 1859 ("I often see yarrow with a delicate pink tint, very distinct from the common pure-white ones.")
July 5, 2020
If you make the least correctobservation of nature this year,you will have occasion to repeat itwith illustrations the next,and the season and life itself is prolonged.A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 5A 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
https://tinyurl.com/HDT05JULY
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