July 2.
July 2, 2014
Bigelow tells me that saddlers sometimes use the excrescence, the whitish fungus, on the birch to stick their awls in. Men find a use for everything at last. I saw one nailed up in his shop with an awl in it.
Last night, as I lay awake, I dreamed of the muddy and weedy river on which I had been paddling, and I seemed to derive some vigor from my day's experience like the lilies which have their roots at the bottom.
I have plucked a white lily bud just ready to expand, and, after keeping it in water for two days, have turned back its sepals with my hand and touched the lapped points of the petals, when they sprang open and rapidly expanded in my hand into a perfect blossom, with the petals as perfectly disposed at equal intervals as on their native lakes, and in this case, of course, untouched by an insect.
I cut its stem short and placed it in a broad dish of water, where it sailed about under the breath of the beholder with a slight undulatory motion. The breeze of his half-suppressed admiration it was that filled its sail.
It was a rare-tinted one. A kind of popular aura that may be trusted, methinks. Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams.
The Mollugo verticillata, carpet-weed, is just beginning in the garden, and the Polygonum convolvulus, black bindweed.
The spikes of the pale lobelia, some blue, some white, passing insensibly from one to the other, and especially hard to distinguish in the twilight, are quite handsome now in moist ground, rising above the grass.
The prunella has various tints in various lights, now blue, now lilac. As the twilight deepens into night, its color changes. It always suggests freshness and coolness, from the places where it grows.
I see the downy heads of the senecio gone to seed, thistle-like but small.
The gnaphaliums and this are among the earliest to present this appearance.
On my way to the Hubbard Bathing-Place, at sun-down.
The blue-eyed grass shuts up before night, and me-thinks it does not open very early the next morning.
The Cornus stolonifera, red osier, osier rouge, well out, and probably has been a day or two. I have got the order of the cornels, I think, pretty well.
I see plenty of the Peltandra Virginica coming forward in Hubbard's meadow, and its lobes are more blunt than the sagittaria.
Pogonias are very common in the meadows now.
The seed-vessels of the Iris Virginica are formed.
At the bathing-place there is [a] hummock which was floated on to the meadow some springs ago, now densely covered with the handsome red-stemmed wild rose, a full but irregular clump, from the ground, showing no bare stems below, but a dense mass of shining leaves and small red stems above in their midst, and on every side now, in the twilight, more than usually beautiful they appear. Countless roses, partly closed, of a very deep rich color, as if the rays of the departed sun still shone through them; a more spiritual rose this hour, beautifully blushing; and then the unspeakable beauty and promise of those fair swollen buds that spot the mass, which will blossom to-morrow, and the more distant promise of the handsomely formed green ones, which yet show no red, for few things are handsomer than a rosebud in any stage; these mingled with a few pure white elder blossoms and some rosaceous or pinkish meadow-sweet heads. I am confident that there can be nothing so beautiful in any cultivated garden, with all their varieties, as this wild clump.
I afterwards found a similar though not so large and dense a clump of sweetbriars. Methinks their flowers are not so fragrant, and perhaps never of so deep a red. Perhaps they are more sure to open in a pitcher than the last.
It is starlight. Near woods the veery is a steady singer at this hour.
I notice that the lowest leaves of my potamogeton are pellucid and wavy, which combined with their purplish tinge on the surface, makes me doubt if it be not the pulcher.
Do the hardhack leaves stand up and hug the stem at night, that they show their under sides so?
Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report. To the full heart she is all but a figure of speech. This is my year of observation and I fancy that my friends are also more devoted to outward observation than ever before, as if it were an epidemic.
I cross the brook by Hubbard's little bridge.
Now nothing but the cool invigorating scent which is perceived at night in these low meadowy places where the alder and ferns grow can restore my spirits. (I made it an object to find a new Parmelia caperata in fruit in each walk.)
At this season, methinks, we do not regard the larger features of the landscape, as in the spring, but are absorbed in details.
Then, when the meadows were flooded, I looked far over them to the distant woods and the outlines of hills, which were more distinct. I should not have so much to say of extensive water or landscapes at this season.
You are a little bewildered by the variety of objects. There must be a certain meagreness of details and nakedness for wide views. (The obtuse galium shows its minute white flowers in the meadows.)
If I remember, the early part of June was cool, as also the latter, though we had some hot weather, perhaps, toward the middle.
The clover heads are drying up except in meadows.
9 o'clock. The full moon rising (or full last night) is revealed first by some slight clouds above the eastern horizon looking white, the first indication that she is about to rise, the traces of day not yet gone in the west . In the west, similar clouds, seen against a lighter sky, look dark and heavy. Now a lower cloud in the east reflects a more yellowish light. The moon, far over the round globe travelling this way, sends her light forward to yonder cloud, from which the news of her coming is reflected to us.
The moon's aurora! it is without redness or fulgidness, like the dawn of philosophy, and its noon, too. At her dawning no cocks crow. How few creatures to hail her rising! Only some belated travellers that may be abroad this night.
What graduated information of her coming! More and more yellow glows the low cloud, with concentrating light, and now the moon's edge suddenly appears above a low bank of cloud not seen before, and she seems to come forward apace without introduction, after all; and the steadiness with which she rises with undisturbed serenity, like a queen who has learned to walk before her court, is glorious, and she soon reaches the open sea of the heavens. She seems to advance (so, perchance, flows the blood in the veins of the beholder) by graceful sallying essays, trailing her garment up the sky.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 2, 1852
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 2, 1852
Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. See September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you."); May 10, 1853 ("He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. . . .I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant."); May 6, 1854 ("There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective."
It is starlight. Near woods the veery is a steady singer at this hour. See June 28,1852 ("When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Veery
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