Perambulated Carlisle line.

September 19.

Perambulated Carlisle line.

Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks, or bur-marigold, now abundant by riverside.

Found the bound stones on Carlisle by the river all or mostly tipped over by the ice and water, like the pitch pines about Walden Pond.

Grapes very abundant along that line.

The soapwort gentian now.

In an old pasture, now grown up to birches and other trees, followed the cow-paths to the old apple trees.

Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle, who lives nearest to the Kibbe Place, can remember when there were three or four houses around him (he is nearly eighty years old and has always lived there and was born there); now he is quite retired, and the nearest road is scarcely used at all.

He spoke of one old field, now grown up, which [we] were going through, as the "hog-pasture," formerly.

He found the meadows so dry that it was thought to be a good time to burn out the moss.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 19, 1851

Perambulated Carlisle line. See September 12, 1851 (" On Monday, the 15th instant, I am going to perambulate the bounds of the town. ...It is a sort of reconnoissance of its frontiers authorized by the central government of the town, which will bring the surveyor in contact with whatever wild inhabitant or wilderness its territory embraces."); September 15, 1851 ("Commenced perambulating the town bounds."); September 16, 1851 ("The inhabitants of Lincoln yield sooner than usual to the influence of the rising generation, and are a mixture of rather simple but clever with a well-informed and trustworthy people."); September 17, 1851 ("Perambulated the Lincoln line."); September 18, 1851 ("Perambulated Bedford line."); September 20, 1851 ("A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men.. . . I feel inexpressibly begrimed."); September 21, 1851 ("Here was the cider-mill, and there the orchard, and there the hog-pasture; and so men lived, and ate, and drank, and passed away, — like vermin.")

Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks. See September 13, 1852 ("The great bidens in the sun in brooks affects me as the rose of the fall. They are low suns in the brook. The golden glow of autumn concentrated, more golden than the sun. How surely this yellow comes out along the brooks in autumn."); September 13, 1859  ("The Bidens chrysanthemoides, now apparently in its prime by the river, now almost dazzles you with its great sunny disk. I feast my eyes on it annually. . . .  in this is seen the concentrated heat of autumn."); October 12, 1851 ("The seeds of the bidens, — without florets, — or 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") See also 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Great Bidens

The soapwort gentian now. See September 19, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian cheers and surprises, -- solid bulbs of blue from the shade, the stale grown purplish. It abounds along the river, after so much has been mown") See also September 6, 1857 ("Soapwort gentian, out not long");;September 8, 1852 ("Gentiana saponaria out."); September 22, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian the flower of the river-banks now.") September 25, 1857 ("You notice now the dark-blue dome of the soapwort gentian in cool and shady places under the bank.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Soapwort Gentian 

Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle . . .spoke of one old field, now grown up . . . as the "hog-pasture," formerly. See June 10, 1853 ("Crossed on to the old Carlisle road by the house north of Isaiah Green‘s, and then across the road through the woods to the Paul Adams house by Bateman‘s Pond. Saw a hog-pasture of a dozen acres in the woods, with thirty or forty large hogs and a shelter for them at night, a half-mile east of the last house, — something rare in these days here abouts.)

I had two friends.

March 4

To Carlisle, surveying.

I had two friends.

The one offered me friendship on such terms that I could not accept it, without a sense of degradation.

He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron.

He would not come to see me, but was hurt if I did not visit him.

He would not readily accept a favor, but would gladly confer one.

He treated me with ceremony occasionally, though he could be simple and downright sometimes; and from time to time acted a part, treating me as if I were a distinguished stranger; was on stilts, using made words.

Our relation was one long tragedy, yet I did not directly speak of it.

I do not believe in complaint, nor in explanation.

The whole is but too plain, alas, already.

We grieve that we do not love each other, that we cannot confide in each other.

I could not bring myself to speak, and so recognize an obstacle to our affection.

I had another friend, who, through a slight obtuseness, perchance, did not recognize a fact which the dignity of friendship would by no means allow me to descend so far as to speak of, and yet the inevitable effect of that ignorance was to hold us apart forever.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1856

We grieve that we do not love each other. See e.g. January 21, 1852 ("I never realized so distinctly as this moment that I am peacefully parting company with the best friend I ever had,. . . Simply our paths diverge."); June 11, 1855 ("What if we feel a yearning to which no breast answers? I walk alone. My heart is full. Feelings impede the current of my thoughts. I knock on the earth but no friend appears, and perhaps none is dreaming of me"); March 28, 1856 ("Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that."): February 8, 1857 ("And now another friendship is ended. I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded. . . . am perfectly sad at parting from you. I could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind. ")

March 4. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 4

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I had two friends.

A 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 © 2009-2025

So much snow in the road.

March 5 

Snowed an inch or two in the night. Went to Carlisle, surveying. 

It is very hard turning out, there is so much snow in the road. Your horse springs and flounders in it. 

The snow in the wood-lot which I measured was about two feet on a level.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 5, 1856

There is so much snow in the road . . . about two feet on a level. See February 12, 1856 ("Twenty-five days the snow was sixteen inches deep in open land!!”); February 19, 1856 ("The snow has been deeper since the 17th than before this winter . . . seventeen or eighteen inches deep on a level.”); March 27, 1856 ("People do not remember when there was so much old snow on the ground at this date.”); March 30, 1856 ("Snow . . . has covered the ground since Christmas and stretches as far as you can see on every side . . . The Corner road is impassable to horses, because of their slumping in the old snow.”); April 10, 1856 ("We may now say that the ground is bare, though we still see a few patches or banks of snow on the hillsides at a distance . . . Thus does this remarkable winter disappear at last.") See also Donald Sutherland, The Long, Hard Winter of 1855-56 ("The Winter of 1855-56 was the coldest winter of the 1850s.")

Two feet in the wood-

lot and so much in the road 

that your horse flounders. 

Yellow butterflies in the damp road.

September 3.

September 3, 2023

Fair weather and a clear atmosphere after two days of mizzling, cloudy, and rainy weather and some smart showers at daylight and in the night. The street is washed hard and white. 

P. M. —- With Minot Pratt into Carlisle.

Woodbine berries purple. 

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. 

Pratt showed me a tobacco flower, long and tubular, slightly like a datura. 

In the meadow southwest of Hubbard's Hill saw white Polygala sanguinea, not described.

Close to the left-hand side of bridle-road, about a hundred rods south of the oak, a bayberry bush without fruit, probably a male one. 

It made me realize that this was only a more distant and elevated sea-beach and that we were within reach of marine influences. My thoughts suffered a sea-turn.

North of the oak (four or five rods), on the left of the bridle-road in the pasture next to Mason’s, tried to find the white hardback still out, but it was too late. 

Found the mountain laurel out again, one flower, close sessile on end of this year’s shoot. There were numerous blossom-buds expanding, and they may possibly open this fall.

A white hardback out of bloom by a pile of stones (on which I put another) in Robbins’s field, and a little south of it a clump of red huckleberries.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 3, 1854

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. See July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places . . . I do not know what attracts them thus to sit near together , like a fleet in a haven; why they collect in groups.") See also July 14, 1852 ("See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road”); July 16, 1851 ("I see the yellow butterflies now gathered in fleets in the road, and on the flowers of the milkweed"); July 19, 1856 ("Fleets of yellow butterflies on road.");  October 18, 1856 (“I still see a yellow butterfly occasionally zigzagging by the roadside”); October 20, 1858 ("I see yellow butterflies chasing one another, taking no thought for the morrow, but confiding in the sunny day as if it were to be perpetual.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yellow Butterflies

September 3.  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 3

Again see fleets of 

yellow butterflies in the 

damp road after rain.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Yellow butterflies in the damp road

A 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 ©  2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540903

Getting lost

August 15.

Walk all day with Channing, northwest into Acton and Carlisle. 

A dog-day, comfortably cloudy and cool as well as still. 

The river meadows, where no mowing, have a yellowish and autumnal look.  

I see large flocks of bobolinks on the Union Turnpike. 

Ford the Assabet at the bathing-place. 

Panicled cornel berries on College Road. 

Many of the trees in Barrett's orchard on Annursnack touch the ground all around, weighed down with fruit.

Cross from top of Annursnack to top of Strawberry Hill.  The locomotive whistle, far southwest, sounds like a bell. 

From Strawberry Hill we steer northeast toward the east point of a wood in the direction of Hutchinson's, perhaps two miles off.

Before starting on this walk I had studied the map to discover a new walk, and decided to go through a large wooded tract west and northwest of the Paul Dudley house, where there was no road, there at last to strike east across the head of Spencer Brook Meadow, perhaps to the old Carlisle road.

A mile and a half northeast of Strawberry Hill, keeping on through a somewhat swampy upland, we fall  into a path, which Channing preferring, though it leads us through woods widely out of our course westward. 

I soon correct it, and, descending through swampy land, at length see through the trees and bushes into a small meadow completely surrounded by woods, in which is a man haying only eight or ten rods off. 

Soon after, we follow an indistinct path through a dense birch wood, leading quite out of our course, westward.

At length, when I endeavor to correct my course by compass, it points so that I lose my faith in it, and we continue to go out of our way, till we come out on a side-hill immediately overlooking a stream and mill and several houses and a small mill-pond. 

We are completely lost, and see not one familiar object. 

At length see steeples which we think Westford, but the monument proves it Acton. Take their bearings, calculate a new course, and pursue it at first east-northeast, then east, and finally southeast, along rocky hillsides covered with weeds, where the fall seems further advanced than in Concord, with more autumnal colors, through dense oak woods and scrub oak, across a road or two, over some pastures, through a swamp or two, where the cinnamon fern is as high as our heads.   

After travelling about five miles, for the most part in woods, without knowing where we are, we come out on a hill from which we see, far to the south, the open valley at head of Spencer Brook.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 15, 1854

A large flocks of bobolinks... See August 15, 1852 ("I see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. They cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note as I approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. This is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky.")

Cross from top of Annursnack to top of Strawberry Hill.  See September 6, 1851  ("From Strawberry Hill the first, but a very slight, glimpse of Nagog Pond by standing up on the wall. That is enough to relate of a hill, methinks, that its elevation gives you the first sight of some distant lake.")

We are completely lost, . See March 29, 1853 ("It is a surprising and memorable and, I may add, valuable experience to be lost in the woods, especially at night")

August 15. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Just after sunrise and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 15

Far in the southwest

the locomotive whistle

sounds like a bell.

A 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 ©  2009-2024

To Mason's pasture.

The world now full of verdure and fragrance and the air comparatively clear (not yet the constant haze of the dog-days), through which the distant fields are seen, reddened with sorrel, and the meadows wet green, full of fresh grass, and the trees in their first beautiful, bright, untarnished and unspotted green.

May is the bursting into leaf and early flowering, with much coolness and wet and a few decidedly warm days, ushering in summer; June, verdure and growth with not intolerable, but agreeable, heat.

The fresh light green shoots of  the hemlocks have now grown half an inch or an inch, spotting the trees, contrasting with the dark green of last year's foliage. 

The young pitch pines in Mason's pasture are a glorious sight, now most of the shoots grown six inches, so soft and blue-green, nearly as wide as high. It is nature's front yard.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.

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

The fresh light green shoots of the hemlocks. See June 11, 1859 ("Hemlocks are about at height of their beauty, with their fresh growth."); June 26, 1860 ("The hemlocks are too much grown now and are too dark a green to show the handsomest bead-work by contrast..")

The heavens and the earth are one flower. See August 6, 1852 ("We live, as it were, within the calyx of a flower."); May 16, 1854 ("The earth is all fragrant as one flower.”); May 16, 1852 ("The whole earth is fragrant as a bouquet held to your nose.")

Travelling locally

December 13, 2014

December 13.

While surveying to-day, saw much mountain laurel for this neighborhood in Mason's pasture, just over the line in Carlisle. Its bright yellowish-green shoots are agreeable to my eye.

We had one hour of almost Indian summer weather in the middle of the day. I felt the influence of the sun. It melted my stoniness a little. The pines looked like old friends again. Cutting a path through a swamp where was much brittle dogwood, etc., etc., I wanted to know the name of every shrub.

This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time. If it makes me forget some things which I ought to remember, it no doubt enables me to forget many things which it is well to forget.

By stepping aside from my chosen path so often, I see myself better and am enabled to criticise myself. Of this nature is the only true lapse of time.


It seems an age since I took walks and wrote in my journal, and when shall I revisit the glimpses of the moon? To be able to see ourselves, not merely as others see us, but as we are?


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 13, 1851

This varied employment, to which my necessities compel me, serves instead of foreign travel and the lapse of time. See April 8, 1854 ("A day or two surveying is equal to a journey"); November 18 1851 ("The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); November 20, 1851("Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man")