Now there is a dense mass of weeds along the waterside, where the muskrats lurk, and overhead a canopy of leaves conceals the birds and shuts out the sun.
In the little meadow pool, or bay, in Hubbard's shore, I see two old pouts tending their countless young close to the shore. The former are slate-colored. The latter are about half an inch long and very black, forming a dark mass from eight to twelve inches in diameter. The old are constantly circling around them, -over and under and through, as if anxiously endeavoring to keep them together, from time to time moving off five or six feet to reconnoitre. The whole mass of the young and there must be a thousand of them at least is incessantly moving, pushing forward and stretching out. Are often in the form of a great pout, apparently keeping together by their own instinct chiefly, now on the bottom, now rising to the top. Alone they might be mistaken for polly-wogs. The old, at any rate, do not appear to be very successful in their apparent efforts to communicate with and direct them. At length they break into four parts. The old are evidently very careful parents. One has some wounds apparently . . . I think also that I see the young breams in schools hovering over their nests while the old are still protecting them.
Up the grassy hollows in the sprout-lands north of Goose Pond I feel as if in a strange country, — a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance.
Here are numerous open hollows more or less connected, where for some reason the wood does not spring up, — and I am glad of it, — filled with a fine wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom around the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries straggling down into them.
As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored West or East. The quarter of a mile of sprout-land which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth.
Your horizon is there all your own.
Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass , all glowing with rosy light.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1854
Up the grassy hollows in the sprout-lands north of Goose Pond I feel as if in a strange country, — a pleasing sense of strangeness and distance.
Here are numerous open hollows more or less connected, where for some reason the wood does not spring up, — and I am glad of it, — filled with a fine wiry grass, with the panicled andromeda, which loves dry places, now in blossom around the edges, and small black cherries and sand cherries straggling down into them.
As wild and strange a place as you might find in the unexplored West or East. The quarter of a mile of sprout-land which separates it from the highway seems as complete a barrier as a thousand miles of earth.
Your horizon is there all your own.
Again I am attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild moss rose half open in the grass , all glowing with rosy light.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1854
See August 6, 1851 ("After how few steps, how little exertion, the student stands in pine woods . . .in a place still unaccountably strange and wild to him.")
June 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 21
June 21. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 21
The deep scarlet of
the wild moss rose, half open,
glowing in the grass.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A Wild and Strange Place
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
tinyurl.com/hdt-540621
