Perambulated the Lincoln line.

September 17.

Perambulated the Lincoln line.

Was it the small rough sunflower which I saw this morning at the brook near Lee's Bridge?

Saw at James Baker's a buttonwood tree with a swarm of bees now three years in it, but honey and all inaccessible.

John W. Farrar tells of sugar maples behind Miles's in the Corner.

Did I see privet in the swamp at the Bedford stone near Giles's house?

Swamp all dry now; could not wash my hands.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 17, 1851

Perambulated the Lincoln line. See September 15, 1851 ("Commenced perambulating the town bounds"); September 18, 1851 ("Perambulated Bedford line.") See also Septembeer 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.")

Was it the small rough sunflower which I saw this morning at the brook near Lee's Bridge?  See July 29, 1853 (“The sight of the small rough sunflower about a dry ditch bank and hedge advances me at once further toward autumn.”); August 1, 1852 ("The small rough sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus) tells of August heats”); August 13, 1858 ("H. divaricatus was abundantly out on the 11th."); August 19, 1851 ("Small rough sunflower by side of road between canoe birch and White Pond"); September 2, 1856 ("Also, a short time ago, I was satisfied that there was but one kind of sunflower (divaricatus) indigenous here.")


Sugar maples behind Miles's in the Corner. Charles Miles (1791- 864) resided at the corner of what is now Old-Road-to-Nine-Acre-Corner and Williams Road. ~ Place Names of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts(and in Lincoln, Massachusetts) & Other Botanical Sites in Concord compiled by Ray Angelo; See August 11, 1852 ("Aster corymbosus, path beyond Corner Spring and in Miles Swamp."); March 24, 1853 ("The white pine wood, freshly cut, piled by the side of the Charles Miles road, is agreeable to walk beside."); February 4, 1858 ("To C. Miles Swamp. Discover the Ledum latifolium, quite abundant over a space about six rods in diameter just east of the small pond-hole."); May 17, 1858 ("What a pleasant sandy road, soaking up the rain, that from the woods to the Miles house! The house becomes a controlling feature in the landscape when there is but one or two in sight."); 

Skate to Bound Rock.

February 15.

As in the expression of moral truths we admire any closeness to the physical fact which in all language is the symbol of the spiritual, so, finally, when natural objects are described, it is an advantage if words derived originally from nature, it is true, but which have been turned (tropes) from their primary signification to a moral sense, are used, i. e., if the object is personified. 

The one who loves and understands a thing the best will incline to use the personal pronouns in speaking of it. To him there is no neuter gender. Many of the words of the old naturalists were in this sense doubly tropes. 

P. M. — About 30° at 2 P. M. 

Skated to Bound Rock. 

Frequently, the same night that it first freezes, or perhaps in the morning, the ice over the thread of the river will be puffed up for many rods a foot or more, evidently by expanding vapors beneath, and also over the channel of some warm spring emptying in. Also at Walden where it is very shallow or the ice rests on a bar between the pond and a bay. 

When lately the open parts of the river froze more or less in the night after that windy day, they froze by stages, as it were, many feet wide, and the water dashed and froze against the edge of each successive strip of ice, leaving so many parallel ridges. 

The river is rapidly falling, is more than a foot lower than it was a few days ago, so that there is an ice-belt left where the bank is steep, and on this I skate in many places; in others the ice slants from the shore for a rod or two to the water; and on the meadows for the most part there is no water under the ice, and it accordingly rumbles loudly as I go over it, and I rise and fall as I pass over hillocks or hollows.

From the pond to Lee's Bridge I skated so swiftly before the wind, that I thought it was calm, for I kept pace with it, but when I turned about I found that quite a gale was blowing. 

Occasionally one of those puffs (making a pent-roof of ice) runs at right angles across the river where there is no spring or stream emptying in. A crack may have started it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 15, 1860

February 14. February 15. February 16

It is an advantage if words derived originally from nature, it is true, but which have been turned (tropes) from their primary signification to a moral sense, are used, i. e., if the object is personified. See February 23, 1860 ("Ultimately the moral is all in all, and we do not mind it if inferior truth is sacrificed to superior, as when the moralist fables and makes animals speak and act like men. It must be warm, moist, incarnated, — have been breathed on at least. A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.");  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.")

Bound Rock.  See A Week on the Concord and Merrimak Rivers ("Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord.")

The river is rapidly falling, is more than a foot lower than it was a few days ago, so that there is an ice-belt left where the bank is steep, and on this I skate in many places. See February 14, 1859 ("The ice-belt which I still see along the steep bank of the Assabet is now some three weeks old."); February 15, 1859 ("there are two of those ice-belts, a narrower and thinner one about twenty inches below the first, often connected with it by icicles at the edge. Thus each rise was recorded.") See also January 1, 1857 ("I observe a shelf of ice — what arctic voyagers call the ice-belt or ice-foot (which they see on a very great scale sledging upon it) — adhering to the walls and banks at various heights, the river having fallen nearly two feet since it first froze"); January 16, 1857("As I pass the Island (Egg Rock), I notice the ice-foot adhering to the rock about two feet above the surface of the ice generally. . . . The same phenomena, no doubt, on a much larger scale occur at the north.”); February 1, 1859 ("Also an ice-belt adheres to the steep shores . . .and you see where this hard and thick ice has bent under its own weight.")

From the pond to Lee's Bridge I skated so swiftly before the wind. See January 14, 1855 ("Skate to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling . . . like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate. . . . There was I, and there, and there. I judged that in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion.")

The winter diet of muskrat.

December 26. 

P. M. — Skate to Lee's Bridge and there measure back, by pacing, the breadth of the river. 

After being uniformly overcast all the forenoon, still and moderate weather, it begins to snow very gradually, at first imperceptibly, this afternoon, — at first I thought I imagined it, — and at length begins to snow in earnest about 6 p. m., but lasts only a few minutes. 

I see a brute with a gun in his hand, standing motionless over a musquash-house which he has destroyed. I find that he has visited every one in the neighborhood of Fair Haven Pond, above and below, and broken them all down, laying open the interior to the water, and then stood watchful, close by, for the poor creature to show its head there for a breath of air. There lies the red carcass of one whose pelt he has taken on the spot, flat on the bloody ice. 

And for his afternoon's cruelty that fellow will be rewarded with a ninepence, perchance. When I consider what are the opportunities of the civilized man for getting ninepences and getting light, this seems to me more savage than savages are. Depend on it that whoever thus treats the musquash's house, his refuge when the water is frozen thick, he and his family will not come to a good end. 

So many of these houses being broken open, — twenty or thirty I see, — I look into the open hole, and find in it, in almost every instance, many pieces of the white root with the little leaf-bud curled up which I take to be the yellow lily root, — the leaf- bud unrolled has the same scent with the yellow lily. There will be half a dozen of these pointed buds, more or less green, coming to a point at the end of the root. 

Also I see a little coarser, what I take to be green leaf -stalk of the pontederia, for I see a little of the stipule sheathing the stalk from within it? 

The first unrolls and off course it is yellow lily. In one hole there was a large quantity of this root, and these buds attached or bitten off, the root generally five or six eighths inch in diameter and one to four inches long. I think, therefore, that this root must be their principal food at this time. 

If you open twenty cabins you will find it in at least three quarters of them, and nothing else, unless a very little pontederia leaf-stem. 

I see no fresh clamshells in them, and places, nor are they probably deposited in a heap under the ice. It may be, however, that the shells are opened in this hole and then dropped in the water near by!! By eating or killing at least so many lily buds they must thin out that plant considerably. 

Twice this winter I have noticed a musquash floating in a placid open place in the river when it was frozen for a mile each side, looking at first like a bit of stump or frozen meadow, but showing its whole upper outline from nose to end of tail; perfectly still till he observed me, then suddenly diving and steering under the ice toward some cabin's entrance or other retreat half a dozen or more rods off. 

As some of the tales of our childhood, the invention of some Mother Goose, will haunt us when we are grown up, so the race itself still believes in some of the fables with which its infancy was amused and imposed on, e. g. the fable of the cranes and pygmies, which learned men endeavored to believe or explain in the last century. 

Aristotle, being almost if not quite the first to write systematically on animals, gives them, of course, only popular names, such as the hunters, fowlers, fishers, and farmers of his day used. He used no scientific terms. But he, having the priority and having, as it were, created science and given it its laws, those popular Greek names, even when the animal to which they were applied cannot be identified, have been in great part preserved and make those learned far-fetched and commonly unintelligible names of genera to-day. His History of Animals has thus become a very storehouse of scientific nomenclature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1859

By eating or killing at least so many lily buds they must thin out that plant considerably. See April 10, 1855 ("I see much yellow lily root afloat, which the muskrats have dug up and nibbled.")

The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf.

November 16. 

9 a. m. — Sail up river to Lee's Bridge. 

Colder weather and very windy, but still no snow. A very little ice along the edges of the river, which does not all melt before night. 

Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape. 

I still see the drowned white lily pads showing their red sides. 

On the meadow side the water is very much soiled by the dashing of the waves. 

I see one duck. 

The pines on shore look very cold, reflecting a silvery light. 

The waves run high, with white caps, and communicate a pleasant motion to the boat. 

At Lee's Cliff the Cerastium viscosum. 

We sailed up Well Meadow Brook. The water is singularly grayey, clear and cold. The bottom of the brook showing great nuphar roots, like its ribs, with some budding leaves. 

Returning, landed at Holden's Spruce Swamp. 

The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf.

The swamp-pink and blueberry buds attract.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1852

Muskrat-houses completed.See  October 16, 1859 (“When I get to Willow Bay I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. To me this is an important and suggestive sight, as, perchance, in some countries new haystacks in the yards; as to the Esquimaux the erection of winter houses.”); November 11, 1855 ("The bricks of which the muskrat builds his house are little masses or wads of the dead weedy rubbish on the muddy bottom, which it probably takes up with its mouth. It consists of various kinds of weeds, now agglutinated together by the slime and dried confervae threads, utricularia, hornwort, etc., — a streaming, tuft-like wad. The building of these cabins appears to be coincident with the commencement of their clam diet, for now their vegetable food, excepting roots, is cut off.”)

The pines on shore look very cold, reflecting a silvery light. See . November 11, 1851 (“There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan's. Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light”) December 3, 1856 (“The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.")

The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf. See November 11, 1858 (“In the meadows the pitcher-plants are bright-red. ”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant

The swamp-pink and blueberry buds attract. See November 5, 1855 ("Swamp-pink buds now begin to show.”); November 6, 1853 (“The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry.”);  December 1, 1852 (“At this season I observe the form of the buds which are prepared for spring,- the large bright yellowish and reddish buds of the swamp-pink, the already downy ones of the Populus tremuloides and the willows, the red ones of the blueberry”)

The character of the river valley changes about at Hill's Bridge.

June 24. 

To Billerica dam, surveying the bridges. 

Another foggy [sic], amounting from time to time to a fine rain, and more, even to a shower, though the grass was thickly covered with cobwebs in the morning. Yet it was a condensed fog, I should say. Its value appeared to be as a veil to protect the tender vegetation after the long rainy and cloudy weather.

The 22d, 23d, and 24th, I have been surveying the bridges and river from Heard's Bridge to the Billerica dam. 

I hear of two places in Wayland where there was formerly what was called a hay bridge, but no causeway, at some narrow and shallow place, a hundred years ago or more. Have looked after all the swift and the shallow places also. The testimony of the farmers, etc., is that the river thirty to fifty years ago was much lower in the summer than now. 

Deacon Richard Heard spoke of playing when a boy on the river side of the bushes where the pads are, and of wading with great ease at Heard's Bridge, and I hear that one Rice (of Wayland or Sudbury), an old man, remembers galloping his horse through the meadows to the edge of the river. 

The meadow just above the causeway on the Wayland side was spoken of as particularly valuable. 

Colonel David Heard, who accompanied me and is best acquainted of any with the details of the controversy, — has worked at clearing out the river (I think about 1820), — said that he did not know of a rock in the river from the falls near the Framingham line to perhaps the rear of Hubbard's in Concord. 

The grass not having been cut last year, the ice in the spring broke off great quantities of pipes, etc., immense masses of them, which were floated and drifted down against the causeways and bridges; and there they he still, almost concealing any green grass, like a raft on the meadows, along the south side the causeways. 

The inhabitants of Wayland used a good deal for mulching trees. One told me that at Sherman's Bridge they stretched quite across the river above the bridge, so that a man "could walk across on them," — perhaps "did walk across on them," — but on inquiring of one who lived by the bridge I learned that "a dog could not have walked across on them." 

Daniel Garfield, whom I met fishing on the river, and who has worked on Nine-Acre Corner and Lee's Bridges for fifty years or more, could remember one year when Captain Wheeler dug much mud from the river, when the water was so low that he could throw out pickerel on each side outside the bushes (where the pads now are). 

Says that his old master with whom he lived in Lincoln when he was young told him that he wheeled the first barrow-load at the building of Lee's Bridge and road, and that if he were alive now he would be a good deal over a hundred years old. Yet Shattuck says that bridge was a new bridge in 1660. 

Ebenezer Conant remembers when the Canal dam was built, and that before that it used to be dry at midsummer outside the bushes on each side. 

Lee says that about 1819 the bridge near him was rebuilt and the mud-sills taken up. These are said to remain sound an indefinite while. When they put in a new pile (Buttrick the carpenter tells me) they find the mortise in the mud-sill and place it in that. 

Deacon Farrar says that he can remember Lee's Bridge seventy-five years ago, and that it was not a new bridge then. That it is sometimes obstructed by hay in the spring. That he has seen a chip go faster up-stream there than ever down. His son said this was the case considerably further up in the meadows toward Rice's, and he thought it the effect of Stow River backing up. 

Deacon Farrar thought the hay bridge called Farrar's Bridge was for foot-passengers only. 

I found the water in Fair Haven Pond on the 22d twelve to thirteen feet deep in what I thought the channel, but in Purple Utricularia Bay, half a dozen rods from the steep hill, twenty-two and a half feet was the most I found. 

John Hosmer tells me that he remembers Major Hosmer's testifying that the South Bridge was carried up-stream, before the court, at the beginning of the controversy. 

Simonds of Bedford, who is measuring the rapidity of the current at Carlisle Bridge, says that a board with a string attached ran off there one hundred yards in fifteen minutes at the height of water (in May, and pretty high), when the Commissioners were here. That he has found it to be swiftest just after the water has begun to fall. 

The character of the river valley changes about at Hill's Bridge. The meadows are quite narrow and of a different character, — higher and firmer, — a long hill bounds the meadow, and almost the river, on the west for a good way, and high land on the east, and the bottom is harder and said to be often rocky (?). The water was about four and a half feet deep — sounded with a paddle and guessed at — at the Fordway, and at that stage so swift and strong that you could not row a boat against it in the swiftest part of the falls.

July 22d, the average depth of water at the Fordway was two feet, it having fallen in Concord two feet nine and three fourths inches since June 23d; so that the water fell possibly as much in this month at the Fordway as at Concord, — I think surely within half a foot as much.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 24, 1859

Caterpillars of the mourning cloak / a promethea moth emerges.

July 5. 

July 5, 2017

A. M. — To Lee's Cliff by boat. 

Potentilla arguta abundantly out. 

Partridges big as quails. 

At Clamshell I found three arrowheads and a small Indian chisel for my guests. 

Rogers determined the rate of the boat's progress by observing by his second-hand how long the boat was going its length past a pad, calling the boat's length so much. 

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. Are they the caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa? [Yes; according to Harris's description, they are.] 

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. 

That new ravine at Clamshell is so enlarged that bank swallows already use its sides, and I feel some young there. 

After leaving my companions at the Lee Bridge road, 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. 

Comara palustris apparently in prime. 

A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. 

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.

There came out this morning, apparently from one of those hard stem-wound cocoons on a black birch in my window, a moth whose wings are spread four and a quarter inches, and it is about an inch and three quarters long. It is black, wings and body, with two short, broad feathery antennae. The wings all have a clay-colored border behind, with a distinct black waving line down the middle of it, and, about midway the wings, a less distinct clay-colored line. Near the point of each forward wing, a round black spot or eye, with a bluish crescent within its forward edge, and beyond this spot, a purple tinge with a short whitish waving line continued through it from the crescent. The rear wings have a row of oblong roundish black spots along the clay-colored border, within the black line. There is a very faint light line on the fore wings on each side of the head. Beneath, on wings and body, dark purplish brown takes the place of the black above. It is rather handsomer and higher-colored beneath than above. There is a very small light or clay-colored triangular spot near the middle of wing beneath; also a row of brown spots on a white band along each side of the body. 

This is evidently the male Attacus Promethea. The rich purplish brown beneath — a sort of chocolate purple — makes the figure of a smaller moth of different form. 

The cocoon, about an inch long, is surrounded by the now pale withered leaf of the birch, which is wrapped almost quite around it and extends beneath, and it is very hard and firm, the light silk being wound thickly about the petiole, and also, afterward, the twig itself for half an inch or more both above and beneath the petiole. Sometimes there is no real petiole for a core, but the silky sheath can be slid up and down the twig.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1857

Partridges big as quails. See July 5, 1856  ("Young partridges . . .as big as robins")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge

At Clamshell I found three arrowheads and a small Indian chisel for my guests. See July 5, 1854 ("On Lupine Knoll pick up a dark-colored spear-head three and a half inches long, lying on the bare sand; so hot that I can not long hold it tight in my hand."); May 25, 1856 ("I found five arrowheads at Clamshell Hill.")

The caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa.  See  March 21, 1853 (" On the warm, dry cliff, looking south over Beaver Pond, I am surprised to see a large butterfly, black with buff-edged wings, so tender a creature to be out so early, and, when alighted, opening and shutting its wings. What does it do these frosty nights? Its chrysalis must have hung in some sunny nook of the rocks. Born to be food for some early bird."); April 11, 1853 ("Dr. Harris says that that early black-winged, buff-edged butterfly is the Vanessa Antiopa, and is introduced from Europe, and is sometimes found in this state alive in winter."); October 1, 1860.(Water was prepared for ice, and C. saw the first Vanessa Antiopa since spring."); November 1,1860 ("The butterflies are out again, — probably some new broods. I see the common yellow and two Vanessa Antiopa,") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Buff-edged Butterfly


A phoebe's nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. See  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") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Phoebe

The cocoon, about an inch long, is surrounded by the now pale withered leaf of the birch. See January 19, 1854 ("The A. Promethea is the only moth whose cocoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf, and round the shoot, the leaf partly folded round it."); February 19, 1854 ("The light ash-colored cocoons of the A. Promethea, with the withered and faded leaves wrapped around them so artfully and admirably secured by fine silk wound round the leaf-stalk and the twig."); May 17, 1857 (" Two cocoons of apparently the Attacus Promethea on a small black birch, the silk wound round the leaf stalk.")

The View from Mt. Misery

April 4

A fine morning, still and bright, with smooth water and singing of song and tree sparrows and some blackbirds. A nuthatch is heard on the elms, and two ducks fly upward in the sun over the river. 

P. M. — To Clematis Brook via Lee’s. 

A pleasant day, growing warmer; a slight haze. Now the hedges and apple trees are alive with fox colored sparrows, all over the town, and their imperfect strains are occasionally heard. Their clear, fox colored backs are very handsome. I get quite near to them. 

Stand quite near to what I call a hairy woodpecker -- but, seeing the downy afterward, I am in doubt about it. Its body certainly as big as a robin. It is a question of size between the two kinds. The rows of white spots near the end of the wings of the downy remind me of the lacings on the skirts of a soldier’s coat. 

I am surprised to find the pond, i. e. Fair Haven Pond, not yet fully open. There is a large mass of ice in the eastern bay, which will hardly melt to morrow. 

It is a fine air, but more than tempered by the snow in the northwest. All the earth is bright; the very pines glisten, and the water is a bright blue. A gull is circling round Fair Haven Pond, seen white against the woods and hillsides, looking as if it would dive for a fish every moment, and occasionally resting on the ice. 

The water above Lee’s Bridge is all alive with ducks. There are many flocks of eight or ten together, their black heads and white breasts seen above the water, - more of them than I have seen before this season, - and a gull with its whole body above the water, perhaps standing where it was shallow. 

Not only are the evergreens brighter, but the pools, as that upland one behind Lee’s, the ice as well as snow about their edges being now completely melted, have a peculiarly warm and bright April look, as if ready to be inhabited by frogs. 

I can now put a spade into the garden anywhere. The rain of April 1st and the warmth of to-day have taken out the frost there; but I cannot put a spade into banks by the meadow where there is the least slope to the north.

Returning from Mt. Misery, the pond and river reach presented a fine, warm view. The slight haze, which on a warmer day at this season softens the rough surfaces which the winter has left and fills the copses seemingly with life, — makes them appear to teem with life, — made the landscape remarkably fair. 

It would not be called a warm, but a pleasant day; but the water has crept partly over the meadows, and the broad border of button-bushes, etc., etc., off Wheeler’s cranberry meadow, low and nearly flat, though sloping regularly from an abrupt curving edge on the river side several rods into the meadow till it is submerged — this is isolated, but at this distance and through this air it is remarkably soft and elysian.

April 4, 2015

There is a remarkable variety in the view at present from this summit. The sun feels as warm as in June on my ear. Half a mile off in front is this elysian water, high over which two wild ducks are winging their rapid flight eastward through the bright air; on each side and beyond, the earth is clad with a warm russet, more pleasing perhaps than green; and far beyond all, in the north western horizon, my eye rests on a range of snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 4, 1855

In the north western horizon, my eye rests on a range of snow-covered mountains, glistening in the sun. . . . See April 4, 1852  ("I see the snow lying thick on the south side of the Peterboro Hills, . . .probably the dividing line at present between the bare ground and the snow-clad ground stretching three thousand miles to the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie and the Icy Sea.");  April 4, 1859 ("When I look with my glass, I see the cold and sheeny snow still glazing the mountains. This it is which makes  the wind so piercing cold."); February 21, 1855 ("I look at the Peterboro mountains with my glass from Fair Haven Hill. I think that there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare, russet fields and dark forests. . . “)

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

Snow-covered mountains

in the northwest horizon

glisten in the sun.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The View from Mt. Misery

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-550404

***

April 4, 2014

One of the wonderful things about living here is the mountains in every direction heading up north Main Street you see far into Chittenden and Mount Caramel, Nickwackett Mountain Lead Mine Mountain -- to the west is Mount Herrick and Birdseye-- to the south White Rocks and Dorset Peak-- viewed from West Rutland and N. Grove St. the Green Mountain ranges remarkable Pico Killington Mendon peak seen behind East Mountain and up close in downtown Rutland looking at East Mountain it is a wall sheer wall --to the south Bald Mountain to the north Blue Ridge Mountain-- all these mountains at one time or another living here these 66 years I have climbed.

hey let's go up Tom would say and we did Nickwackett East Mountain Bald Mountain Blue Ridge Killington Pico Mendon Bob’s Slide etc.

I've never been up Herrick though it sits outside my office.

Well what I'm getting around to is when the snow from this cold hard winter finally melted here, even though I've lived here all these years, I am just stunned at looking at the mountains still covered with snow and it is the whiteness and the brightness of the mountains standing all around this valley I cannot describe.

Today reading Henry Thoreau he stands on Mount Misery and looks to the northwest horizon he looks over the near landscape before him and in the"north western horizon my eyes rest on a range of snow covered mountains glistening in the sun.”

Stunning white and bright

mountains all these years standing

around this valley.

April 4, 2015. zphx

See April 2, 2019 (Overheard in the hospital waiting room:

"'The air won’t be warm,' my father always said, 'until they get the snow out of the mountain'")

Moonlit clouds

June 1.

Evening. -To the Lee place, the moon about full.

The sounds I hear by the bridge: the midsummer frog (I think it is not the toad), the nighthawk, crickets, the peetweet (it is early), the hum of dor-bugs, and the whip-poor-will.

The moving clouds are the drama of the moonlight nights, and never-failing entertainment of nightly travellers. You can never foretell the fate of the moon, -- whether she will prevail over or be obscured by the clouds half an hour hence. The traveller's sympathy with the moon makes the drama of the shifting clouds interesting. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 1, 1852

The moving clouds are the drama of the moonlight nights. See August 12, 1851 ("The traveller’s whole employment is to calculate what cloud will obscure the moon and what she will triumph over.")

To Mt. Misery and Lee's Bridge.

November 8.

I notice along the Corner road, beyond Abiel Wheeler's, quite a number of little white pines springing up against the south wall, whose seed must have been blown from Hubbard's Grove some fifty rods east.  Also a wet and brushy meadow some forty rods in front of Garfield's is being rapidly filled with white pines whose seeds must have been blown an equal distance.

We need not be surprised at these results when we consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly.

A great pine wood may drop many millions of seeds in one year, and if only half a dozen are conveyed a quarter of a mile and lodge against some fence, and only one comes up and lives there, yet in the course of fifteen or twenty years there are fifteen or twenty young trees there.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 8, 1860

How persevering Nature is... See October 12, 1851("The seeds of the bidens, or beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes, so that you are all bristling with them. ... 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." ); October 23, 1853 ("I find my clothes all bristling as with a chevaux- de-frise of beggar-ticks, which hold on for many days. A storm of arrows these weeds have showered on me, as I went through their moats. How irksome the task to rid one's self of them! We are fain to let some adhere. Through thick and thin I wear some; hold on many days. In an instant a thousand seeds of the bidens fastened themselves firmly to my clothes, and I carried them for miles, planting one here and another there.")