Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face?

June 22. 

8 p.m. — Up the Union Turnpike. 

We have had a succession of thunder-showers to day and at sunset a rainbow. 

How moral the world is made! This bow is not utilitarian. Methinks men are great in proportion as they are moral. After the rain He sets his bow in the heavens! The world is not destitute of beauty. Ask of the skeptic who inquires, Cui bono? why the rainbow was made. While men cultivate flowers below, God cultivates flowers above; he takes charge of the parterres in the heavens. 

June 22, 2016

I feel my Maker blessing me

June 22, 1851 

Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face? How glorious should be the life of man passed under this arch! What more remarkable phenomenon than a rainbow, yet how little it is remarked! 

Near the river thus late, I hear the peetweet, with white-barred wings. 

The scent of the balm-of-Gilead leaves fills the road after the rain. 

There are the amber skies of evening, the colored skies of both morning and evening! Nature adorns these seasons.

Unquestionable truth is sweet, though it were the announcement of our dissolution.

More thunder-showers threaten, and I still can trace those that are gone by.

The fireflies in the meadows are very numerous, as if they had replenished their lights from the lightning. The far-retreated thunder-clouds low in the southeast horizon and in the north, emitting low flashes which reveal their forms, appear to lift their wings like fireflies; or it is a steady glare like the glow worm. Wherever they go, they make a meadow.

 I hear no toads this cool evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 22, 1852

Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face? See March 3, 1841 ("God's voice is but a clear bell sound."). See also June 22, 1851 ("Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives . . . so that we become like a still lake of purest crys tal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves . All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps .. . . Whom shall I thank for it ? . . . I feel my Maker blessing me ")

What more remarkable phenomenon than a rainbow See November 5, 1857 ("I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you. The important fact is its effect on me. He thinks that I have no business to see anything else but just what he defines the rainbow to be, but I care not whether my vision of truth is a waking thought or dream remembered, whether it is seen in the light or in the dark. It is the subject of the vision, the truth alone, that concerns me. The philosopher for whom rainbows, etc., can be explained away never saw them. With regard to such objects, I find that it is not they themselves (with which the men of science deal) that concern me; the point of interest is somewhere between me and them (i. e. the objects)")

Thunder-showers to day and at sunset a rainbow. See March 15. 1859 ("Two brilliant rainbows at sunset, the first of the year."); August 9, 1851 ("It is a splendid sunset, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people come to their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings and the sky, as the sun’s rays shine through the cloud and the falling rain we are, in fact, in a rainbow. "); August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek name for the world, - Kosmos, or beauty. It was designed to impress man."); August 7, 1852 ("A moment when the sun was setting with splendor in the west, his light reflected far and wide through the clarified air after a rain, and a brilliant rainbow, as now, o'erarching the eastern sky.") and note to May 11, 1854 ("A rainbow on the brow of summer")

Near the river thus late, I hear the peetweet. See June 21, 1855 ("Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm.")

Unquestionable truth is sweet. See  August 8, 1852 ("No man ever makes a discovery, even an observation of the least importance, but he is advertised of the fact by a joy that surprises him.”); November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us more than a lower expressed.")

The fireflies in the meadows are very numerous, as if they had replenished their lights from the lightning. See  June 3, 1852 (“It has been a sultry day, and a slight thunder-shower, and now I see fireflies in the meadows at evening.”) and note to June 8, 1859 ("See lightning-bugs to-night”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Fireflies


June 22. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 22

Is not the rainbow 

a faint vision of God's face –

a clear bell his voice?

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

Is not the rainbow a faint vision of God's face?

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-520622

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

Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat.

July 10

Another day, if possible still hotter than the last. We have already had three or four such, and still no rain.

It is with a suffocating sensation and a slight pain in the head that I walk the Union Turnpike where the heat is reflected from the road.

July 10, 2019

 I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head.There are but few travellers abroad, on account of the oppressive heat. 

I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk.  It seems the properest highway for this weather. Now in water a foot or two deep, now suddenly descending through valleys up to my neck, but all alike agreeable. 

There are many interesting objects of study walking up and down a clear river like this in the water, where you can see every inequality in the bottom and every object on it. Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head.

Now we traverse a long water plain some two feet deep; now we descend into a darker river valley, where the bottom is lost sight of and the water rises to our armpits; now we go over a hard iron pan; now we stoop and go under a low bough of the Salix nigra; now we slump into soft mud amid the pads of the Nymphaea odorata, at this hour shut. 

On this road there is no other traveller to turn out for.

We finally return to the dry land, and recline in the shade of an apple tree on a bank overlooking the meadow. The stones lying in the sun on this hillside where the grass has been cut are as hot to the hand as an egg just boiled, and very uncomfortable to hold. 

Every hour we expect a thundershower to cool the air, but none comes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 10, 1852

I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk . . . Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head. See July 22, 1851("I bathe, and in a few hours I bathe again, not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river, I take off my clothes and carry them over, then bathe and wash off the mud and continue my walk. I would fain take rivers in my walks endwise.”); July 27, 1852 ("That the luxury of walking in the river may be perfect it must be very warm, such as are few days even in July, so that the breeze on those parts of the body that have just been immersed may not produce the least chilliness. It cannot be too warm, so that, with a shirt to fend the sun from your back, you may walk with perfect indifference, or rather with equal pleasure, alternately in deep and in shallow water. Both water and air must be unusually warm; otherwise we shall feel no impulse to cast ourselves into and remain in the stream")  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing

July 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 10

up and down river 

walking  in torrid weather 

with only a hat 

  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 © 2009-2021