Over the highest hill behind Bangor.

September 23

Friday. Walked down the riverside this forenoon to the hill where they were using a steamshovel at the new railroad cut, and thence to a hill three quarters of a mile further. 

Saw Aster undulatus, Solidago nemoralis, fragrant everlasting, silvery cinquefoil, small white birch, Lobelia inflata, both kinds of primrose, low cudweed, lactuca, Polygonum cilinode (apparently out of bloom), yellow oxalis.

I returned across the fields behind the town, and over the highest hill behind Bangor, and up the Kenduskieg, from which I saw the Ebeeme Mountains in the northwest and hills we had come by. 

The arbor-vitæ is the prevailing shrub.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 23, 1853

Friday. Walked down the riverside. See September 21, 1853 ("Reached Bangor at dark."); September 22, 1853 ("Behind one house, an Indian had nearly finished one canoe and was just beginning another, outdoors")

Aster undulatus. See September 20, 1852 ("Aster undulatus, or variable aster, with a large head of middle-sized blue flowers."); October 6, 1858 ("the Aster undulatus is now very fair and interesting. Generally a tall and slender plant with a very long panicle of middle-sized lilac or paler purple flowers, bent over to one side the path. "); October 19, 1856 ("The A. undulatus is, perhaps, the only [aster] of which you can find a respectable specimen. I see one so fresh that there is a bumblebee on it."); October 25, 1858 ("The Aster undulatus is now a dark purple (its leaves), with brighter purple or crimson under sides.");November 7, 1858 ("Aster undulatus and several goldenrods, at least, may be found yet.")

Solidago nemoralis. See note to September 12, 1859 ("One dense mass of the bright golden recurved wands of the Solidago nemoralis, waving in the wind and turning upward to the light hundreds, if not a thousand, flowerets each.")

Fragrant everlasting, See August 11, 1858 (“I smell the fragrant everlasting concealed in the higher grass and weeds there, some distance off.”); September 19, 1852 ("The fall dandelion and the fragrant everlasting abound")

I saw the Ebeeme Mountains in the northwest and hills we had come by. See Book for the Children of Maine, 19 (1831)   ("The Ebeeme mountains nearly south of Ktaadn, are about four thousand feet high.")

We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden.

October 14. 

9 a. m. — To and around Flint's Pond with Blake. 

A fine Indian-summer day. 

The 6th and 10th were quite cool, and any particularly warm days since may be called Indian summer (?), I think. 

We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden.

Overlooking Walden Pond from Pine Hill
April 28, 1906

There is a thick haze almost entirely concealing the mountains. There is wind enough to raise waves on the pond and make it bluer. What strikes me in the scenery here now is the contrast of the unusually blue water with the brilliant-tinted woods around it. 

The tints generally may be about at their height. The earth appears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red, or with imbricated scales of that color, and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, and a distant circumference of whitish haze. 

The nearer woods, where chestnuts grow, are a mass of warm, glowing [yellow] (though the larger chestnuts have lost the greater part of their leaves and generally you wade through rustling chestnut leaves in the woods), but on other sides the red and yellow are intermixed. The red, probably of scarlet oaks on the south of Fair Haven Hill, is very fair. The beech tree at Baker's fence is past prime and many leaves fallen. 

The shrub oak acorns are now all fallen, — only one or two left on, — and their cups, which are still left on, are apparently somewhat incurved at the edge as they have dried, so that probably they would not hold the acorn now. 

The ground is strewn also with red oak acorns now, and, as far as I can discover, acorns of all kinds have fallen. 

At Baker's wall two of the walnut trees are bare but full of green nuts (in their green cases), which make a very pretty sight as they wave in the wind. So distinct you could count every one against the sky, for there is not a leaf on these trees, but other walnuts near by are yet full of leaves. You have the green nut contrasted with the clean gray trunks and limbs. These are pig nut-shaped. 

The chestnuts generally have not yet fallen, though many have. I find under one tree a great many burs, apparently not cast down by squirrels — for I see no marks of their teeth — and not yet so opened that any of the nuts fall out. They do not all wait till frosts open the burs before they fall, then. 

I see a black snake, and also a striped snake, out this warm day.

***
Some Rhus radicans was leafless on the 13th, and some tupelos bare maybe a week or more, and button-bushes nearly bare. 

My little white pines by Walden are now conspicuous in their rows, the grass, etc., having withered to tawny and the blackberry turned to scarlet. They have been almost inobvious through the summer. 

The dark evergreen leaves of the checkerberry also attract us now amid the shrub oaks, as on the southwest of Pine Hill.

I hear a man laughed at because he went to Europe twice in search of an imaginary wife who, he thought, was there, though he had never seen nor heard of her. But the majority have gone further while they stayed in America, have actually allied themselves to one whom they thought their wife and found out their mistake too late to mend it. It would be cruel to laugh at these. 

Wise, the balloonist, says that he lost a balloon "in a juniper bog in the State of Maine," which he mistook for a "prairie." Does he mean a larch swamp? 

Balloonists speak of hearing dogs bark at night and wagons rumbling over bridges.

Arbor-vitae falling (seeds), how long?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 14, 1859

A fine Indian-summer day. See October 14, 1853 ("Fine, clear Indian-summer weather.")

We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden. See October 1, 1859 ("Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden."); October 22, 1852 ("Looking over the forest on Pine Hill, I can hardly tell which trees are lit up by the sunshine and which are the yellow chestnut-tops."); October 20, 1852 (“Picking chestnuts on Pine Hill. . . . I see the mountains in sunshine, all the more attractive from the cold I feel here, with a tinge of purple on them”); October 25, 1858 ("Returning in an old wood-path from top of Pine Hill to Goose Pond, I see many goldenrods turned purple"); November 4, 1857 ("I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length, or half a mile, — I sit high."); November 5, 1857 ("I shiver about awhile on Pine Hill, waiting for the sun to set."); November 30, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden. The country seems to slope up from the west end of Walden to the mountain"); February 29, 1852 ("The ice on Walden is of a dull white as I look directly down on it, but not half a dozen rods distant on every side it is a light-blue color.From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach. . ."); April 27, 1859 ("Through the cemetery, and over Pine Hill, where I heard a strange warbler, methought, a dark-colored, perhaps reddish-headed bird"); May 15, 1856 (“Checker-berries very abundant on south side of Pine Hill, by pitch pine wood. Now is probably best time to gather them.”); June 12, 1853 ("Going up Pine Hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. She ran indeshabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than a chicken just hatched, dispersed. "); July 29, 1858 ("To Pine Hill, looking for the Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum berries. I find plenty of bushes, but these bear very sparingly. They appear to bear but one or two years before they are overgrown."); August 27, 1854 ("I am surprised to see the top of Pine Hill wearing its October aspect, — yellow with changed maples and here and there faintly blushing with changed red maples. . . .. As I go up Pine Hill, gather the shrivelled Vaccinium vacillans berries, many as hard as if dried on a pan. They are very sweet and good."); September 12, 1851 ("Found a violet, apparently Viola cucullata, or hood-leaved violet, in bloom in Baker's Meadow beyond Pine Hill.")

The earth appears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red. . .and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, and a distant circumference of whitish haze. See October 13, 1852 (" The water or lake from however distant a point seen is always the centre of the landscape. The pond is now most beautifully framed with the autumn-tinted woods and hills.");  November 4, 1857 ("I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting. . . Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length");See also June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon."): June 25, 1852 ("The earth appears like a vast saucer sloping upward to its sharp mountain rim.")

The ground is strewn also with red oak acorns now, and, as far as I can discover, acorns of all kinds have fallen. See September 12, 1854 ("White oak acorns have many of them fallen. . . .. Some black scrub oak acorns have fallen, and a few black oak acorns also have fallen. The red oak began to fall first."); September 30, 1854 ("Acorns are generally now turned brown and fallen or falling; the ground is strewn with them and in paths they are crushed by feet and wheels."); October 1, 1859 ("The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit. . . .Now is the time for shrub oak acorns if not for others."); October 11, 1860 ("There is a remarkably abundant crop of white oak acorns this fall, also a fair crop of red oak acorns; but not of scarlet and black, very few of them. The acorns are now in the very midst of their fall."); October 12, 1858 ("Acorns, red and white (especially the first), appear to be fallen or falling. They are so fair and plump and glossy that I love to handle them, and am loath to throw away what I have in my hand."); October 13, 1859 ("I see no acorns on the trees. They appear to have all fallen before this."); October 13, 1860 ("This is a white oak year, . . . I should think that there might be a bushel or two of acorns on and under some single trees.")

Some tupelos bare maybe a week or more. Compare October 14, 1857 ("Near by is a tupelo which is all a distinct yellow with a little green. ")

A beautiful law of distribution.

April 22. 

The Salix purpurea in prime, out probably three or four days; say 19th. 

Arbor-vitae, how long? 

P. M. — In a fine rain, around Walden. 

I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut just after entering, whose aments (which apparently here began to shed pollen yesterday) in scattered clusters at the ends of the bare twigs, but just begun to shed their pollen, not hanging loose and straight yet, but curved, are a very rich crimson, like some ripe fruit, as mulberries, seen against the sand. I cannot represent the number in a single cluster, but they are much the handsomest now before the crimson anthers have burst, and are all the more remarkable for the very open and bare habit of the tree. 

When setting the pines at Walden the last three days,

I was sung to by the field sparrow.

For music I heard their jingle from time to time.

That the music the pines were set to, and

I have no doubt they will build many a nest

under their shelter. 

It would seem as if such a field as this —

a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods,

with small pines scattered in it —

was well-nigh, if not quite, abandoned to

this one alone among the sparrows. 

The surface of the earth is portioned out among them.

By a beautiful law of distribution,

one creature does not too much interfere with another.

          I do not hear the song sparrow here. 

As the pines gradually increase,

and a wood-lot is formed,

these birds will withdraw to new pastures,

and the thrushes, etc., will take their place. 

[S]o my pines were established

by the song of the field sparrow.

They commonly place their nests here

under the shelter of a little pine in the field. 

As I planted there, wandering thoughts visited me, which I have now forgotten. My senses were busily suggesting them, though I was unconscious of their origin. 

E. g., I first consciously found myself entertaining the thought of a carriage on the road, and directly after I was aware that I heard it. No doubt I had heard it before, or rather my ears had, but I was quite unconscious of it, — it was not a fact of my then state of existence; yet such was the force of habit, it affected my thoughts nevertheless, so double, if not treble, even, are we. 

Sometimes the senses bring us information quicker than we can receive it. Perhaps these thoughts which run in ruts by themselves while we are engaged in some routine may be called automatic. 

I distinctly entertained the idea of a carriage, without the slightest suspicion how it had originated or been suggested to my mind. I have no doubt at all that my ears had heard it, but my mind, just then preoccupied, had refused to attend to it. 

This suggests that most, if not all, indeed, of our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. 

This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. 

I still see a large flock of grackles. 

Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there. 

Scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See them skim or scale away for forty rods along and upward to the woods, into which they swiftly scale, dodging to right and left and avoiding the twigs, yet without once flapping the wings after having launched themselves.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 22, 1859

I go by a Populus grandidentata on the eastern sand slope of the Deep Cut  whose aments are a very rich crimson. See April 3, 1853 ("The female Populus tremuliformis catkins, narrower and at present more red and somewhat less downy than the male, west side of railroad at Deep Cut, quite as forward as the male in this situation");  April 8, 1853 ("The male Populus grandidentata . . .shows some of its red anthers long before it opens. There is a female on the left, on Warren's Path at Deep Cut.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen

A field as this — a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods, with small pines scattered in it — [is]abandoned to this one alone among the sparrows. See  April 19, 1860 ("Hear the field sparrow sing on his dry upland, it being a warm day, and see the small blue butterfly hovering over the dry leaves.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Field Sparrow

Our ideas may be due to some sort of sensuous impression of which we may or may not be conscious. Compare November 18, 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there.")

At Heywood's meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking. See June 19, 1859 ("The prevailing sedge of Heywood Meadow by Bartlett Hill-side, that which showed yellow tops in the spring, is the Carex stricta. On this the musquash there commonly makes its stools. A tall slender sedge with conspicuous brown staminate spikes") See also April 22, 1852 ("The early sedge (Carex marginata) grows on the side of the Cliffs in little tufts with small yellow blossoms, i. e. with yellow anthers, low in the grass.") and  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Sedges in Early Spring

This afternoon there is an east wind, and a rain-storm accordingly beginning, the eighth of the kind with this wind. See April 22, 1852 ("It still rains. The water is over the road at Flint's Bridge . . . This makes five stormy days. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."); April 22, 1856 ("It has rained two days and nights, and now the sun breaks out, but the wind is still easterly, and the storm probably is not over . . . These rain-storms -- this is the third day of one -- characterize 'the season, and belong rather to winter than to summer.")

Scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. See April 22, 1852 ("Our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Partridge.

Fifteen inches east of our line.

May 18. 

May 18, 2018

Set an arbor-vitae hedge fifteen inches east of our line; about twenty inches high.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 18, 1858

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond.

April 21. 

April 21, 2018

George Melvin says that Joshua Haynes once saw a perch depositing her spawn and the male following behind and devouring it! (?) Garlick in his book on pisciculture says that the perch spawn in May. 

Melvin says that those short-nosed brook pickerel are caught in the river also, but rarely weigh more than two pounds. 

The puddles have dried off along the road and left thick deposits or water-lines of the dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. You could collect great quantities of them. 

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. 

P. M. — To Easterbrooks’s and Bateman’s Pond. 

The benzoin yesterday and possibly the 19th, so much being killed. It might otherwise have been earlier yet. 

Populus grandidentata some days at least. 

The Cornus florida flower-buds are killed. 

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. I see some very large leather apron umbilicaria there. They are flaccid and unrolled now, showing most of the olivaceous-fuscous upper side. This side feels cold and damp, while the other, the black, is dry and warm, notwithstanding the warm air. This side, evidently, is not expanded by moisture. It is a little exciting even to meet with a rock covered with these livid (?) green aprons, betraying so much life. Some of them are three quarters of a foot in diameter. What a growth for a bare rock!

April 21, 2018

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1858

The dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. See  April 13, 1859 (“The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm”); April 15, 1852 (“The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney's elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles, -- these are just expanding or blossoming now.”); April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds.”); April 16, 1856 (“Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously.”);  April 24, 1852 ("he elms are now fairly in blossom.")

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. See April 20, 1857 ("Arbor-vitae? apparently in full bloom.”) 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. See  April 21, 1855 (“I hear at a distance a wood thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves.”); April 20, 1860 ("C. sees . . . some kind of thrush to-day, size of wood thrush, — he thought probably hermit thrush."): see also May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring: The Arrival of the Hermit Thrush and note to April 24, 1856 ("Behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches.”)

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. See September 4, 1857 (“The sides of Cornus florida Ravine at Bateman’s Pond are a good place for ferns. ”);  November 2, 1857 (“A patch of polypody . . . in abundance on hillside between Calla Swamp and Bateman’s Pond ”)

Arbor-vitae in bloom.

April 20. 

Arbor-vitae? apparently in full bloom.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 20, 1857


See April 19, 1856 ("The arbor-vita: by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom."); April 21, 1858 (“The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already.”): April 26, 1855 ("Wheildon’s arbor-vitae well out, maybe for a week.")

See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, April 20

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 ©  2009-2023

Though fitted to drain Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels.

April 19.

Was awakened in the night to a strain of music dying away, — passing travellers singing. 

My being was so expanded and infinitely and divinely related for a brief season that I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. When I remembered what a narrow and finite life I should anon awake to! Though, with respect to our channels, our valleys, and the country we are fitted to drain, we are Amazons, we ordinarily live with dry channels. 

The arbor-vita: by riverside behind Monroe’s appears to be just now fairly in blossom. 

I notice acorns sprouted. 

My birch wine now, after a week or more, has become pretty clear and colorless again, the brown part having settled and now coating the glass. 

Helped Mr. Emerson set out in Sleepy Hollow two over-cup oaks, one beech, and two arbor-vitaes. 

As dryness will open the pitch pine cone, so moisture closes it up again. I put one which had been open all winter into water, and in an hour or two it shut up nearly as tight as at first.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1856

I saw how unexhausted, how almost wholly unimproved, was man’s capacity for a divine life. . . . See March 17, 1852  ("I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual"); July 16, 1851(" I am astonished. I am daily intoxicated. There comes to me such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion -- . . . I am dealt with by superior powers"); May 24, 1851 ("My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning. I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place”).

A pitch pine cone which had been open all winter shut up. Compare January 25, 1856 ("A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber. ") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Pitch Pine