That coarse mustard-like branched plant with racemes of small yellow flowers.

 

July 15.

July 15, 2019

Common form of arrowhead.

The Rumex obtusifolius shows its single grain now.

Near Loring's ram that coarse mustard-like branched plant, one or two feet high, with racemes of small yellow flowers, -- perhaps Gray's Nasturtium palustre or Bigelow's Sisymbrium amphibium, -- in seed and in blossom.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 15, 1853

The Rumex obtusifolius shows its single grain now. See December 31. 1859 ("One of the two large docks, perhaps obtusifolius, commonly holds its seeds now, but they are very ready to fall. ")

That coarse mustard-like branched plant. See June 14, 1854 ("What is that sisymbrium or mustard-like plant at foot of Loring's?")

July 15. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau July 15

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

Nature is a great imitator and loves to repeat herself.

February 13

Skated to Sudbury. A beautiful, summer-like day.

The meadows were frozen just enough to bear.

Examined now the fleets of ice-flakes close at hand. They are a very singular and interesting phenomenon, which I do not remember to have seen.

I should say that when the water was frozen about as thick as paste board, a violent gust had here and there broken it up, and while the wind and waves held it up on its edge, the increasing cold froze it in firmly. So it seemed, for the flakes were for the most part turned one way; i. e. standing on one side, you saw only their edges, on another the northeast or southwest their sides.

They were for the most part of a triangular form, like a shoulder-of - mutton sail, slightly scalloped, like shells. They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel fishers under a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze. Sometimes the sun and wind had reduced them to the thinness of writing-paper, and they fluttered and rustled and tinkled merrily.

I skated through them and strewed their wrecks around.

They appear to have been elevated expressly to reflect the sun like mirrors, to adorn the river and attract the eye of the skater. Who will say that their principal end is not answered when they excite the admiration of the skater? Every half-mile or mile, as you skate up the river, you see these crystal fleets.

Nature is a great imitator and loves to repeat herself.

She wastes her wonders on the town. It impresses me as one superiority in her art, if art it may be called, that she does not require that man appreciate her, takes no steps to attract his attention.

The trouble is in getting on and off the ice; when you are once on you can go well enough. It melts round the edges.

Again I saw to-day, half a mile off in Sudbury, a sandy spot on the top of a hill, where I prophesied that I should find traces of the Indians. When within a dozen rods, I distinguished the foundation of a lodge, and merely passing over it, I saw many fragments of the arrowhead stone. I have frequently distinguished these localities half a mile, gone forward, and picked up arrowheads.

Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were frost- bitten, but the fruit sound. There was one partly expanded.

The first flower of the season; for it is a flower. I doubt if there is [a] month without its flower. Examined by the botany all its parts, the first flower I have seen. The Ictodes fætidus.

Also mosses, mingled red and green. The red will pass for the blossom.

As for antiquities, one of our old deserted country roads, marked only by the parallel fences and cellar - hole with its bricks where the last inhabitant died, the victim of intemperance, fifty years ago, with its bare and exhausted fields stretching around, suggests to me an antiquity greater and more remote from the America of the newspapers than the tombs of Etruria. I insert the rise and fall of Rome in the interval. This is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

It is important to observe not only the subject of our pure and unalloyed joys, but also the secret of any dissatisfaction one may feel.

In society, in the best institutions of men, I remark a certain precocity. When we should be growing children, we are already little men. Infants as we are, we make haste to be weaned from our great mother's breast, and cultivate our parts by intercourse with one another.

I have not much faith in the method of restoring impoverished soils which relies on manuring mainly and does not add some virgin soil or muck.

Many a poor, sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late to study, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

I would not have every man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated. Some must be preparing a mould by the annual decay of the forests which they sustain.

Saw half a dozen cows let out and standing about in a retired meadow as in a cow-yard.


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

Skated to Sudbury. See January 31, 1855 ("Skated up the river to explore further than I had been . . .  up as far as the boundary between Wayland and Sudbury just above Pelham’s Pond, about twelve miles,")

Examined now the fleets of ice-flakes close at hand . . .They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel fishers under a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze. See February 12, 1851 ("I saw to-day something new to me. . . thin cakes of ice forced up on their edges and reflecting the sun like so many mirrors, whole fleets of shining sails, giving a very lively appearance to the river, — where for a dozen rods the flakes of ice stood on their edges, like a fleet beating up-stream against the sun, a fleet of ice-boats")

Nature is a great imitator and loves to repeat herself. Compare October 14, 1857 ("I doubt if you can ever get Nature to repeat herself exactly") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Nature

I saw to-day, half a mile off in Sudbury, a sandy spot on the top of a hill, where I prophesied that I should find traces of the Indians. See August 22, 1860 ("I never find a remarkable Indian relic but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it. Frequently I have told myself distinctly what it was to be before I found it.”); see also note to February 4, 1858 (" It is a remarkable fact that, in the case of the most interesting plants which I have discovered in this vicinity, I have anticipated finding them perhaps a year before the discovery.") 

The first flower of the season. See February 18, 1851 ("See the skunk-cabbage in flower.”); April 2, 1856 ("This year, at least, the cabbage is the first flower; and perhaps it is always earlier than I have thought, if you seek it in a favorable place."); and note to March 21, 1858 ("The skunk-cabbage at Clamshell is well out, shedding pollen. It is evident that the date of its flowering is very fluctuating,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Skunk Cabbage and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Earliest Flower

Mosses, mingled red and green See February 18, 1852 ("The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs, when spring comes.");  February 27, 1852 ("The mosses now are in fruit - or have sent up their filaments with calyptrae."); March 10, 1859 ("Fine red-stemmed mosses have begun to push and bud on Clamshell bank")

Mosses now in fruit

are warmly red in the sun

when seen from one side.

April 25, 1857

See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau., signs of spring: mosses bright green

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact

April 19

6 a. m. — Rain still, a fine rain. The robin sang early this morning over the bare ground, an hour ago, nevertheless, ushering in the day.

Then the guns were fired and the bells rung to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of a nation's liberty.

The birds must live on expectation now. There is nothing in nature to cheer them yet.

That last flock of geese yesterday is still in my eye. After hearing their clangor, looking southwest, we saw them just appearing over a dark pine wood, in an irregular waved line, one abreast of the other, as it were breasting the air and pushing it before them. It made you think of the streams of Cayster, etc., etc. They carry weight, such a weight of metal in the air. Their dark waved outline as they disappear. The grenadiers of the air. Man pygmifies himself at sight of these inhabitants of the air. These stormy days they do not love to fly; they alight in some retired marsh or river. From their lofty pathway they can easily spy out the most extensive and retired swamp. How many there must be, that one or more flocks are seen to go over almost every farm in New England in the spring.

That oak by Derby's is a grand object, seen from any side. It stands like an athlete and defies the tem pests in every direction. It has not a weak point. It is an agony of strength. Its branches look like stereo typed gray lightning on the sky. But I fear a price is set upon its sturdy trunk and roots for ship-timber, for knees to make stiff the sides of ships against the Atlantic billows. Like an athlete, it shows its well- developed muscles.

I saw yesterday that the farmers had been out to save their fencing-stuff from the flood, and everywhere it was drawn above high-water mark.

The North River had fallen nearly a foot, which I cannot account for, unless some of the dams above had broken away or been suddenly raised [sic]. This slight difference in the character of the tributaries of a river and their different histories and adventures is interesting, — all making one character at last.

The willow catkin might be the emblem of spring. The buds of the lilac look ready to take advantage of the first warm day. The skin of my nose has come off in consequence of that burning of the sun reflected from the snow.

A stormy day. 2 p. m. — With C. over Wood's Bridge to Lee's and back by Baker Farm.

It is a violent northeast storm, in which it is very difficult and almost useless to carry an umbrella. I am soon wet to my skin over half my body. At first, and for a long time, I feel cold and as if I had lost some vital heat by it, but at last the water in my clothes feels warm to me, and I know not but I am dry. It is a wind to turn umbrellas.

The meadows are higher, more wild and angry, and the waves run higher with more white to their caps than before this year. I expect to hear of shipwrecks and of damage done by the tide. This wind, too, keeps the water in the river. It is worth the while to walk to-day to hear the rumbling roar of the wind, as if it echoed through the hollow chambers of the air. It even sounds like thunder sometimes, and when you pass under trees, oaks or elms, that overhang the road, the sound is more grand and stormy still. The wind sounds even in open fields as if on a roof over our heads. It sounds as if amid sails.

The mists against the woods are seen driving by in upright columns or sections, as if separated by waves of air. Drifting by, they make a dimly mottled land scape.

What comes flapping low with heavy wing over the middle of the flood ? Is it an eagle or a fish hawk ? Ah, now he is betrayed, I know not by what motion, — a great gull, right in the eye of the storm. He holds not a steady course, but suddenly he dashes upward even like the surf of the sea which he frequents, showing the under sides of his long, pointed wings, on which do I not see two white spots ? He suddenly beats upward thus as if to surmount the airy billows by a slanting course, as the teamster surmounts a slope. The swallow, too, plays thus fantastically and luxuriously and leisurely, doubling some unseen corners in the sky. Here is a gull, then, long after ice in the river. It is a fine sight to see this noble bird leisurely advancing right in the face of the storm.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. When the phenomenon was not observed, it was not at all. I think that no man ever takes an original [sic], or detects a principle, without experiencing an inexpressible, as quite infinite and sane, pleasure, which advertises him of the dignity of that truth he has perceived. 

The thing that pleases me most within these three days is the discovery of the andromeda phenomenon. It makes all those parts of the country where it grows more attractive and elysian to me. It is a natural magic. These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world. At sight of any redness I am excited like a cow.

To-day you can find arrowheads, for every stone is washed bright in the rain.

On the Miles road, the Bceomyces roseus is now in perfection. Seen on the clay-like surface, amid the dark dead birch and pine leaves, it looks like a mi nute dull-pinkish bloom, a bloom on the earth, and passes for a terrene flower. It impresses me like a mildew passing into a higher type. It covers large tracts of ground there [with] a pink color. C. calls it flesh-colored, but it is high-colored for that.

Observed the thistle again covered with the beads of rain-drops and tinged with purple on the edges of the leaves. It impressed me again as some rich fruit of the tropics ready to be eaten with a spoon. It suggests pineapples, custard-apples, or what is it? The pasture thistle.

All the farmers' cart-paths (for their meadow-hay) are now seen losing themselves in the water.

In the midst of this storm I see and hear the robin still and the song sparrow, and see the bluebird also, and the crow, and a hawk a-hunting (a marsh hawk?), and a blue woodpecker, I thought about the size of the hairy.

The meadow from Lee's causeway, looking northeast against the storm, looks dark and, as C. says, slate-colored. I observe that, to get the dark color of the waves, you must not only look in the direction whence they come, but stand as low and nearly on a level with them as possible. If you are on the top of a hill, light is reflected upward to you from their surface.

In all this storm and wet, see a muskrat's head in the meadow, as if some one thrust up a mop from below, — literally a drowned rat. Such independence of the moods of nature! He does not care, if he knows, when it rains. Saw a woodchuck out in the storm. The elder buds are forward. I stood by Clematis Brook, hearing the wind roar in the woods and the water in the brook; and, trying to distinguish between these sounds, I at last concluded that the first was a drier sound, the last a wetter. There is a slight dry hum to the wind blowing on the twigs of the forest, a softer and more liquid splashing sound to the water falling on rocks.

Scared up three blue herons in the little pond close by, quite near us. It was a grand sight to see them rise, so slow and stately, so long and limber, with an undulating motion from head to foot, undulating also their large wings, undulating in two directions, and looking warily about them. With this graceful, lim ber, undulating motion they arose, as if so they got under way, their two legs trailing parallel far behind like an earthy re siduum to be left behind. They are large, like birds of Syrian lands, and seemed to oppress the earth, and hush the hillside to silence, as they winged their way over it, looking back toward us. It would affect our thoughts, deepen and perchance darken our reflections, if such huge birds flew in numbers in our sky. Have the effect of magnetic passes. They are few and rare. Among the birds of celebrated flight, storks, cranes, geese, and ducks. The legs hang down like a weight which they [ ?] raise, to pump up as it were with its [sic] wings and convey out of danger. The mist to-day makes those near distances which Gilpin tells of. I saw, looking from the railroad to Fair Haven Hill soon after we started, four such, — the wood on E. Hubbard's meadow, dark but open; that of Hubbard's Grove, showing the branches of the trees; Potter's pitch pines, perhaps one solid black mass with outline only distinct; Brown's on the Cliff, but dimly seen through the mist, — one above and be yond the other, with vales of mist between.

To see the larger and wilder birds, you must go forth in the great storms like this. At such times they frequent our neighborhood and trust themselves in our midst. A life of fair-weather walks might never show you the goose sailing on our waters, or the great heron feeding here. When the storm increases, then these great birds that carry the mail of the seasons lay to.

To see wild life you must go forth at a wild season. When it rains and blows, keeping men indoors, then the lover of Nature must forth. Then returns Nature to her wild estate.

In pleasant sunny weather you may catch butterflies, but only when the storm rages that lays prostrate the forest and wrecks the mariner, do you come upon the feeding-grounds of wildest fowl, — of heron and geese.

The light buff( ?)-colored hazel catkins, some three inches long, are conspicuous now. 

Beside the direct and steady rain, large drops fall from the trees and dimple the water. Stopped in the barn on the Baker Farm. Sat in the dry meadow-hay, where the mice nest. To sit there, rustling the hay, just beyond reach of the rain while the storm roars without, it suggested an inexpressible dry stillness, the quiet of the haymow in a rainy day; such stacks of quiet and undisturbed thought, when there is not even a cricket to stir in the hay, but all without is wet and tumultuous, and all within is dry and quiet. 

Oh, what reams of thought one might have here! The crackling of the hay makes silence audible. It is so deep a bed, it makes one dream to sit on it, to think of it. 

The never-failing jay still screams. 

Standing in Pleasant Meadow, Conantum shore, seen through the mist and rain, looks dark and heavy and without perspective, like a perpendicular upon its edge. 

Crossed by the chain of ponds to Walden. The first, looking back, appears elevated high above Fair Haven between the hills above the swamp, and the next higher yet. Each is distinct, a wild and interesting pond with its musquash house. 

The second the simplest perhaps, with decayed spruce (?) trees, rising out of the island of andromeda in its midst, draped with usnea, and the mists now driving between them.

Saw the Veratrum viride, seven or eight inches high, in Well Meadow Swamp, — the greatest growth of the season, at least above water, if not above or below. I doubt if there is so much recent vegetable matter pushed above ground elsewhere; certainly there is not unless of pads under water. Yet it did not start so early as it has grown fast.

Walden is clear of ice. The ice left it yesterday, then, the 18th.

Trillium Woods make a lee thirty or forty rods off, though you are raised twenty feet on the causeway.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 19, 1852

The guns were fired and the bells rung to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of a nation's liberty. See April 19, 1855 ("The guns are firing and bells ringing")

That oak by Derby's is a grand object,. . .But I fear a price is set upon its sturdy trunk and roots for ship-timber,  See February 10, 1854 ("The sturdy white oak near the Derby railroad bridge has been cut down. It measures five feet and three inches over the stump, at eighteen inches from the ground.").

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!  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"); July 7, 1851

("Knowledge does not come

to us by details but by

lieferungs from the gods.")

The andromeda phenomenon. See April 17, 1852 ("From this position alone I saw, as it were, through the leaves which the opposite sun lit up, giving to the whole this charming warm, what I call Indian, red color, — the mellowest, the ripest, red imbrowned color . . . And afterward, when I had risen higher up the hill, though still opposite the sun, the light came reflected upward from the surfaces, and I lost that warm, rich red tinge, surpassing cathedral windows. Let me look again at a different hour of the day, and see if it is really so. It is a very interesting piece of magic. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Andromeda Phenomenon

To see wild life you must go forth at a wild season. When it rains and blows, keeping men indoors, then the lover of Nature must forth. See  December 25, 1856 ("Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary. "); February 28, 1852 ("To get the value of the storm we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin,"); March 8, 1859 (" If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage. . ., and come home as if from an adventure. There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out"); March 31, 1852 ("I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system."); April 13, 1852 ("I love to hear the wind howl"); May 13, 1852  ("They who do not walk in the woods in the rain never behold them in their freshest, most radiant and blooming beauty")

Walden is clear of ice. The ice left it yesterday, then, the 18th. See April 17, 1852 ("The pond is still half covered with ice, and it will take another day like this to empty it. It is clear up tight to the shore on the south side, — dark-gray cold ice, completely saturated with water. The air from over it is very cold.")[In Thoreau’s records, the latest  ice out occurred April 18th]. See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Ice-Out

The pasture thistle

covered with beads of rain-drops

and tinged with purple.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact

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

The duck most common and most identified with the stream at this season.

March 24. 

Cold and rather blustering again, with flurries of snow. 

March 24, 2020

The boatman, when the chain of his boat has been broken with a stone by some scamp, and he cannot easily transport his boat to the blacksmith's to have it mended, gets the latter to bend him a very stout iron wire in the form of an S, then, hooking this to the two broken ends and setting it upright on a rock, he hammers it down till it rests on itself in the form of an 8, which is very difficult to pry open. 

2 P. M. — About 39. To Copan. 

I see a male frog hawk beating a hedge, scarcely rising more than two feet from the ground for half a mile, quite below the level of the wall within it. How unlike the hen-hawk in this! 

They are real wind-clouds this afternoon; have an electric, fibry look. Sometimes it is a flurry of snow falling, no doubt. Peculiar cold and windy cumuli are mixed with them, not black like a thunder cloud, but cold dark slate with very bright white crowns and prominences. 

I find on Indian ground, as to-day on the Great Fields, very regular oval stones like large pebbles, sometimes five or six inches long, water-worn, of course, and brought hither by the Indians. They commonly show marks of having been used as hammers. Often in fields where there is not a stone of that kind in place for a mile or more. 

From Holbrook's clearing I see five large dark-colored ducks, probably black ducks, far away on the meadow, with heads erect, necks stretched, on the alert, only one in water. Indeed, there is very little water on the meadows. For length of neck those most wary look much like geese. They appear quite large and heavy. They probably find some sweet grass, etc., where the water has just receded. 

There are half a dozen gulls on the water near. They are the large white birds of the meadow, the whitest we have. As they so commonly stand above water on a piece of meadow, they are so much the more conspicuous. They are very conspicuous to my naked eye a mile off, or as soon as I come in sight of the meadow, but I do not detect the sheldrakes around them till I use my glass, for the latter are not only less conspicuously white, but, as they are fishing, sink very low in the water. Three of the gulls stand together on a piece of meadow, and two or three more are standing solitary half immersed, and now and then one or two circle slowly about their companions. 

The sheldrakes appear to be the most native to the river, briskly moving along up and down the side of the stream or the meadow, three-fourths immersed and with heads under water, like cutters collecting the revenue of the river bays, or like pirate crafts peculiar the stream. They come the earliest and seem to be most at home. The water is so low that all these birds are collected near the Holt. 

The inhabitants of the village, poultry fanciers, perchance, though they be, [know not] these active and vigorous wild fowl (the sheldrakes) pursuing their finny prey ceaselessly within a mile of them, in March and April. Probably from the hen-yard fence with a good glass you can see them at it. 

They are as much at home on the water as the pickerel is within it. Their serrated bill reminds me of a pickerel's snout. You see a long row of these schooners, black above with a white stripe beneath, rapidly gliding along, and occasionally one rises erect on the surface and flaps its wings, showing its white lower parts  They are the duck most common and most identified with the stream at this season. They appear to get their food wholly within the water. Less like our domestic ducks. 

I saw two red squirrels in an apple tree, which were rather small, had simply the tops of their backs red and the sides and beneath gray! 

Fox-colored sparrows go flitting past with a faint, sharp chip, amid some oaks. 

According to a table in the "American Almanac" for ’49, page 84, made at Cambridge, from May, '47, to May, '48, the monthly mean force of the wind . . . March, April, and May were equal, and were inferior to July and June; for quantity of clouds March and May were equal, and were preceded by December, November, September, January, June, and August. 

For depth of rain, September stood first, and March ninth, succeeded only by May, October, and April. 

The wind's force was observed at sunrise, 9 A. M., 3 P. M., and 9 P. M., and in March the greatest force was at 3 P. M., the least at 9 P. M. So, for the whole year the greatest force was at 3 P. M., but the least at sunrise and 9 P. M. both alike. 

The clouds were observed at the same time, and in March there was the greatest quantity at 9 P. M. and the least at sunrise, but for the year the greatest quantity at 3 P. M. and the least at sunrise and 9 A. M. alike. 

At Mendon, Mass., for the whole year 1847 alone (i. e. a different January, February, March, and April from the last) it stood, for force of wind,. . . March , July , September , November , and December were equal, and were inferior to April , June , August , and October; and for clouds March was sixth . 

The wind's force for March was greatest at 9 A. M. and 3 P. M., which were equal; but for the year greatest at 9 A. M. and least at sunrise. 

For March there was the greatest quantity of clouds at 9 A. M., but for the year at both sunrise and 9 A. M. 

In the last table eight points of the wind were noticed viz. northwest, north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west. During the year the wind was southwest 130 days, northwest 87, northeast 59, south 33, west 29, east 14, southeast 10, north 3 days.

In March it was northwest 9 days, southwest 8, northeast 5, south 4, west 3, north 2.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 24, 1860

They are real wind-clouds this afternoon; have an electric, fibry look. Peculiar cold and windy cumuli are mixed with them. See March 4, 1860 ("Very strong and gusty northwest wind, with electric-looking wind-clouds");   March 22, 1858 ("I see those peculiar spring clouds, scattered cumuli with dark level bases. No doubt the season is to be detected by the aspect of the clouds no less than by that of the earth."); March 23, 1860 ("Small dark-based cumuli spring clouds, mostly in rows parallel with the horizon.").

I see a male frog hawk beating a hedge, scarcely rising more than two feet from the ground for half a mile. See March 27, 1855 ("See my frog hawk. (C. saw it about a week ago.) It is the hen-harrier, i.e. marsh hawk, male. Slate-colored; beating the bush; black tips to wings and white rump") See Also Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons, The Marsh Hawk (Northern Harrier)

They are the duck most common and most identified with the stream at this season. See  February 27, 1860 ("This is the first bird of the spring that I have seen or heard of."); and note to March 16, 1860  ("Saw a flock of sheldrakes a hundred rods off, on the Great Meadows, mostly males with a few females, all intent on fishing. ") See also Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons, The Sheldrake (Merganser, Goosander)

March 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 24

Cold and blustering

again with flurries of snow--

cold dark slate wind-clouds.

March 24, 1860

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Cold and rather blustering again

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

What a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us

February  13

2 p. m. — Down river. Thermometer 38°. Warm; a cloud just appearing in the west. 

That hard meadow just below the boys' bathing- place below the North Bridge is another elfin burial- ground. It would be a bad place to walk in a dark night. The mounds are often in ridges, even as if turned up by the plow. 

Water overflowing the ice at an opening in the river, and mixing with thin snow, saturating it, seen now on one side at right angles with the sun's direction, is as black as black cloth. 

It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us, using but few pigments, so to call them. The principal charm of a winter walk over ice is perhaps the peculiar and pure colors exhibited.

There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs. 

The blue of the sky, and of the ice and water reflected, and of shadows on snow. 

The yellow of the sun and the morning and evening sky, and of the sedge (or straw-color, bright when lit on edge of ice at evening), and all three in hoar frost crystals. 

Then, for the secondary, there is the purple of the snow in drifts or on hills, of the mountains, and clouds at evening. 

The green of evergreen woods, of the sky, and of the ice and water toward evening. 

The orange of the sky at evening. 

The white of snow and clouds, and the black of clouds, of water agitated, and water saturating thin snow on ice. 

The russet and brown and gray, etc., of deciduous woods. 

The tawny of the bare earth. 

I suspect that the green and rose (or purple) are not noticed on ice and snow unless it is pretty cold, and perhaps there is less greenness of the ice now than in December, when the days were shorter. 

The ice may now be too old and white. 

Those horn, knob, and rake icicles on the southeast sides of all open places — or that were open on the 10th near enough to the bushes — are suddenly softening and turning white on one side today, so that they remind me of the alabaster (?) or plaster images on an Italian's board. 

All along the ice belt or shelf — for the river has fallen more than a foot — countless white figures stand crowded, their minute cores of sedge or twigs being concealed. Some are like beaks of birds, — cranes or herons. Having seen this phenomenon in one place, I know with certainty in just how many places and where, throughout the town, — four or five, — I shall find these icicles, on the southeast sides of the larger open places which approached near enough to a bushy or reedy shore. 

The grass comes very nearly being completely en crusted in some places, but commonly rounded knobs stand up. 

The ground being bare, I pick up two or three arrow heads in Tarbell's field near Ball's Hill. There is nothing more affecting and beautiful to man, a child of the earth, than the sight of the naked soil in the spring. I feel a kindredship with it. 

The sun being in a cloud, partly obscured, I see a very dark purple tinge on the flat drifts on the ice earlier than usual, and when afterward the sun comes out below the cloud, I see no purple nor rose. Hence it seems that the twilight has as much or more to do with this phenomenon, supposing the sun to be low, than the slight angle of its rays with the horizon.  

Always you have to contend with the stupidity of men. It is like a stiff soil, a hard-pan. If you go deeper than usual, you are sure to meet with a pan made harder even by the superficial cultivation. The stupid you have always with you. Men are more obedient at first to words than ideas. They mind names more than things. Read to them a lecture on "Education," naming that subject, and they will think that they have heard some thing important, but call it "Transcendentalism," and they will think it moonshine. 

Or halve your lecture, and put a psalm at the beginning and a prayer at the end of it and read it from a pulpit, and they will pronounce it good without thinking. 

The Scripture rule, "Unto him that hath shall be given," is true of composition. The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 13, 1860

Thought breeds thought. See January 22, 1852 ("Thought begat thought.")

It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us. See February 13, 1859 ('As I walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear, bright afternoon, at 3.30 o’clock, the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad fine facets."); December 20, 1851 ("Red, white, green, and, in the distance, dark brown are the colors of the winter landscape."); December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.") See also Winter Colors (The solstice) (posted December 21, 2020)

Sun-dogs. See February 2, 1860 ("I noticed a distinct fragment of rainbow, about as long as wide, on each side of the sun.")

An Indian soapstone pot.

June 7. 

June 7, 2012

Surveying for Sam. Pierce. Found piece of an Indian soapstone pot.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 7, 1852

See March 20, 1858 (“I had noticed from the Cliff by Lee's road an elevated sandy point above Pole Brook which I said must be Indian ground, and, walking there, I found a piece of a soapstone pot.”); March 28, 1859 (“[I]f the knolls in the meadows are washed by a freshet where they have been plowed the previous fall, the soil will be taken away lower down and the stones left, — the arrow heads, etc., and soapstone pottery amid them”);  See also March 28, 1859 (“I have not decided whether I had better publish my experience in searching for arrowheads in three volumes, with plates and an index, or try to compress it into one. ”);  August 22, 1860 ("I never find a remarkable Indian relic but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it. Frequently I have told myself distinctly what it was to be before I found it. “); and Tahatowan’s Scarab

June 7. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 7

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

I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly,

May 2. 

May 2, 2019

Small pewee and young lackey caterpillars. 

I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honey bees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

Those swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river, sometimes constantly falling to and touching the surface and then rising again. When at rest they are seen to be blackish-winged, but flying they look light-colored. They flutter low and continuously over the same place. Theirs is a sort of dance. 

A peetweet and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. The river seems really inhabited when the peetweet is back and those little light-winged millers (?). This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. He is perched on the accustomed rock. Its note peoples the river, like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. 

I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun, against the dark-brown twigs of the wood, though these leafets are yet but thinly dispersed. It is very enlivening. 

I heard yesterday, and perhaps for several days, the soft purring sound of what I take to be the Rana palustris, breeding, though I did not this time see the frog. 

I feel no desire to go to California or Pike's Peak, but I often think at night with inexpressible satisfaction and yearning of the arrowheadiferous sands of Concord. I have often spent whole afternoons, especially in the spring, pacing back and forth over a sandy field, looking for these relics of a race. This is the gold which our sands yield. 

The soil of that rocky spot on Simon Brown's land is quite ash-colored — now that the sod is turned up — by Indian fires, with numerous pieces of coal in it. There is a great deal of this ash-colored soil in the country. We do literally plow up the hearths of a people and plant in their ashes. The ashes of their fires color much of our soil.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 2, 1859

Small pewee. See April 30, 1856 (“I hear the small pewee’s tche-vet’ repeatedly.”);  May 3, 1854 (“What I have called the small pewee on the willow by my boat, — quite small, uttering a short tchevet from time to time); May 3, 1855 “Small pewee; tchevet, with a jerk of the head.”); May 5, 1858 ("Saw and heard the small pewee yesterday.”); May 7, 1852 (“he first small pewee sings now che-vet, or rather chirrups chevet, tche-vet — a rather delicate bird with a large head and two white bars on wings. . . . Now I remember the yellowbird comes when the willows begin to leave out. (And the small pewee on the willows also.) ”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Small Pewee

I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honey bees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. See  May 6, 1858 (“The Salix rostrata staminate flowers are of very peculiar yellow, — a bright, what you might call yellow yellow.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Willows on the Causeway

Swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river. Compare May 1, 1854 ("The water is strewn with myriads of wrecked shad-flies, erect on the surface, with their wings up like so many schooners all headed one way. . . .”); May 1, 1858 (“Ephemerae quite common over the water.”); May 4, 1856 ("Shad-flies on the water, schooner-like.”)

The tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just expanded suddenly. See May 2, 1855 ("The young aspens are the first of indigenous trees conspicuously leafed”); May 4, 1856 ("The aspen there [the Island]just begun to leaf."); May 5, 1858 ("The aspen leaves at Island to-day appear as big as a nine pence suddenly"); May 17, 1860 ("Standing in the meadow near the early aspen at the island, I hear the first fluttering of leaves, - a peculiar sound, at first unaccountable to me”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau the Aspens.

A peetweet and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. See May 2, 1858 (“Peetweet on a rock”); April 30, 1856 (“As I go along the Assabet, a peetweet skims away from the shore.”); May 4, 1856 (“See a peetweet on Dove Rock, which just peeps out. As soon as the rocks begin to be bare the peetweet comes and is seen teetering on them and skimming away from me.”)

A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low.

April 7.

April 7, 2019

The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow,[no], and the Salix purpurea will perhaps within a week. 

Standing under the north side of the hill, I hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe' of a fish hawk (for it is not a scream, but a rather soft and innocent note), and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. The body looks quite short in proportion to the spread of the wings, which are quite dark or blackish above. He evidently has something in his talons. 

We soon after disturb him again, and, at length, after circling around over the hill and adjacent fields, he alights in plain sight on one of the half-dead white oaks on the top of the hill, where probably he sat before. As I look through my glass, he is perched on a large dead limb and is evidently standing on a fish (I had noticed something in his talons as he flew), for he stands high and uneasily, finding it hard to keep his balance in the wind. 

He is disturbed by our neighborhood and does not proceed at once to eat his meal. I see the tail of the fish hanging over the end of the limb. Now and then he pecks at it. I see the white on the crown of the hawk. It is a very large black bird as seen against the sky. Soon he sails away again, carrying his fish, as before, horizontally beneath his circles about over the adjacent pasture like a hawk hunting, though he can only be looking for a suitable place to eat his fish or waiting for us to be gone. 

Looking under the limb on which he was perched, we find a piece of the skin of a sucker (?) or some other scaly fish which a hawk had dropped there long since. No doubt many a fish hawk has taken his meal on that sightly perch. 

It seems, then, that the fish hawk which you see soaring and sailing so leisurely about over the land — for this one soared quite high into the sky at one time — may have a fish in his talons all the while and only be waiting till you are gone for an opportunity to eat it on his accustomed perch. 

I told Pratt my theory of the formation of a swamp on a hillside, but he thought that the growth of the alders, etc., there would not make the ground any more moist there, but less so, and stated that the soil (as he had noticed) was drier under rank grass in a mowing-field than at the same depth under a surface of bare and hot sand, because the grass took up the moisture from the soil. 

I saw a hole (probably of a woodchuck) partly dug on the east side of the hill, and three or four large stones lay on the fresh sand-heap thrown out, which the wood- chuck had pushed up from below. One was about six inches long by four or more wide and might weigh four pounds, and, looking into the hole, whose bottom I could not see, I saw another nearly as large about three feet down, on its way up. I have seen their holes dug in much worse places than this. This hole sloped downward at a considerable angle, so that the stones had to be pushed up a steep slope. 

A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low, apparently the same as that of April 3d, a deep rusty brown. 

The woodchuck probably digs in a stony place that he may be the more secure. 

I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day. 

Find a Sternothcerus odoratus so far from water on Simon Brown's knoll, where water has not been since about March 20th, that I think he was then washed and left there and has since lain in the ground. There are two or three small leeches on him, which may have adhered to him all winter. 

The white man's relics in the fields are like the Indian's, — pipes, pottery, and (instead of arrowheads) bullets.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 7, 1859

The Cheney elm looks as if it would shed pollen to-morrow.  See 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 16, 1856 (“Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously.”); April 17, 1855 (“The flowers of the common elm at Lee’s are now loose and dangling, apparently well out a day or two in advance of Cheney’s, but I see no pollen. ”)


I hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe' of a fish hawk , and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. See April 6, 1859 ("A fish hawk sails down the river, from time to time almost stationary one hundred feet above the water, notwithstanding the very strong wind.”); April 14, 1852 ("The streams break up; the ice goes to the sea. Then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey.”) April 25, 1858 (“ I hear the phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe, the sharp whistling note, of a fish hawk. . . . There is about half a second between each note, and he utters them either while perched or while flying. He shows a great proportion of wing and some white on back. The wings are much curved. He sails along some eighty feet above the water’s edge, looking for fish, and alights again quite near. I see him an hour afterward about the same spot.”)See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau The Osprey (Fish Hawk)

A small hawk flies swiftly past on the side of the hill, swift and low, apparently the same as that of April 3d, a deep rusty brown. See April 3, 1859 ("Near to the pond I see a small hawk, larger than a pigeon hawk, fly past, — a deep brown with a light spot on the side. I think it probable it was a sharp-shinned hawk.”) See also See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the sharp-shinned hawk.

I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day. See April 7, 1858 ("Snipes rise two or three times as I go over the meadow"); see also April 6, 1854 ("Hear the snipe over the meadows this evening."); April 9, 1853 ("Hear the snipe a short time at early starlight"); April 9, 1855 ("Some twenty minutes after sundown I hear the first booming of a snipe.") and A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: the Snipe

Stone fruit II

March 28. 

P. M. — Paddle to the Bedford line. 

It is now high time to look for arrowheads, etc. I spend many hours every spring gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been plowed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. 

The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil. As much ground is turned up in a day by the plow as Indian implements could not have turned over in a month, and my eyes rest on the evidences of an aboriginal life which passed here a thousand years ago perchance. 

Especially if the knolls in the meadows are washed by a freshet where they have been plowed the previous fall, the soil will be taken away lower down and the stones left, — the arrow heads, etc., and soapstone pottery amid them, — some what as gold is washed in a dish or torn. 

I landed on two spots this afternoon and picked up a dozen arrowheads. It is one of the regular pursuits of the spring. As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travellers of adventures, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes round again. 

So I help my self to live worthily, and loving my life as I should. 

It is a good collyrium to look on the bare earth, — to pore over it so much, getting strength to all your senses, like Antaeus. If I did not find arrowheads, I might, per chance, begin to pick up crockery and fragments of pipes, — the relics of a more recent man. Indeed, you can hardly name a more innocent or wholesome entertainment. As I am thus engaged, I hear the rumble of the bowling-alley's thunder, which has be gun again in the village. It comes before the earliest natural thunder. But what its lightning is, and what atmospheres it purifies, I do not know. Or I might collect the various bones which I come across. They would make a museum that would delight some Owen at last, and what a text they might furnish me for a course of lectures on human life or the like! I might spend my days collecting the fragments of pipes until I found enough, after all my search, to compose one perfect pipe when laid together. 

I have not decided whether I had better publish my experience in searching for arrowheads in three volumes, with plates and an index, or try to compress it into one. These durable implements seem to have been suggested to the Indian mechanic with a view to my entertainment in a succeeding period. After all the labor expended on it, the bolt may have been shot but once perchance, and the shaft which was devoted to it decayed, and there lay the arrowhead, sinking into the ground, awaiting me.

They lie all over the hills with like expectation, and in due time the husbandman is sent, and, tempted by the promise of corn or rye, he plows the land and turns them up to my view. 

Many as I have found, methinks the last one gives me about the same delight that the first did.

 Some time or other, you would say, it had rained arrowheads, for they lie all over the surface of America. 

You may have your peculiar tastes. Certain localities in your town may seem from association unattractive and uninhabitable to you. You may wonder that the land bears any money value there, and pity some poor fellow who is said to survive in that neighborhood. 

But plow up a new field there, and you will find the omnipresent arrow-points strewn over it, and it will appear that the red man, with other tastes and associations, lived there too. 

No matter how far from the modern road or meeting-house, no matter how near. 

They lie in the meeting-house cellar, and they lie in the distant cow-pasture. 

And some collections which were made a century ago by the curious like myself have been dispersed again, and they are still as good as new. 

You cannot tell the third-hand ones (for they are all second-hand) from the others, such is their persistent out-of-door durability; for they were chiefly made to be lost. 

They are sown, like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. 

Like the dragon's teeth which bore a crop of soldiers, these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. 

It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. 

His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave or under a pyramid. No disgusting mummy, but a clean stone, the best symbol or letter that could have been transmitted to me. 

The Red Man, his mark 

At every step I see it, and I can easily supply the "Tahatawan" or 'Mantatuket " that might have been written if he had had a clerk. 

It is no single inscription on a particular rock, but a footprint — rather a mind-print — left everywhere, and altogether illegible. No vandals, however vandalic in their disposition, can be so industrious as to destroy them. 

Time will soon destroy the works of famous painters and sculptors, but the Indian arrowhead will balk his efforts and Eternity will have to come to his aid.

They are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts, forever reminding me of the mind that shaped them.

 I would fain know that I am treading in the tracks of human game, — that I am on the trail of mind, — and these little reminders never fail to set me right. When I see these signs I know that the subtle spirits that made them are not far off, into whatever form transmuted. What if you do plow and hoe amid them, and swear that not one stone shall be left upon another ? They are only the less like to break in that case. When you turn up one layer you bury another so much the more securely. They are at peace with rust. This arrow-headed character promises to outlast all others. The larger pestles and axes may, perchance, grow scarce and be broken, but the arrowhead shall, perhaps, never cease to wing its way through the ages to eternity. 

It was originally winged for but a short flight, but it still, to my mind's eye, wings its way through the ages, bearing a message from the hand that shot it. Myriads of arrow-points lie sleeping in the skin of the revolving earth, while meteors revolve in space. The footprint, the mind-print of the oldest men. 

When some Vandal chieftain has razed to the earth the British Museum, and, perchance, the winged bulls from Nineveh shall have lost most if not all of their features, the arrowheads which the museum contains will, perhaps, find themselves at home again in familiar dust, and resume their shining in new springs upon the bared surface of the earth then, to be picked up for the thousandth time by the shepherd or savage that may be wandering there, and once more suggest their story to him. Indifferent they to British Museums, and, no doubt, Nineveh bulls are old acquaintances of theirs, for they have camped on the plains of Mesopotamia, too, and were buried with the winged bulls. 

They cannot be said to be lost nor found. Surely their use was not so much to bear its fate to some bird or quadruped, or man, as it was to lie here near the surface of the earth for a perpetual reminder to the generations that come after. As for museums, I think  it is better to let Nature take care of our antiquities. These are our antiquities, and they are cleaner to think of than the rubbish of the Tower of London, and they are a more ancient armor than is there. It is a re commendation that they are so inobvious, — that they occur only to the eye and thought that chances to be directed toward them. When you pick up an arrowhead and put it in your pocket, it may say : 

"Eh, you think you have got me, do you ? But I shall wear a hole in your pocket at last, or if you put me in your cabinet, your heir or great-grandson will forget me or throw me out the window directly, or when the house falls I shall drop into the cellar, and there I shall lie quite at home again. Ready to be found again, eh ? Perhaps some new red man that is to come will fit me to a shaft and make me do his bidding for a bow-shot. What reck I ?" 

As we were paddling over the Great Meadows, I saw at a distance, high in the air above the middle of the meadow, a very compact flock of blackbirds advancing against the sun. Though there were more than a hundred, they did not appear to occupy more than six feet in breadth, but the whole flock was dashing first to the right and then to the left. When advancing straight toward me and the sun, they made but little impression on the eye, — so many fine dark points merely, seen against the sky, — but as often as they wheeled to the right or left, displaying their wings flat wise and the whole length of their bodies, they were a very conspicuous black mass. This fluctuation in the amount of dark surface was a very pleasing phenomenon. It reminded me [of] those blinds whose sashes [sic] ting nearly all the light and now entirely excluding it; so the flock of blackbirds opened and shut. But at length they suddenly spread out and dispersed, some flying off this way, and others that, as, when a wave strikes against a cliff, it is dashed upward and lost in fine spray. So they lost their compactness and impetus and broke up suddenly in mid-air. 

We see eight geese floating afar in the middle of the meadow, at least half a mile off, plainly (with glass) much larger than the ducks in their neighborhood and the white on their heads very distinct. When at length they arise and fly off northward, their peculiar heavy undulating wings, blue-heron-like and unlike any duck, are very noticeable. 

The black, sheldrake, etc., move their wings rapidly, and remind you of paddle-wheel steamers. Methinks the wings of the black duck appear to be set very far back when it is flying. The meadows, which are still covered far and wide, are quite alive with black ducks. 

When walking about on the low east shore at the Bedford bound, I heard a faint honk, and looked around over the water with my glass, thinking it came from that side or perhaps from a farmyard in that direction. I soon heard it again, and at last we detected a great flock passing over, quite on the other side of us and pretty high up. From time to time one of the company uttered a short note, that peculiarly metallic, clangorous sound. These were in a single undulating line, and, as usual, one or two were from time to time crowded out of the line, apparently by the crowding of those in the rear, and were flying on one side and trying to recover their places, but at last a second short line was formed, meeting the long one at the usual angle and making a figure somewhat like a hay-hook. I suspect it will be found that there is really some advantage in large birds of passage flying in the wedge form and cleaving their way through the air, — that they really do overcome its resistance best in this way, — and perchance the direction and strength of the wind determine the comparative length of the two sides. 

The great gulls fly generally up or down the river valley, cutting off the bends of the river, and so do these geese. These fly sympathizing with the river, — a stream in the air, soon lost in the distant sky. 

We see these geese swimming and flying at midday and when it is perfectly fair. 

If you scan the horizon at this season of the year you are very likely to detect a small flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undulating line of migrating geese against the sky. 

Perhaps it is this easterly wind which brings geese, as it did on the 24th. 

Ball's Hill, with its withered oak leaves and its pines, looks very fair to-day, a mile and a half off across the water, through a very thin varnish or haze. It reminds me of the isle which was called up from the bottom of the sea, which was given to Apollo. 

How charming the contrast of land and water, especially a temporary island in the flood, with its new and tender shores of waving outline, so withdrawn yet habitable, above all if it rises into a hill high above the water and contrasting with it the more, and if that hill is wooded, suggesting wildness ! 

Our vernal lakes have a beauty to my mind which they would not possess if they were more permanent. Everything is in rapid flux here, suggesting that Nature is alive to her extremities and superficies. To-day we sail swiftly on dark rolling waves or paddle over a sea as smooth as a mirror, unable to touch the bottom, where mowers work and hide their jugs in August; coasting the edge of maple swamps, where alder tassels and white maple flowers are kissing the tide that has risen to meet them. 

But this particular phase of beauty is fleeting. Nature has so many shows for us she cannot afford to give much time to this. In a few days, perchance, these lakes will have all run away to the sea. 

Such are the pictures which she paints. When we look at our masterpieces we see only dead paint and its vehicle, which suggests no liquid life rapidly flowing off from beneath. In the former case — in Nature — it is constant surprise and novelty. In many arrangements there is a wearisome monotony. We know too well what [we] shall have for our Saturday's dinner, but each day's feast in Nature's year is a surprise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirits. She has arranged such an order of feasts as never tires. Her motive is not economy but satisfaction. 

As we sweep past the north end of Poplar Hill, with a sand-hole in it, its now dryish, pale-brown mottled sward clothing its rounded slope, which was lately saturated with moisture, presents very agreeable hues. In this light, in fair weather, the patches of now dull- greenish mosses contrast just regularly enough with the pale-brown grass. It is like some rich but modest- colored Kidderminster carpet, or rather the skin of a monster python tacked to the hillside and stuffed with earth. 


These earth colors, methinks, are never so fair as in the spring. Now the green mosses and lichens contrast with the brown grass, but ere long the surface will be uniformly green. I suspect that we are more amused by the effects of color in the skin of the earth now than in summer. Like the skin of a python, greenish and brown, a fit coat for it to creep over the earth and be concealed in. Or like the skin of a pard, the great leopard mother that Nature is, where she lies at length, exposing her flanks to the sun. I feel as if I could land to stroke and kiss the very sward, it is so fair. It is homely and domestic to my eyes like the rug that lies before my hearth-side. Such ottomans and divans are spread for us to recline on. Nor are these colors mere thin superficial figures, vehicles for paint, but wonderful living growths, — these lichens, to the study of which learned men have devoted their lives, — and libraries have been written about them. The earth lies out now like a leopard, drying her lichen and moss spotted skin in the sun, her sleek and variegated hide. I know that the few raw spots will heal over. Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man's loaf.  The bright tints are pies and cakes, good only for October feasts, which would make us sick if eaten every day. 

One side of each wave and ripple is dark and the other light blue, reflecting the sky, — as I look down on them from my boat, — and these colors (?) combined produce a dark blue at a distance. These blue spaces ever remind me of the blue in the iridescence produced by oily matter on the surface, for you are slow to regard it as a reflection of the sky. The rippling undulating surface over which you glide is like a changeable blue silk garment. 

Here, where in August the bittern booms in the grass, and mowers march en echelon and whet their scythes and crunch  the ripe wool-grass, raised now a  few feet, you scud before the wind in your tight bark and listen to the surge (or sough ?) of the great waves sporting around you, while you hold the steering-oar and your mast bends to the gale and you stow all your ballast to windward. The crisped sound of surging waves that rock you, that ceaseless roll and gambol, and ever and anon break into your boat. 

Deep lie the seeds of the rhexia now, absorbing wet from the flood, but in a few months this mile-wide lake will have gone to the other side of the globe; and the tender rhexia will lift its head on the drifted hum mocks in dense patches, bright and scarlet as a flame, — such succession have we here, — where the wild goose and countless wild ducks have floated and dived above them. So Nature condenses her matter. She is a thousand thick. So many crops the same surface bears. 

Undoubtedly the geese fly more numerously over rivers which, like ours, flow northeasterly, — are more at home with the water under them. Each flock runs the gantlet of a thousand gunners, and when you see them steer off from you and your boat you may remember how great their experience in such matters may be, how many such boats and gunners they have seen and avoided between here and Mexico, and even now, perchance (though you, low plodding, little dream it), they see one or two more lying in wait ahead. They have an experienced ranger of the air for their guide. The echo of one gun hardly dies away before they see another pointed at them. How many bullets or smaller shot have sped in vain toward their ranks! Ducks fly more irregularly and shorter distances at a time. The geese rest in fair weather by day only in the midst of our broadest meadow or pond. So they go, anxious and earnest to hide their nests under the pole. 

The gulls seem used to boats and sails and will often fly quite near without manifesting alarm.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1859

See November 2, 1852 (“The pond, dark before, was now a glorious and indescribable blue, mixed with dark, perhaps the opposite side of the wave, a sort of changeable or watered-silk blue, more cerulean if possible than the sky itself, which was now seen overhead. It required a certain division of the sight, however, to discern this. Like the colors on a steel sword-blade.”); April 9, 1859 (“ You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. Looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look dark-blue, almost black. Standing low and more opposite to the sun, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at. Water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blue Waters in Spring

Each found arrow-point 

wings its way through the ages, 

bearing a message. 

It is a stone fruit,

mind-print of the oldest men.

Each one yields a thought.