The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
East window at noon –
the sound of crickets and a
distant piano.
By some fortunate
circumstance I am attuned
to the universe.
August 3, 1852
Bubbles trace a boat
that passed half an hour before –
our sluggish river.
Cornus alternifolia berries ripe . . . in open cymes, dull-blue, somewhat depressed globular, tipped with the persistent styles, yet already, as usual, mostly fallen. But handsomer far are the pretty (bare) red peduncles and pedicels, like fairy fingers spread. August 3, 1856
They make a show at a distance of a dozen rods even. Something light and open about this tree, but a sort of witch's tree nevertheless. August 3, 1856
High blackberries begin to be ripe. August 3, 1859
The sium and Hypericum Sarothra appears to be out. The central umbel of the sium going or gone to seed. August 3, 1852
Savory-leaved aster. August 3, 1858
Our river is so sluggish and smooth that sometimes I can trace a boat that has passed half an hour before, by the bubbles on its surface, which have not burst. August 3, 1856
Many farmers are now troubled to get their meadow-hay since the rise of the river . August 3, 1853
As I wade through the middle of the meadows in sedge up to my middle and look afar . . . toward the distant mainland, I feel a little as if caught by a rising tide on flats far from the shore. I am, as it were, cast away in the midst of the sea. It is a level sea of waving and rustling sedge about me. The grassy sea. August 3, 1859
Saw two hay carts and teams cross the shallow part of the river in front of N. Barrett's, empty, to the Great Meadows. An interesting sight. The Great Meadows alive with farmers getting their hay. I could count four or five great loads already loaded in different parts. August 3, 1852
Think what the farmer gets with his hay, — what his river-meadow hay consists of, — how much of fern and osier and sweet-gale and Polygonum hydropiperoides and rhexia (I trust the cattle love the scent of it as well as I) and lysimachia, etc., etc., and rue, and sium and cicuta. In a meadow now being mown I see that the ferns and small osiers are as thick as the grass. August 3, 1856
The haymakers are quite busy on the Great Meadows, it being drier than usual. It being remote from public view, some of them work in their shirts or half naked. August 3, 1859
At the east window. A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. August 3, 1852
I am affected. What coloring variously fair and intense our life admits of! August 3, 1852
This enchantment is no delusion. . . .it is a fact such as what we call our actual existence. August 3, 1852
It is its truth and reality that affect me. A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. August 3, 1852
By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe. August 3, 1852
A splendid entire rainbow after a slight shower, with two reflections of it . . . too remarkable to be remarked on. August 3, 1852
We landed opposite his door at about four in the afternoon, having come some forty miles this day . . . This was the last that I saw of Joe Polis. We took the last train, and reached Bangor that night. August 3, 1857 (The Maine Woods)
August 3, 2015
April 2, 1854 ("Sitting on the rail over the brook, I hear something which reminds me of the song of the robin in rainy days in past springs.")
April 5, 1860 ("I hear, or think that I hear, a very faint distant ring of toads, which, though I walk and walk all the afternoon, I never come nearer to.")
April 16, 1852 ("[Concord River is a] succession of bays . . . a chain of lakes,. . . There is just stream enough for a flow of thought; that is all. . . . Many a foreigner who has come to this town has worked for years on its banks without discovering which way the river runs.") April 19, 1856 ("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.") April 25, 1859 ("Methinks I hear . . . a very faint, low ringing of toads, as if distant and just begun. It is an indistinct undertone, and I am far from sure that I hear anything. It may be all imagination.") May 19, 1856 ("I am always thus affected when I hear in the fields any singing or instrumental music at the end of the day.")
May 23, 1854 ("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.”) June 14, 1851 ("How sweet and encouraging it is to hear the sound of some artificial music from the midst of woods or from the top of a hill at night, borne on the breeze from some distant farmhouse, — the human voice or a flute!")
June 16, 1852("A flute from some villager. How rare among men so fit a thing as the sound of a flute at evening!")
June 18, 1852 ("I hear a man playing a clarionet far off.") June 22, 1851 ("The world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. I awake to its music with the calmness of a lake when there is not a breath of wind.")
June 25, 1852 (“Now his day's work is done, the laborer plays his flute, — only possible at this hour.") July 4, 1860 ("We are wading and navigating at present in a sort of sea of grass, which yields and undulates under the wind like water") July 8, 1852 ("The Sium latifolium, water parsnip, — except that the calyx-leaves are minute and the fruit ribbed, — close to the edge of the river.")
July 13, 1857 ("I hear before I start the distant mutterings of thunder in the northwest, though I see no cloud.") July 20, 1853 ("The light of the moon is a cold, almost frosty light, white on the ground. There are a few fireflies about. Green, their light looks sometimes, and crickets are heard. You are pretty sure also to hear some human music, vocal or instrumental, far or near.")
July 26, 1854 ("Alternate cornel berries a day or two.")
July 21, 1856 ("The small hypericums are open only in the forenoon.") July 31, 1856 ("I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years.") August 1, 1852 ("The berries of what I have called the alternate-leaved cornel are now ripe, a very dark blue - blue-black - and round, but dropping off prematurely, leaving handsome red cymes, which adorn the trees from a distance.")
August 2, 1854 ("The crickets on the causeway make a steady creak.")
August 4, 1851 ("As my eye rests on the blossom of the meadow-sweet in a hedge, I hear the note of a cricket, and am penetrated with the sense of autumn. I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere cut and housed, though I am drunk with the season's wine.")
August 4, 1856 ("Have heard the alder cricket some days. The turning-point is reached.")August 4, 1856 ("Here and there the high blackberry, just beginning, towers over all.") August 5, 1851 ("I hear now from Bear Garden Hill — I rarely walk by moonlight without hearing — the sound of a flute, or a horn, or a human voice") August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek name for the world, - Kosmos, or beauty") 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.") 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 11, 1858 ("It reminds me of the lateness of the season.")
August 12, 1856 (“The sarothra — as well as small hypericums generally — has a lemon scent.”) August 18, 1856 ("I hear the steady . . . shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail.") August 19, 1856 ("The small hypericums have a peculiar smart, somewhat lemon-like fragrance, but bee-like.") August 20, 1851 ("Sium lineare, a kind of water-parsnip, whose blossom resembles the Cicuta maculata.")
August 23, 1853 ("Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end") August 24, 1858 ("Looking up and down the river this sunny, breezy afternoon, men busily haying
in gangs of four or five, revealed by their white shirts, some two miles below toward Carlisle Bridge,
and others still further up the stream up to their shouldersin the grassy sea,")
August 28, 1852 ("The berries of the alternate leaved cornel have dropped off mostly.") August 30, 1856("The sarothra is now apparently in prime on the Great Fields, and comes near being open now, at 3 p. m. Bruised, it has the fragrance of sorrel and lemon, rather pungent or stinging, like a bee.”) August 30, 1857 ("The flower of Cicuta maculata smells like the leaves of the golden senecio..")
Walden ("Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.")September 2, 1859 ("The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, i.e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides.")
September 19, 1852 ("The red capsules of the sarothra.")
September 23, 1852 ("The sarothra in bloom")
November 20, 1851 ("It is often said that melody can be heard farther than noise, and the finest melody farther than the coarsest. I think there is truth in this, and that accordingly those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more.") December 5, 1856 (" I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too");
December 31, 1853 ("I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road. I hear it, and I realize and see clearly what at other times I only dimly remember. . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”) January 13, 1857 ("I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived.")
January 24, 1852 ("I hear the tones of my sister's piano below. It reminds me of strains which once I heard more frequently, when, possessed with the inaudible rhythm, I sought my chamber in the cold and commụned with my own thoughts")
August 3, 2015
If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
you will have occasion to repeat it
with illustrations the next,
and the season and life itself is prolonged.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2026
