A botanist in pursuit of grasses tramples down oaks in his walk.

September 9. 

P. M. — To Waban Cliff. 

A very hot day, — 90°, as I hear. Yesterday was hot, too. 

Now it is about time to gather elder-berries. 

Many Viola cucullata have opened again. 

What is that short squeaking note heard from time to time from amid the weeds on the west side the river at Hubbard’s Bath? 

There are broad patches, sometimes of several acres, on the edge of the meadow, where it is wettest and weediest, which the farmers do not mow. There especially stands the brown-headed wool-grass. There are small tracts still, as it were, in their primitive condition, — wild tracts where the bittern rises and where, no doubt, the meadow-hen lurks.

(Was it the note of the last I heard?)

Heard a short plover-like note from a bird flying high across the river. 

Watched a little dipper some ten rods off with my glass, but I could see no white on the breast. It was all black and brownish, and head not enlarged. Who knows how many little dippers are sailing and sedulously diving now along the edge of the pickerel-weed and the button-bushes on our river, unsuspected by most? 

This hot September afternoon all may be quiet amid the weeds, but the dipper, and the bittern, and the yellow legs, and the blue heron, and the rail are silently feeding there. At length the walker who sits meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food along their edge: Yet ordinary eyes might range up and down the river all day and never detect its small black head above the water. 

It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants, as, for example, Juncaceoa and Gramineoe; even; i. e., I find that when I am looking for the former, I do not see the latter in their midst. 

How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He as it were tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk. 

Bidens cernua, how long?


The river is about at its height to-day or yesterday. Much bur-reed and heart-leaf is floating and washed up, apparently the first important contribution to the river wrack. The sportsman will paddle a boat now five or six miles, and wade in water up to his knees, being out all day without his dinner, and think himself amply compensated if he bags two or three yellow-legs. The most persistent and sacrificing endeavors are necessary to success in any direction. 

Woodbine scarlet, like a brilliant scarf on high, wrapped around the stem of a green tree. By a blush betrays where it hangs upon an elm. 

I find an abundance of beaked hazelnuts at Blackberry Steep, one to three burs together, but, gathering them, I get my fingers full of fine shining bristles, while the common hazel burs are either smooth or covered with a softer glandular down; i. e., its horns are brazen tipped. 

Under the rocks near the slippery elm, the Gymnostichum Hystrix, bottle-brush grass, hedgehog grass, long done. 

Rice says he saw two meadow-hens when getting his hay in Sudbury some two months ago, and that they breed there. They kept up a peculiar note. My egg (named Sept. 7th) was undoubtedly a meadow-hen’s Rallus Virginiana. 

R. says that he has caught pigeons which had ripe grapes in their crops long before any were ripe here, and that they came from the south west. 

We live in the same world with the Orientals, far off as they may seem. Nature is the same here to a chemist’s tests. 

The weeping willow (Salix Babylonica) will grow here. The peach, too, has been transplanted, and is agreeable to our palates. So are their poetry and philosophy near and agreeable to us.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 9, 1858

It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. See  November 18 1851 ("A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going.".); September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye."); March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye."); June 14, 1853 (". . . you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.”); December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”); April 28, 1856 ("Again, as so many times, I am reminded of the advantage to the poet, and philosopher, and naturalist, and whomsoever, of pursuing from time to time some other business than his chosen one, — seeing with the side of the eye.") July 2, 1857 (“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i. e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”); October 13, 1857 (“We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there.”); November 4, 1858 ("Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray (continued) as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them”) Autumnal tints.("Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them”)

Many Viola cucullata have opened again. See September 4, 1856 (“Viola pedata again.”); September 10, 1857 ("I see lambkill ready to bloom a second time.”); September 16, 1852 (“Some birds, like some flowers, begin to sing again in the fall.”); and note to October 10, 1856 ("Indian summer itself is a similar renewal of the year, with the faint warbling of birds and second blossoming of flowers.”)

There are broad patches, sometimes of several acres, on the edge of the meadow, where it is wettest and weediest, which the farmers do not mow. There are small tracts still, as it were, in their primitive condition, — wild tracts where the bittern rises and where, no doubt, the meadow-hen lurks. See Walden (“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”); Walking (“A town is saved by the woods and swamps that surround it.”); January 22, 1852 (“I see, one mile to two miles distant on all sides from my window, the woods, which still encircle our New England towns. They still bound almost every view. They have been driven off only so far. Where still wild creatures haunt. How long will these last?”)

When one kind of life goes, another comes. The same warm and placid day calls out men and butterflies.

March 28
P. M. — To Cliffs.

After a cloudy morning, a warm and pleasant afternoon. I hear that a few geese were seen this morning.

Israel Rice says that he heard two brown thrashers sing this morning! Is sure because he has kept the bird in a cage. I can’t believe it.

I go down the railroad, turning off in the cut. I notice the hazel stigmas in the warm hollow on the right there, just beginning to peep forth. This is an unobserved but very pretty and interesting evidence of the progress of the season. I should not have noticed it if I had not carefully examined the fertile buds. It is like a crimson star first dimly detected in the twilight. The warmth of the day, in this sunny hollow above the withered sedge, has caused the stigmas to show their lips through their scaly shield. They do not project more than the thirtieth of an inch, some not the sixtieth. The staminate catkins are also considerably loosened. Just as the turtles put forth their heads, so these put forth their stigmas in the spring. How many accurate thermometers there are on every hill and in every valley: Measure the length of the hazel stigmas, and you can tell how much warmth there has been this spring. How fitly and exactly any season of the year may be described by indicating the condition of some flower! 

I go by the springs toward the epigaea. 

It is a fine warm day with a slight haziness. It is pleasant to sit outdoors now, and, it being Sunday, neighbors walk about or stand talking in the sun, looking at and scratching the dry earth, which they are glad to see and smell again. 

In the sunny epigaea wood I start up two Vanessa Antiopa, which flutter about over the dry leaves be fore, and are evidently attracted toward me, settling at last within a few feet. The same warm and placid day calls out men and butterflies. 

It is surprising that men can be divided into those who lead an indoor and those who lead an outdoor life, as if birds and quadrupeds were to be divided into those that lived a within nest or burrow life and [those] that lived without their nests and holes chiefly. How many of our troubles are house-bred! He lives an out door life; i.e., he is not squatted behind the shield of a door, he does not keep himself tubbed. It is such a questionable phrase as an “honest man,” or the “naked eye,” as if the eye which is not covered with a spy glass should properly be called naked.

From Wheeler's plowed field on the top of Fair Haven Hill, I look toward Fair Haven Pond, now quite smooth. There is not a duck nor a gull to be seen on it. I can hardly believe that it was so alive with them yesterday. Apparently they improve this warm and pleasant day, with little or no wind, to continue their journey northward. The strong and cold northwest wind of about a week past has probably detained them. Knowing that the meadows and ponds were swarming with ducks yesterday, you go forth this particularly pleasant and still day to see them at your leisure, but find that they are all gone. No doubt there are some left, and many more will soon come with the April rains. It is a wild life that is associated with stormy and blustering weather. When the invalid comes forth on his cane, and misses improve the pleasant air to look for signs of vegetation, that wild life has withdrawn itself. 

But when one kind of life goes, another comes. This plowed land on the top of the hill — and all other fields as far as I observe — is covered with cobwebs, which every few inches are stretched from root to root or clod to clod, gleaming and waving in the sun, the light flashing along them as they wave in the wind. How much insect life and activity connected with this peculiar state of the atmosphere these imply! Yet I do not notice a spider. Small cottony films are continually settling down or blown along through the air. [A gossamer day. I see them also for a week after.] Does not this gossamer answer to that of the fall? They must have sprung to with one consent last night or this morning and bent new cables to the clods and stubble all over this part of the world. 

The little fuzzy gnats, too, are in swarms in the air, peopling that uncrowded space. They are not confined by any fence. Already the distant forest is streaked with lines of thicker and whiter haze over the successive valleys. 

Walden is open. When? On the 20th it was pretty solid. C. sees a very little ice in it to-day, but probably it gets entirely free to-night.

Fair Haven Pond is open.

[This and Flint's and Walden all open together this year, the latter was so thinly frozen! (For C. says Flint's and Walden were each a third open on the 25th.)]

Sitting on the top of the Cliffs, I look through my glass at the smooth river and see the long forked ripple made by a musquash swimming along over the  meadow. While I sit on these warm rocks, turning my glass toward the mountains, I can see the sun reflected from the rocks on Monadnock, and I know that it would be pleasant to be there too to-day as well as here. I see, too, warm and cosy seats on the rocks, where the flies are buzzing, and probably some walker is enjoying the prospect. 

From this hilltop I overlook, again bare of snow, putting on a warm, hazy spring face, this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it, as it were of more costly manufacture. On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see. I see those familiar features, that large type, with which all my life is associated, unchanged. 

Cleaning out the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I find a small frog, apparently a bullfrog, just come forth, which must have wintered in the mud there. There is very little mud, however, and the rill never runs more than four or five rods before it is soaked up, and the whole spring often dries up in the summer. It seems, then, that two or three frogs, the sole inhabitants of so small a spring, will bury them selves at its head. A few frogs will be buried at the puniest spring-head. 

Coming home, I hear the croaking frogs in the pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove. It is sufficiently warm for them at last. 

Near the sand path above Potter's mud-hole I find what I should call twenty and more mud turtles’ eggs close together, which appear to have been dug from a hole close by last year. They are all broken or cracked and more or less indented and depressed, and they look remarkably like my pigeon's egg fungi, a dirty white covered thickly with a pure white roughness, which through a glass is seen to be oftenest in the form of minute but regular rosettes of a very pure white substance. If these are turtles' eggs, –and there is no stem mark of a fungus, – it is remarkable that they should thus come to resemble so closely another natural product, the fungus.

The first lark of the 23d sailed through the meadow with that peculiar prolonged chipping or twittering sound, perhaps sharp clucking.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1858

I start up two Vanessa Antiopa, which flutter about over the dry leaves before, and are evidently attracted toward me, settling at last within a few feet. See March 28, 1857 ("The broad buff edge of the Vanessa Antiopa’s wings harmonizes with the russet ground it flutters over, and as it stands concealed in the winter, with its wings folded above its back, in a cleft in the rocks, the gray brown under side of its wings prevents its being distinguished from the rocks themselves.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Buff-edged Butterfly

Coming home, I hear the croaking frogs in the pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove. It is sufficiently warm for them at last. See March 26, 1860 ("The wood frog may be heard March 15, as this year, or not till April 13, as in’56, — twenty-nine days."); March 15, 1860 ("Am surprised to hear, from the pool behind Lee's Cliff, the croaking of the wood frog. . . . How suddenly they awake! yesterday, as it were, asleep and dormant, to-day as lively as ever they are. The awakening of the leafy woodland pools.."); March 23, 1859 ("I hear a single croak from a wood frog. . . . Thus we sit on that rock, hear the first wood frog's croak"); March 24, 1859 (" Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak? "); March 26, 1857 ("As I go through the woods by Andromeda Ponds, though it is rather cool and windy in exposed places, I hear a faint, stertorous croak from a frog in the open swamp; at first one faint note only, which I could not be sure that I had heard, but, after listening long, one or two more suddenly croaked in confirmation of my faith, and all was silent again"); March 27, 1853 ("Tried to see the faint-croaking frogs at J. P. Brown's Pond in the woods. They are remarkably timid and shy; had their noses and eyes out, croaking, but all ceased, dove, and concealed themselves, before I got within a rod of the shore."); March 30, 1858 ("Later, in a pool behind Lee's Cliff, I hear them, – the waking up of the leafy pools. . . . I do not remember that I ever hear this frog in the river or ponds. They seem to be an early frog, peculiar to pools and small ponds in the woods and fields.")

The only hazel I saw in Maine

July 27

Monday. 

There were some yellow lilies (Nuphar), Scutellaria galericulata, clematis (abundant), sweet-gale, "great smilacina" (did I mean S. racemosa?), and beaked hazel, the only hazel I saw in Maine.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 27, 1857

See The Maine Woods ("Monday, July 27. Having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the Indian always carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again descending the Caucomgomoc, and turning northeasterly up the Umbazookskus. . . . Having paddled several miles up the Umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow, and we landed to get a black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. . . .Having poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over Umbazookskus Lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven o'clock in the forenoon. . . .We crossed the southeast end of the lake to the carry into Mud Pond. Umbazookskus Lake is the head of the Penobscot in this direction, and Mud Pond is the nearest head of the Allegash, one of the chief sources of the St. John. . . . Mud Pond is about halfway from Umbazookskus to Chamberlain Lake, into which it empties, and to which we were bound. . . . After a long while my companion came back, and the Indian with him. We had taken the wrong road, and the Indian had lost us. . . .We then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. . . .and, going back for his bag, my companion once lost his way and came back without it.. . . As I sat waiting for him, it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. Therefore, as I could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at night fall, I proposed that I should push through with what speed I could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the Indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companion's bag. . . . If he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, . . .We had come out on a point extending into . . .Chamberlain Lake, west of the outlet of Mud Pond, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees. . . . 

In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness. . . This of the loon I do not mean its laugh , but its looning , is a long - drawn call , as it were , sometimes singularly human to my ear , hoo - hoo - ooooo , like the hallooing of a man on a very high key , having thrown his voice into his head . I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils , half awake at ten at night , suggesting my affinity to the loon ; as if its language were but a dialect of my own , after all . Formerly , when lying awake at midnight in those woods , I had listened to hear some words or sylla- bles of their language , but it chanced that I listened in vain until I heard the cry of the loon . I have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town , but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery.

 I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low- flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.")

Yellow lilies. See July 27, 1856 ("The yellow lilies stand up seven or eight inches above the water")

In the middle of the night . . .we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. See June twenty-four two thousand two ("across the dusky lake / the voice of a loon / penetrates lost time")

far over the lake

in the middle of the night

the voice of the loon

July 27, 1857 

(The Maine Woods)

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  July 27, 1857

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt-570727

The beaked hazel below the little pine at Blackberry Steep.

April 18.

P. M. — To Conantum. 

Hear the huckleberry-bird, also the seringo. 

The beaked hazel, if that is one just below the little pine at Blackberry Steep, is considerably later than the common, for I cannot get a whole twig fully out, though the common is too far gone to gather there. The catkins, too, are shorter.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 18, 1857

Hear the huckleberry-bird. See  April 18, 1855 ("The rush sparrows tinkle now at 3 P. M. far over the bushes, and hylodes are peeping in a distant pool."); .April 18, 1859 ("Hear a field sparrow."); April 15, 1856 ("I hear the note of the Fringilla juncorum (huckleberry-bird) from the plains beyond. "); April 27, 1852 ("Heard the field or rush sparrow this morning (Fringilla juncorum), George Minott's "huckleberry-bird.""); June 10, 1856 ("I hear the huckleberry-bird now add to its usual strain a-tea tea tea tea tea."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Field Sparrow (Fringilla juncorum)

. . .also the seringo. See April 22, 1856 ("The seringo also sits on a post, with a very distinct yellow line over the eye,and the rhythm of its strain is ker chick | ker che | ker-char—r-r-r-r | chick, the last two bars being the part chiefly heard."). See also note to June 26, 1856 (" saw, apparently, the F. Savanna near their nests (my seringo note), restlessly flitting about me from rock to rock within a rod. Distinctly yellow-browed and spotted breast, not like plate of passerina.")

The beaked hazel . . . is considerably later than the common . . .See April 9, 1854 (" The beaked hazel stigmas out; put it just after the common."') See also note to March 31, 1853 ("The catkins of the hazel are now trembling in the wind and much lengthened, showing yellowish and beginning to shed pollen."); and April 7, 1854 ("The hazel stigmas are well out and the catkins loose, but no pollen shed yet. "); April 13, 1855 ("The common hazel just out. It is perhaps the prettiest flower of the shrubs that have opened. . . . They know when to trust themselves to the weather."); April 11, 1856 ("The hazel sheds pollen to-day; some elsewhere possibly yesterday.")

I am surprised to find Walden completely open.

April 9.

Saw several more redpolls with their rich, glowing yellow breasts by the causeway sides. 

Saw a wren on the edge of Nathan Stow's wood and field, with some of the habits of a creeper, lurking along a fallen pine and birch, in and out in a restless manner with tail up, a snuff-colored bird with many white spots and a fine chirping note. 

The beaked hazel stigmas out; put it just after the common.

I am surprised to find Walden completely open. When did it open? According to all accounts, it must have been between the 6th and 9th. Fair Haven must have opened entirely the 5th or 6th, and Walden very nearly at the same time. This proves how steadily it has been melting, notwithstanding the severe cold of the last half of March; i. e., it is less affected by transient heat or cold than most ponds. 

The flowers have blossomed very suddenly this year as soon as the long cold spell was over, and almost all together. As yet the landscape generally wears its November russet.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 9, 1854

I am surprised to find Walden completely open. When did it open? See Walden ("In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53, the 23rd of March; in '54, about the 7th of April.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, Ice-out.

The flowers have blossomed very suddenly this year. See  April 28, 1852 ("This year, at least, one flower hardly precedes another, but as soon as the storms are over and pleasant weather comes, all blossom at once, having been retarded so long. This appears to be particularly true of the herbaceous flowers. How much does this happen every year?"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau the Earliest Flower.