All nature is a new impression every instant.

May 23. 

Sunday. Barn. - The distant woods are but the tassels of my eye.

Books are to be attended to as new sounds merely.

Most would be put to a sore trial if the reader should assume the attitude of a listener.

They are but a new note in the forest.

To our lonely, sober thought the earth is a wild unexplored. Wildness as of the jay and muskrat reigns over the great part of nature. The oven-bird and plover are heard in the horizon.

Here is a new book of heroes, come to me like the note of the chewink from over the fen, only over a deeper and wider fen.

The pines are unrelenting sifters of thought; nothing petty leaks through them.

Let me put my ear close, and hear the sough of this book, that I may know if any inspiration yet haunts it.

There is always a later edition of every book than the printer wots of, no matter how recently it was published.

All nature is a new impression every instant. 

May 23, 2020

The aspects of the most simple object are as various as the aspects of the most compound.

Observe the same sheet of water from different eminences.

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 23, 1841

When I have travelled a few miles I do not recognize the profile of the hills of my native village. See June 4, 1858 ("It is remarkable how, as you are leaving a mountain and looking back at it from time to time, it gradually gathers up its slopes and spurs to itself into a regular whole, and makes a new and total impression.")


All nature is a new impression every instant. See June 6, 1857 (“We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact”); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment,"); April 24, 1859 ("There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season")

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I drink at it; but while I drink

I see the sandy bottom and

detect how shallow it is.

Its thin current slides away,

but eternity remains.

I would drink deeper;

fish in the sky, whose bottom

is pebbly with stars.

I cannot count one.

I know not the first 

letter of the alphabet.

I have always been regretting that

I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Walden, Where I lived and what I lived for

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

The Library a wilderness of books.

March 16. 

Before sunrise. 

With what infinite and unwearied expectation and proclamation the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before! And the dogs bark still, and the thallus of lichens springs, so tenacious of life is nature. 

Spent the day in Cambridge Library. 

Walden is not yet melted round the edge. 

It is, perhaps, more suddenly warm this spring than usual. 

Mr. Bull thinks that the pine grosbeaks, which have been unusually numerous the past winter, have killed many branches of his elms by budding them, and that they will die and the wind bring them down, as heretofore. 

Saw a large flock of geese go over Cambridge and heard the robins in the College Yard. 

The Library a wilderness of books. 

Looking over books on Canada written within the last three hundred years, could see how one had been built upon another, each author consulting and referring to his predecessors. You could read most of them without changing your leg on the steps.

It is necessary to find out exactly what books to read on a given subject. Though there may be a thousand books written upon it, it is only important to read three or four; they will contain all that is essential, and a few pages will show which they are. Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand. 

I saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature's primitive wildernesses. 

The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. 

When I looked into Purchas's Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. 

Those old books suggested a  certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. 

Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1852

Saw a large flock of geese go over Cambridge and heard the robins in the College Yard. See March 14, 1854 ("From within the house at 5.30 p. m. I hear the loud honking of geese, throw up the window, and see a large flock in disordered harrow flying more directly north or even northwest than usual. Raw, thick, misty weather"). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; Geese Overhead

Walden is not yet melted round the edge.  See March 14, 1852 ("The ice on Walden has now for some days looked white like snow, the surface being softened by the sun.");  Journal, March 18, 1852("The pond is still very little melted around the shore.");  April 1, 1852 ("Walden is all white ice, but little melted about the shores."); April 14. 1852 (" Walden is only melted two or three rods from the north shore yet."); April 19, 1852 (" Walden is clear of ice. The ice left it yesterday, then, the 18th. ");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.")

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring.

February 25

When it snowed yesterday very large flakes, an inch in diameter, Aunt said, “They are picking geese.” This, it seems, is an old saying.

Heard Staples, Tuttle, E. Wood, N. Barrett, and others this morning at the post-office talking about the profit of milk-farming. The general conclusion seemed to be that it was less profitable than it was three years ago. Yet Staples thought he could name half a dozen who had done well. He named one. He thought he could name eight or ten who had paid off the mortgages on their farms by this means within a few years. Tuttle said he would give him a good supper if he would name three. Staples named only the one referred to above, David Buttrick, but he added, looking at Tuttle, “There is yourself. You know you came to town with nothing in your pocket but an old razor, a few pennies, and a damned dull jack-knife, and n’t used the razor so much.”  

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you,— know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse. 

I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street. I think that they are heard oftener and again at the approach of spring, just as the phoebe note of the chickadee is; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. 

Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year. 

P. M. —Up river on ice.

I see a handful of the scarlet Rosa Carolina hips in the crotch of a willow on some mud, a foot or more above the ice. They are partly eaten, and I think were placed there by a musquash. The rose bush, with a few hips on it, still stands in the ice within a few feet. Goodwin says he has seen their tracks eight or ten rods long to an apple tree near the water, where they have been for apples. 

Along edge of Staples’s meadow sprout-land, the young maples, some three years old, are stripped down, i. e. the lower branches for a foot or two, by the ice falling. This barks and wounds the young trees severely. 

The ice over the middle of the river is now alternately dark and whitish. I see the river beginning to show dark through the thinnest parts, in broad crescents convex up-stream, single or connected. 

A good book is not made in the cheap and offhand manner of many of our scientific reports, ushered in by the message of the President communicating it to Congress, and the order of Congress that so many thousand copies be printed, with the letters of instruction for the Secretary of the Interior (or rather exterior); the bulk of the book being a journal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, illustrated by photographs of the traveller’s footsteps across the plains and an admirable engraving of his native village as it appeared on leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the palaeontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there, the last illustrated by very finely executed engravings of some old broken shells picked up on the road. 

There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little. I mean the trappers. 

They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about. They go about their business in a stealthy manner for fear that any shall see out-of-the-way swamps and meadows and brooks to set or examine their traps for musquash or mink, and the owners of the land commonly know nothing of it. But, few as the trappers are here, it seems by Goodwin’s accounts that they steal one another’s traps.

All the criticism which I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints at Worcester on the 22d was that I assumed that my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, — that there are very few persons who do see much of nature.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1859

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. See August 23, 1853 ("Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring.”); Walden (“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say . . . Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”); and note to March 17, 1857 (“No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring”)

I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. See February 24, 1854 (“Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, — tit for tat, — on different keys, — a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud distinct gnah.”); March 5, 1859 ("Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it. . . . It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before I have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch. . . . This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark.");April 25, 1859 (" I hear still the what what what of a nuthatch, and, directly after, its ordinary winter note of gnah gnah, quite distinct. I think the former is its spring note or breeding-note.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: The Spring Note of the Nuthatch

I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. February 25, 1857 ("Goodwin says he saw a robin this morning.”); February 28, 1860 ("C. saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard's hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Robins in Spring

February 25. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 25  

Feel your pulse – measure

your health by your sympathy

with morning and spring.

If the first bluebird 

does not thrill you– the morning  

of your life is past.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Measure your health 

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 © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-590225

A time to see bird nests.

November 16.

A part of to-day and yesterday I have been making shelves for my Oriental books, which I hear to-day are now on the Atlantic in the Canada. 

I see many more nests in the alders now than I suspected in the summer.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1855

Making shelves for my Oriental books. See November 9, 1855 ("Yesterday I got a perfectly sound oak timber . . . As it was too heavy to lift aboard, I towed it. As I shall want some shelves to put my Oriental books on, I shall begin to save boards now."); November 30, 1855 ("This evening I received Cholmondeley’s gift of Indian books, forty-four volumes in all, which came by the Canada, reaching Boston on the morning of the '24th.")

My Journal should be the record of my love.

November 16.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen.

***

I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. The jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. What has happened? Who 's dead? The twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the secret. Some tragedy surely is being enacted, but murder will out. How many little dramas are enacted in the depth of the woods at which man is not present! 

November 16, 2023

When I am considering which way I will walk, my needle is slow to settle, my compass varies by a few degrees and does not always point due southwest; and there is good authority for these variations in the heavens. It pursues the straighter course for it at last, like the ball which has come out of a rifle, or the quoit that is twirled when cast. To-day it is some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture in that direction that is my southwest.

***

There is a place whither I should walk to-day. Though oftenest I fail to find, when by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight. I have stood by my door sometimes half an hour, irresolute as to what course I should take.

Apparently all but the evergreens and oaks have lost their leaves now. It is singular that the shrub oaks retain their leaves through the winter. Why do they? 

***

Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth. 

Land where the wood has been cut off and is just beginning to come up again is called sprout land. 

The sweet-scented life-everlasting has not lost its scent yet, but smells like the balm of the fields.  

The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries? 

The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider-mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. 

Ah, poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if as extensive orchards are set out to-day in this town as there were a century ago, when these vast straggling cider-orchards were planted. Men stuck in a tree then by every wall side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along almost every road and lane and wall-side, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plot by their houses and fence them in. 

My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearnings than an expanding bud, which does indeed point to flower and fruit, to summer and autumn, but is aware of the warm sun and spring influence only. 

I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seedtime with me. I have lain fallow long enough. 

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. Yet I question sometimes if there is not some settlement to come 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 16, 1850

A truly good book. See November 16, 1855 ("A part of to-day and yesterday I have been making shelves for my Oriental books”)

The jay is on the alert, See  November 11, 1853 ("The jays are seen and heard more of late, their plumage apparently not dimmed at all."):  December 31, 1850 ("The blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so communicate the alarm to other birds and to beasts"). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay

There is a place whither I should walk to-day. See September 7, 1851("I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon.”); August 22, 1854 ("Walking may be a science, so far as the direction of a walk is concerned."); October 20, 1858 ("There is one advantage in walking eastward these afternoons, at least, that in returning you may have the western sky before you"). See also note to December 18, 1856 ("stepping westward seem to be / a kind of heavenly destiny.”); Walking (“Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.”)

When by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight.  See note to September 8, 1858 ("So, in my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing.”)

Shrub oaks retain their leaves through the winter. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Shrub Oak.

Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. See A Week, Wednesday ("Day would not dawn if it were not for the inward morning."); Walden (“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”)

My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. See September 2, 1851 ("A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.");  July 13, 1852 ("A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy."); March 13, 1853 ("The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body . . . You must get your living by loving."); May 6, 1854 ("Every important worker will report what life there is in him. All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love, — to sing; and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.”)

The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries? See November 19, 1850 ("Now that the grass is withered and the leaves are withered or fallen, it begins to appear what is evergreen the partridge-berry and checkerberry, and winter-green leaves even, are more conspicuous.”); November 27, 1853 ("Checkerberries and partridge-berries are both numerous and obvious now"); December 3, 1853 ("The still green Mitchella repens  and checkerberry in shelter, both with fruit"); December 7, 1853 ("The liquid wet glossy leaves of the Chimaphila (winter or snow-loving) umbellata, with its dry fruit. Not to mention the still green Mitchella repens and checkerberry in shelter, both with fruit")

Note: Partridge-berry is Mitchella repens. See November 16, 1858 (listing Mitchella repens and Checkerberry separately as among "our shrubby evergreen plants " and Chimaphila umbellata as among "the herbaceous") Checkerberry" is another name for American wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens). See Checkerberry cum Wintergreen. and GoBotany. What HDT calls “wintergreen” is Chimaphila umbellata, a/k/a pipsissewa, See July 3, 1852 ("The Chimaphila umbellata, wintergreen, must have been in blossom some time.”); November 16, 1858 (“Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our handsomest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods.”). 

The spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. See November 22, 1860 ("Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man.") ; A Week, Wednesday ("I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man (the anthropic principle)

November 16. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 16

The jay on alert

mimicking each woodland note –

What happened? Who's dead?

Some of our richest

days are those in which no

sun shines outwardly.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  My Journal should be the record of my love.

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-501116

Nov. 16. I found three good arrowheads to-day behind Dennis's. The season for them began some time ago, as soon as the farmers had sown their winter rye, but the spring, after the melting of the snow, is still better. 

I am accustomed to regard the smallest brook with as much interest for the time being as if it were the Orinoco or Mississippi. What is the difference, I would like to know, but mere size ? And when a tributary rill empties in, it is like the confluence of famous rivers I have read mid- passage and look down into the water, and study its bottom, its little mystery. There is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with a wary eye, or a pygmy trout glance from under the bank, or in spring, perchance, a sucker will have found its way far up its stream. You are sometimes astonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill, where it is a mere puddle by the roadside. I have stooped to drink at a clear spring no bigger than a bushel basket in a meadow, from which a rill was scarcely seen to dribble away, and seen lurking at its bottom two little pickerel not so big as my finger, sole monarchs of this their ocean, and who probably would never visit a larger water. 

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness. It is the untamed, uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us, — not learned in the schools, not refined and polished by art. 

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvellous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. 

Suppose the muskrat or beaver were to turn his views to literature, what fresh views of nature would he present ! The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane, I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men, — not merely to a pining and complaining coterie of philanthropists.

 I discover again about these times that cranberries are good to eat in small quantities as you are crossing the meadows. 

I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. The jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. What has happened? Who 's dead? The twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the secret. Some tragedy surely is being enacted, but murder will out. How many little dramas are enacted in the depth of the woods at which man is not present! 

When I am considering which way I will walk, my needle is slow to settle, my compass varies by a few degrees and does not always point due southwest; and there is good authority for these variations in the heavens. It pursues the straighter course for it at last, like the ball which has come out of a rifle, or the quoit that is twirled when cast. To-day it is some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture in that direction that is my southwest.

I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie themselves and deny me continually. 

Somebody shut the cat's tail in the door just now, and she made such a caterwaul as has driven two whole worlds out of my thoughts. I saw unspeakable things in the sky and looming in the horizon of my mind, and now they are all reduced to a cat's tail. Vast films of thought floated through my brain, like clouds pregnant with rain enough to fertilize and restore a world, and now they are all dissipated. 

There is a place whither I should walk to-day. Though oftenest I fail to find, when by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight. I have stood by my door sometimes half an hour, irresolute as to what course I should take.

Apparently all but the evergreens and oaks have lost their leaves now. It is singular that the shrub oaks retain their leaves through the winter. Why do they? 

The walnut trees spot the sky with black nuts. Only catkins are seen on the birches.

 I saw the other day a dead limb which the wind or some other cause had broken nearly off, which had lost none of its leaves, though all the rest of the tree, which was flourishing, had shed them. 

There seems to be in the fall a sort of attempt at a spring, a rejuvenescence, as if the winter were not expected by a part of nature. Violets, dandelions, and some other flowers blossom again, and mulleins and in numerable other plants begin again to spring and are only checked by the increasing cold. There is a slight uncertainty whether there will be any winter this year. 

I was pleased to-day to hear a great noise and trampling in the woods produced by some cows which came running toward their homes, which apparently had been scared by something unusual, as their ancestors might have been by wolves. I have known sheep to be scared in the same [way] and a whole flock to run bleating to me for protection. 

What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods, their solitude and darkness? What salvation is there for him? God is silent and mysterious. 

Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth. 

Land where the wood has been cut off and is just beginning to come up again is called sprout land. 

The sweet-scented life-everlasting has not lost its scent yet, but smells like the balm of the fields. 

The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries? 

The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider-mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if as extensive orchards are set out to-day in this town as there were a century ago, when these vast straggling cider-orchards were planted. Men stuck in a tree then by every wall side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along almost every road and lane and wall-side, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plot by their houses and fence them in. 

My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearnings than an expanding bud, which does indeed point to flower and fruit, to summer and autumn, but is aware of the warm sun and spring influence only. 

I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can't discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seedtime with me. I have lain fallow long enough. 

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. Yet I question sometimes if there is not some settlement to come.