I sail the unexplored sea of Concord

November 23.

George Minott tells me that sixty years ago wood was only two or three dollars a cord here – and some of that hickory.

Remembers when Peter Wheeler, sixty or more years ago, cut off all at once over a hundred acres of wood stretching from Flint's Pond to Goose Pond, — since cut again in part by Britton, and owned now partly by the Stows.

Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea. 

We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great. Famous fruits imported from the tropics and sold in our markets — as oranges, lemons, pineapples, and bananas do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk, or which I have found to be palatable to an outdoor taste. 

The tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics; their fairest and sweetest parts cannot be exported nor imported. Brought here, they chiefly concern those whose walks are through the market-place. It is not the orange of Cuba, but the checkerberry of the neighboring pasture, that most delights the eye and the palate of the New England child.

What if the Concord Social Club, instead of eating oranges from Havana, should spend an hour in admiring the beauty of some wild berry from their own fields which they never attended to before?

It is not the foreignness or size or nutritive qualities of a fruit that determine its absolute value.

It is not those far-fetched fruits which the speculator imports that concerns us chiefly, but rather those which you have fetched yourself in your basket from some far hill or swamp, journeying all the long afternoon in the hold of a basket, consigned to your friends at home, the first of the season. We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of their berries, when yet more beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the surrounding fields. As some beautiful or palatable fruit is perhaps the noblest gift of nature to man, so is a fruit with which a man has in some measure identified himself by cultivating or collecting it one of the most suitable presents to a friend.

It was some compensation for Commodore Porter, who may have introduced some cannon-balls and bombshells into ports where they were not wanted, to have introduced the Valparaiso squash into the United States. I think that this eclipses his military glory.

As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna.

At first, perchance, there would be an abundant crop of rank garden weeds and grasses in the cultivated land, — and rankest of all in the cellar-holes, — and of pin weed, hardhack, sumach, blackberry, thimble-berry, raspberry, etc., in the fields and pastures. Elm, ash, maples, etc., would grow vigorously along old garden limits and main streets.

Garden weeds and grasses would soon disappear. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, lambkill, hazel, sweet-fern, barberry, elder, also shad-bush, choke-berry, andromeda, and thorns, etc., would rapidly prevail in the deserted pastures. At the same time the wild cherries, birch, poplar, willows, checkerberry would reëstablish themselves.

Finally the pines, hemlock, spruce, larch, shrub oak, oaks, chestnut, beech, and walnuts would occupy the site of Concord once more.

The apple and perhaps all exotic trees and shrubs and a great part of the indigenous ones named above would have disappeared, and the laurel and yew would to some extent be an underwood here, and perchance the red man once more thread his way through the mossy, swamp-like, primitive wood.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 23, 1860 

Minott tells me that sixty years ago wood was only two or three dollars a cord here. See  February 18, 1857 ("Mr. Prichard says that when he first came to Concord wood was $2.50 per cord. Father says that good wood was $3.00 per cord"); See also April 1, 1852 ("Woodchoppers in this neighborhood get but fifty cents a cord");  June 16, 1857 ("[on Cape Cod] Wood was worth six dollars per cord.")

Over a hundred acres of wood stretching from Flint's Pond to Goose Pond, — since cut again in part by Britton, and owned now partly by the Stows. See October 16, 1860 (" I have come up here this afternoon to see the dense white pine lot beyond the pond, . . .To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here.. . .He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest-warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husbandmen."); October 26, 1860 ("It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there some twenty years ago . He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow") See also ("March 6, 1855 ("There is hardly a wood lot of any consequence left but the chopper’s axe has been heard in it this season.") See also September 28, 1857 ("They have cut down two or three of the very rare celtis trees, not found anywhere else in town. The Lord deliver us from these vandalic proprietors!").

We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. See September 3, 1853 ("Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man.. . .Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known.");  October 24, 1858 ("Round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone. "); March 28, 1859 ("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."); October 7, 1857 ("When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape.”); November 24, 1860 ("These wild fruits, whether eaten or not, are a dessert for the imagination. The south may keep her pineapples , and we will be content with our strawberries."); November 26, 1860 ("Better for us is the wild strawberry than the pineapple, the wild apple than the orange, the hazelnut or pignut than the cocoanut or almond, and not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education.")

Midsummer's deepened shade; a sultry, languid debauched look.

July 18

July 18, 2014

A hot midsummer day with a sultry mistiness in the air and shadows on land and water beginning to have a peculiar distinctness and solidity. The river, smooth and still, with a deepened shade of the elms on it, like midnight suddenly revealed, its bed-curtains shoved aside, has a sultry languid look.

The atmosphere now imparts a bluish or glaucous tinge to the distant trees. A certain debauched look. This a crisis in the season. 

After this the foliage of some trees is almost black at a distance. 

I do not know why the water should be so remarkably clear and the sun shine through to the bottom of the river, making it so plain. Methinks the air is not clearer nor the sun brighter, yet the bottom is unusually distinct and obvious in the sun. There seems to be no concealment for the fishes. On all sides, as I float along, the recesses of the water and the bottom are unusually revealed, and I see the fishes and weeds and shells. I look down into the sunny water. 

We have very few bass trees in Concord, but walk near them at this season and they will be betrayed, though several rods off, by the wonderful susurrus of the bees, etc., which their flowers attract. It is worth going a long way to hear. I am warned that I am passing one in two instances on the river, —only two I pass, — by this remarkable sound. At a little distance it is like the sound of a waterfall or of the cars; close at hand like a factory full of looms. They are chiefly humblebees, and the great globose tree is all alive with them. I hear the murmur distinctly fifteen rods off. You will know if you pass within a few rods of a bass tree at this season in any part of the town, by this loud murmur, like a water fall, which proceeds from it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 18, 1854

A certain debauched look: See June 16, 1852 ("The earth looks like a debauchee after the sultry night") and July 24, 1851 ("Nature is like a hen panting with open mouth, in the grass, as the morning after a debauch.")

After this the foliage of some trees is almost black at a distance. See July 27, 1859 ("Now observe the darker shades, and especially the apple trees, square and round, in the northwest landscape. Dogdayish.")

Bass tree susurrus:  See July 16, 1852 ("The air is full of sweetness. The tree is full of poetry."); July 17, 1856 ("Hear at distance the hum of bees from the bass with its drooping flowers at the Island,. . . It sounds like the rumbling of a distant train of cars.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood

I look down into the sunny water. See July 27, 1860 ("The water has begun to be clear and sunny, revealing the fishes and countless minnows of all sizes and colors”). July 28, 1859 ("The season has now arrived when I begin to see further into the water.");  July 30, 1856 ("The water is suddenly clear.”); August 8, 1859 ("The river, now that it is so clear and sunny, is better than any aquarium. ")

July 18. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Children of the sun and A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 18

.

Hot midsummer day

a crisis in the season

a deepened black shade

like midnight revealed

by bed-curtains shoved aside.

A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Midsummer's deepened shade

A Book of 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-540718a

The season of the fruit of the flower.

September 3.

Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild berries which are not food for man. 

If we so industriously collect those berries which are sweet to the palate, it is strange that we do not devote an hour in the year to gathering those which are beautiful to the eye. It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known, the fruit of the flower.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 3, 1853

It behooves me to go a-berrying in this sense once a year at least. To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. See September 3, 1856 ("Gather four or five quarts of Viburnum nudum berries, now in their prime, attracted more by the beauty of the cymes than the flavor of the fruit."); See also September 11, 1859 ('September is the month when various small, and commonly inedible, berries in cymes and clusters hang over the roadsides and along the walls and fences, or spot the forest floor").; September 18, 1859 ("How little observed are the fruits which we do not use!")

The night of the year approaches.

August 18

Many leaves of the cultivated cherry are turned yellow, and a very few leaves of the elm have fallen, — the dead or prematurely ripe. 

The abundant and repeated rains since this month came in have made the last fortnight and more seem like a rainy season in the tropics, — warm, still copious rains falling straight down, contrasting with the cold, driving spring rains. Now again I am caught in a heavy shower in Moore's pitch pines on edge of Great Fields, and am obliged to stand crouching under my umbrella till the drops turn to streams, which find their way through my umbrella, and the path up the hillside is all afloat, a succession of puddles at different levels, each bounded by a ridge of dead pine-needles. 

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? 

The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! The sound of the crickets, even in the spring, makes our hearts beat with its awful reproof, while it encourages with its seasonable warning. It matters not by how little we have fallen behind; it seems irretrievably late. 

The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life. The sound of so many insects and the sight of so many flowers affect us so, — the creak of the cricket and the sight of the prunella and autumnal dandelion. They say, "For the night cometh in which no man may work."

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, August 18, 1853 

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill . . . See  August 18, 1856 ("It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, . . . so little brought to pass! "). See also .July 30 1852 (After midsummer we have a belated feeling as if we had all been idlers, and are forward to see in each sight and hear in each sound some presage of the fall, just as in middle age man anticipates the end of life.);

But where is our fruit? See August 17, 1851  ("Ah! if I could so live that . . . when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might be ripe also! ! "); June 17, 1854 (“The season of small fruits has arrived. We are a little saddened, because we begin to see the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment.”); Augusst 9, 1854  ("Walden" published.")

The night of the year is approaching. See August, 19, 1853 (" The day is an epitome of the year.")

The sound of the crickets. . . with its seasonable warning. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Cricket in August

August 18. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau August 18

This sense of lateness.

Now is the season of fruits

but where is our fruit?

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The night of the year approaches.

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-530818

A season of fruits and berries. Nature is now a Bacchanal

August 6. 

More dog-days. The sun, now at 9 a. m., has not yet burst through the mists. It has been warmer weather for a week than for at least three weeks before, — nights when all windows were left open, though not so warm as in June. This morning a very heavy fog. The sun has not risen clear or even handsomely for some time, nor have we had a good sunset. 

P. M. — To J. Farmer's Cliff.

I see the sunflower's broad disk now in gardens, probably a few days, — a true sun among flowers, monarch of August. Do not the flowers of August and September generally resemble suns and stars? 

— sunflowers and asters and the single flowers of the goldenrod. 

I once saw one as big as a milk-pan, in which a mouse had its nest. 

Already I notice that the lower leaves of some catnip and a white vervain have turned. They are in fact matured, and high-colored or wine-colored like the fruits. It suggests that the whole plant tends toward an equal richness and maturity and to become one flower. It is the blush of its evening sky. I have seen some red leaves on the low choke-berry. 

Now begins the vintage of their juices. Nature is now a Bacchanal, drunk with the wines of a thousand plants and berries. 

The rudbeckia must have been out at least a week or more; half the buds have opened. 

Cranberries show red cheeks, and some are wholly red, like varnished cherry wood. 

Yesterday I ate early summer apples. 

The huckleberries were many of them burst open in consequence of the copious rains. 

And now it begins to rain again and compels us to return.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 6, 1853

Do not the flowers of August and September generally resemble suns and stars? See August 30, 1853 ("The sun has shone on the earth, and the goldenrod is his fruit. The stars, too, have shone on it, and the asters are their fruit.”)

August 6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 6

 

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 Afternoon of the Year

July 26. 

I reckon that about nine tenths of the flowers of the year have now blossomed. 

Dog-days, - sultry, sticky weather, - now when the corn is topped out. Clouds without rain. Rains when it will. Old spring and summer signs fail.

The bobolinks are just beginning to fly in flocks, and I hear their link link. I see the young birds also, just able to get out of my way above the weeds and bushes of the low grounds their tails not grown out to steady them.

Lark, too seen now, four or five together, sing as of yore; also the goldfinch twitters over oftener.

I notice to-day the first purplish aster, a pretty sizable one; may have been out a day or two, near the brook beyond Hubbard's Grove, - A.Radula.

I mark again the sound of crickets or locusts about alders, etc. about this time when the first asters open, which makes you fruitfully meditative, helps condense your thoughts, like the mel dews in the afternoon. This the afternoon of the year.

How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent! Such little objects check the diffuse tide of our thoughts and bring it to a head, which thrills us. They are such fruits as music, poetry, love, which humanity bears.

Saw one of the common wild roses (R. lucida?).

The swamp blackberry ripe in open ground. 

The Rhus copallina is not yet quite out, though the glabra is in fruit. 

The smaller purple fringed orchis has not quite filled out its spike. What a surprise to detect under the dark, damp, cavernous copse, where some wild beast might fitly prowl, this splendid flower, silently standing with all its eyes on you! It has a rich fragrance withal. 

July 26, 2013

Rain in the evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 26, 1853

Dog-days, - sultry, sticky weather, - now when the corn is topped out . . . when the first asters open, the sound of crickets or locusts that makes you fruitfully meditative. See July 26, 1854 ("The peculiarity of the stream is . . . a dog-day density of shade reflected darkly in the water . . . Almost constantly I hear borne on the wind from far, mingling with the sound of the wind, the z-ing locust, scarcely like a distinct sound"); July 26, 1859 ("Dogdayish.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Locust, Dogdayish Days

This the afternoon of the year.  See August, 19, 1853 (" The day is an epitome of the year.”);
August 23, 1853 "I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day — say an August day — and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year.”)

The bobolinks are just beginning to fly in flocks, and I hear their link link. I see the young birds also, just able to get out of my way. See July 19, 1855 ("Young bobolinks; one of the first autumnalish notes."); August 15, 1852 ("I see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. They cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note as I approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. This is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Bobolink

I notice to-day the first purplish aster. See July 23, 1859 ("Aster Radula, how long?"); July 25, 1857 {Maine woods} ("Here, among others, were the Aster Radula, just in bloom"); July 28, 1852 ("Aster Radula (?) in J. P. Brown's meadow.")

How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent! See July 28, 1854 ("Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month , — that the year was of indefinite promise before, but that, after the first intense heats , we postponed the fulfillment of many of our hopes for this year, and, having as it were attained the ridge of the summer, commenced to descend the long slope toward winter, the afternoon and down- hill of the year .) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Midsummer midlife blues

Such little objects check the diffuse tide of our thoughts and bring it to a head, which thrills us. See September 3, 1853 ("I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts, or what is due to the influence of the moon, from the current distractions and fluctuations.")

Music, poetry, love . . . See November 30, 1858 ("music, poetry, beauty, and the mystery of life . . .”)

Saw one of the common wild roses (R. lucida?) See July 17, 1854 ("The late rose not fairly begun along the river, now when lucida is leaving off. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Rose

The smaller purple fringed orchis has not quite filled out its spike. See July 21, 1851 ("The small purple orchis, its spikes half opened "); July 24, 1856 ("The small purple fringed orchis, apparently three or four days at least");  July 30, 1853 ("A small purple orchis (Platanthera psycodes), quite small, so that I perceive what I called by this name before must have been the fimbriata."); August 1, 1852 ("Found a long, dense spike of the Orchis psycodes. Much later this than the great orchis. The same, only smaller and denser, not high-colored enough. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Fringed Orchids

July 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 26

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 color of fruits and berries

August 22.
The elder bushes are weighed down with fruit partially turned, and are still in bloom at the extremities of their twigs. I am struck by the handsome and abundant clusters of yet green shrub oak acorns. Some are whitish. How much food for some creatures! Is not the high blackberry our finest berry?  I gather very sweet ones which weigh down the vines in sprout-lands.  The arum berries are mostly devoured, apparently by birds. The two-leaved Solomon's-seal berries begin to be red. The panicled cornel berries now white.  

Perhaps fruits are colored like the trillium berry and the scarlet thorn to attract birds to them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 22, 1852

Perhaps fruits are colored like the trillium berry and the scarlet thorn to attract birds to them. See June 15, 1852 ("Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colors imply eyes, spectators")

Eternal summer arrrives

July 5.

I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature.

The progress of the season is indescribable. 

It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle-berrying.

Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 5, 1852

Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. SeeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cherry-bird (cedar waxwing)

Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity.. See January 9, 1853 (" I thought of those summery hours when time is tinged with eternity . . .”); July 16, 1851 ("It is an air this afternoon that makes you indifferent to all things, - perfect summer. . . You know not heat nor cold. What season of the year is this?") See also August 6, 1852 (" Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming.")

The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, . . — its four or five open purple flowers — . . . makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa.  See July 7, 1852 ("The Arethusa bulbosa, " crystalline purple;" Pogonia ophioglossoides, snake-mouthed arethusa, "pale purple;" and the Calopogon pulchellus, grass pink, "pink purple," make one family in my mind, — next to the purple orchis, or with it, — being flowers par excellence, all flower, all color, with inconspicuous leaves, naked flowers,")

 July 5. I know a man who never speaks of the sexual relation but jestingly, though it is a subject to be approached only with reverence and affection. What can be the character of that man's love ? It is ever the subject of a stale jest, though his health or his dinner can be seriously considered. The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in nature. White lilies continue to open in the house in the morning and shut in the night for five or six days, un til their stamens have shed their pollen and they turn rusty and begin to decay, and the beauty of the flower is gone, and its vitality, so that it no longer expands with the light.

How perfect an invention is glass ! There is a fitness in glass windows which reflect the sun morning and evening, windows, the doorways of light, thus reflecting the rays of that luminary with a splendor only second to itself. This invention one would say was anticipated in the arrangement of things. The sun rises with a salute and leaves the world with a farewell to our windows. To have, instead of opaque shutters or dull horn or paper, a material like solidified air, which reflects the sun thus brightly! It is inseparable from our civilization and enlightenment. It is encouraging that this intelligence and brilliancy or splendor should be long to the dwellings of men, and not to the cliffs and micaceous rocks and lakes exclusively.

P. M. — To Second Division Brook. The Typha latifolia, or reed-mace, sheds an abundance of sulphur-like pollen into the hand now. Its tall and handsome swords are seen waving above the bushes in low grounds now. What I suppose the Vaccinium fuscatum, or black blueberry, is now ripe here and there, quite small. Heard the Mating or lowing of a calf. Sat in the shade of the locusts in front of J. Hosmer's cottage and heard a locust z-ing on them, but could not find him. This cottage and the landscape, seen through the frame made by the " Railroad Crossing " sign, as you approach it along the winding bushy road, is a pleasing sight. It is picturesque.

There is a meadow on the Assabet just above Derby's Bridge, — it may contain an acre, — bounded on one side by the river, on the other by alders and a hill, completely covered with small hummocks which have lodged on it in the winter, covering it like the mounds in a graveyard at pretty regular intervals. Their edges are rounded like [the] latter, and they and the paths between are covered with a firm , short greensward , with here and there hardhacks springing out of them , so that they make excellent seats , especially in the shade of an elm that grows there . They are completely united with the meadow , forming little oblong hillocks from one to ten feet long , flat as a mole to the sward . I am inclined to call it the elfin burial - ground , or per- chance it might be called the Indian burial - ground . It is a remarkably firm - swarded meadow , and convenient to walk on . And these hummocks have an important effect in elevating it . It suggests at once a burial - ground of the aborigines , where perchance lie the earthly re- mains of the rude forefathers of the race . I love to ponder the natural history thus written on the banks of the stream , for every higher freshet and intenser frost is recorded by it . The stream keeps a faithful and a true journal of every event in its experience , what- ever race may settle on its banks ; and it purls past this natural graveyard with a storied murmur , and no doubt it could find endless employment for an old mortality in renewing its epitaphs . 

The progress of the season is indescribable. It is growing warm again, but the warmth is different from that we have had. We lie in the shade of locust trees. Haymakers go by in a hay-rigging. I am reminded of berrying. I scent the sweet-fern and the dead or dry pine leaves. Cherry-birds alight on a neighboring tree. The warmth is something more normal and steady, ripening fruits. Campanula aparinoides, slender bell- flower. The Cicuta maculata, American hemlock. It begins to be such weather as when people go a-huckle berrying.

 Nature offers fruits now as well as flowers. We have become accustomed to the summer. It has acquired a certain eternity. The earth is dry. Perhaps the sound of the locust expresses the season as well as anything. The farmers say the abundance of the grass depends on wet in June. I might make a separate season of those days when the locust is heard. That is our torrid zone. This dryness and heat are necessary for the maturing of fruits.

How cheering it is to behold a full spring bursting forth directly from the earth, like this of Tarbell's, from clean gravel, copiously, in a thin sheet; for it descends at once, where you see no opening, cool from the caverns of the earth, and making a consider able stream. Such springs, in the sale of lands, are not valued for as much as they are worth. I lie almost flat, resting my hands on what offers, to drink at this water where it bubbles, at the very udders of Nature, for man is never weaned from her breast while this life lasts. How many times in a single walk does he stoop for a draught!

We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. It is a factory of soil, depositing sediment.

How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs ; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you. In the Ministerial Swamp there is a great deal of the naked viburnum rising above the dwarf andromeda. The calopogon, or grass-pink, now fully open, is remarkably handsome in the grass in low grounds, by contrast — its four or five open purple flowers — with the surrounding green. It makes a much greater show than the pogonia. It is of the same character with that and the arethusa, with a slight fragrance, methinks. It is very much indebted to its situation, no doubt, in low ground, where it contrasts with the dark- green grass. All color, with only a grass-like leaf be low; flowers eminently. If it grew on dry and barren hilltops, or in woods above the dead leaves, it would lose half its attractions. Buttercups have now almost disappeared, as well as clover. Some of the earliest roses are ceasing, but others remain. I see many devil's-needles zigzagging along the Second Division Brook, some green, some blue, both with black and perhaps velvety wings. They are confined to the brook. How lavishly they are painted ! How cheap was the paint! How free the fancy of their creator! I caught a handful of small water-bugs, fifteen or twenty, about as large as apple seeds. Some country people call them apple seeds, it is said, from their scent. I perceived a strong scent, but I am not sure it was like apples. I should rather think they were so called from their shape.

Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season. 

I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early.

The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc.

The wood thrush's is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai's note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. 

The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.

Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.

How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming! Can any house [be] said to be furnished without them ? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers ? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the fine thoughts it is fitted to suggest. Shall we say, " A penny for your thoughts," before we have looked into the face of Nature ? Let me know what picture she is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing, now.

I hear my hooting owl now just before sunset. You can fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if Nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. It reminds of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. One answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. Some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it. Yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me.1

Some fields are quite yellow with johnswort now, — a pleasing motley hue, which looks autumnal. What is that small chickweed-like plant on Clamshell Hill, now out of bloom ?

The sun has set. We are in Dennis's field. The dew is falling fast. Some fine clouds, which have just escaped being condensed in dew, hang on the skirts of day and make the attraction in our western sky, — that part of day's gross atmosphere which has escaped the clutches of the night and is not enough condensed to fall to earth, — soon to be gilded by his parting rays. They are remarkably finely divided clouds, a very fine mackerel sky, or, rather, as if one had sprinkled that part of the sky with a brush, the outline of the whole being that of several large sprigs of fan coral. C, as usual, calls it a Mediterranean sky. They grow darker and darker, and now are reddened, while dark-blue bars of clouds of wholly different character lie along the northwest horizon.

The Asclepias Cornuti (Syriaca) and the A. incarnata (pulchra) (this hardly out). Considerable fog to night.

The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. See  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wood Thrush

Autumn tastes and sounds

August 26.

The shrilling of the alder locust is the solder that welds these autumn days together.

I thread my way through the blueberry swamp in front of Martial Miles's. The high blueberries far above my head in the shade of the swamp retain their freshness and coolness a long time. Little blue sacks full of swampy nectar and ambrosia commingled. And now a far greater show of choke-berries is here, rich to see.

I press my way through endless thickets of these berries, their lower leaves now fast reddening. All bushes resound with the song of the alder locust; I wade up to my ears in it.

Methinks the burden of their song is the countless harvests of the year, - berries, grain, and other fruits.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 26, 1860

I thread my way through the blueberry swamp in front of Martial Miles's.. .. Now a far greater show of choke-berries is here, rich to see. See July 30, 1860 ("Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp. Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head, with many of their lower leaves already red"); August 5, 1852 ("How wildly rich and beautiful hang on high there the blueberries which might so easily be poisonous, the cool blue clusters high in air. Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes. The wild holly berry, perhaps the most beautiful of berries, hanging by slender threads from its more light and open bushes and more delicate leaves. The bushes, eight feet high, are black with choke-berries, and there are no wild animals to eat them. ")

Summer fruits and berries

July 30

Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp. Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head, with many of their lower leaves already red, alternating with young birches and raspberry, high blueberry andromeda (high and low), and great dense flat beds of Rubus sempervirens. Amid these, perhaps in cool openings, stands an island or two of great dark-green high blueberry bushes, with big cool blueberries, though bearing but sparingly this year.

 

In a frosty hollow in the woods west of this and of the blackberry field, find a thick patch of shad-bush, about a rod and a half long, the bushes about three feet high, and quite interesting now, in fruit. Firm dark-green leaves with short, broad, irregular racemes (cluster-like) of red and dark dull purplish berries intermixed, making considerable variety in the color. The ripest and largest dark-purple berries are just half an inch in diameter. The conspicuous red - for most are red - remind me a little of the wild holly, the berry so contrasts with the dark leaf. These berries are peculiar in that the red are nearly as pleasant-tasted as the more fully ripe dark-purple ones.

I am surprised and delighted to see this handsome profusion in hollows usually so barren and bushes commonly so fruitless.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 30, 1860

Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head. See July 18, 1854 ("every bush and bramble bears its fruit; the sides of the road are a fruit garden; blackberries, huckleberries, thimble-berries, fresh and abundant, no signs of drought; all fruits in abundance; the earth teems."); July 18, 1852 ("The Cerasus Virginiana, or choke-cherry, is turning, nearly ripe."); August 5, 1856 ("Choke-cherries near . . . begin to be ripe, though still red. They are scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See those handsome racemes of ten or twelve cherries each, dark glossy red, semi- transparent. You love them not the less because they are not quite palatable."); August 5, 1858 (" Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes."); August 26, 1860 ("I thread my way through the blueberry swamp in front of Martial Miles's. . . . And now a far greater show of choke-berries is here, rich to see.")

A thick patch of shad-bush. See June 25, 1853 ("Found in the Glade (?) Meadows an unusual quantity of amelanchier berries, – I think of the two common kinds,-one a taller bush, twice as high as my head, with thinner and lighter-colored leaves and larger, or at least somewhat softer, fruit, the other a shorter bush, with more rigid and darker leaves and dark-blue berries, with often a sort of woolliness on them. Both these are now in their prime.")

July 30. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 30

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