To effect the quality of the day.

(The art of spending a day)

I went to the woods because

I wished to live deliberately

to front only the essential facts of life, and

 see if I could not learn what it had to teach, 

and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived.

Walden

One does not soon learn the trade of life. That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work.   December 29, 1841.

I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself . . . but to see over and above myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. November 23, 1850

Resolve to read no book, to take no walk, to undertake no enterprise, but such as you can endure to give an account of to yourself. Live thus deliberately for the most part. August 23, 1851

It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. September 2, 1851

I don’t remember 

a page to tell me how to 

 spend this afternoon.

The art of spending a day . . . I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, that the day may not have been in vain. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. September 7, 1851.

I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days. December 12, 1851

What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us by letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle. December 29, 1851

We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. January 11, 1852

Do the things which lie 

nearest to you – but which are 

difficult to do.

January 12, 1852

It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. January 20, 1852

Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature, make a day to bring forth something new? April 18, 1852

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something. April 29, 1852

The world can never be more beautiful than now. May 18, 1852

A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one. December 15, 1852

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body, — that so the life be not a failure. March 13, 1853

The sun is now warm on my back, and when I turn round I shade my face with my hands. Nature is beautiful only as a place where a life is to be lived.  July 21, 1853 

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. May 6, 1854

To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts . . . Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature . . . determined to make a day of it. Walden

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. October 18, 1855

The advantage of having some purpose, however small, to be accomplished . . .  for only absorbing employment prevails, succeeds, takes up space, occupies territory, determines the future . . . any little enterprise . . . a thing to be done, — some step to be taken, however slight, out of the usual course.  [O]ur days should be spent . . . carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him [and] the flavor of your life to that extent . . . will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy. August 30, 1856

The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become. August 30, 1856

Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of. November 18, 1857

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. September 8, 1858

If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow. September 18, 1860

Simply to see to a distant horizon through a clear air, -- the fine outline of a distant hill or a blue mountain- top through some new vista, -- this is wealth enough for one afternoon. November 22, 1860

To know and possess

the wealth of this afternoon,

get the most of life.

To see the sun rise

or go down every day

full of news to me.

To see what transpires

in the mind and heart of me,

go where my life is.

To attend each thought

every phenomena and

oratorio.

To grow green with spring

yellow and ripe with autumn,

to live each season.

So I help myself,

loving my life as I should –

a day's devotion.

~zphx 20150118

See also 

Walden, An artist in the city of Kouroo

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day

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 ©  2009-2022

In the crucible of my celibate life

purified of all desire,

I enter truth from behind

and call her name --

Simplify!

tinyurl.com/HDTTO-DAY

https://tinyurl.com/HDT-DAY

A Book of the seasons: December 15 (weeds, winter eve, life)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

December 15.

December 15, 2018

My love is invulnerable. 

Meet me on that ground

and you will find me strong.

December 15, 1841

The bare landscape looks

as if covered with snow on

these bright moonlit nights.

December 15, 1853

A few clean dry weeds

seen against smooth reflecting

water between ice.

December 15, 1854

The low grass and weeds

bent down with crystalline drops

now ready to freeze.

December 15, 1855

The now dark green pines.

The oak leaves and withered weeds

bleached above the snow.

The hushed stillness of

the wood at sundown, aye

all the winter day.

Smooth serenity

and reflections of the pond,

alone free from ice.

Hooting of the owl

with the distant whistle of

a locomotive.

The last strokes of the

woodchopper who presently

bends his steps homeward.

Gilded bar of cloud

conducting my thoughts into

the eternal west.

The horizon glow,

and the hasty walk homeward.

Long winter evening.

December 15, 1856

And the trees have all

come down to the bank to see

the river go by.

December 15, 1841

December 15, 2023

A mild summer sun shines, over forest and lake. December 15, 1841

In the woods there is an inexpressible happiness. December 15, 1841.

The trees have come down to the bank to see the river go by. December 15, 1841

The water which so calmly reflects the fleeting clouds and the primeval trees I have never seen before. December 15, 1841

This old, familiar river is renewed each instant; only the channel is the same. December 15, 1841

This morning it has begun to snow apparently in earnest. December 15, 1855

The air is quite thick and the view confined. December 15, 1855

The first kind of snow-storm, or that of yesterday, which ceased in the night after some three inches had fallen, was that kind that makes handsome drifts behind the walls. December 15, 1859

There are no drifts equal to these behind loosely built stone walls, the wind passing between the stones. December 15, 1859

Slight as this snow was, these drifts now extend back four or five feet and as high as the wall, on the north side of the Corner Bridge road. December 15, 1859

It is quite still, yet some flakes come down from one side and some from another, crossing each other like woof and warp apparently, as they are falling in different eddies and currents of air. December 15, 1855

In the midst of it, I hear and see a few little chickadees prying about the twigs of the locusts in the graveyard. December 15, 1855

They have come into town with the snow. December 15, 1855

They now and then break forth into a short sweet strain, and then seem suddenly to check them selves, as if they had done it before they thought. December 15, 1855

The snow turns to rain, and this afternoon I walk in it down the railroad and through the woods. December 15, 1855

The boys have skated a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet. December 15, 1855

I see on the ice, half a dozen rods from shore, a small brown striped grub, and again a black one five eighths of an inch long. The last has apparently melted quite a cavity in the ice. How came they there? December 15, 1854

How interesting a few clean, dry weeds on the shore a dozen rods off, seen distinctly against the smooth, reflecting water between ice! December 15, 1854

The low grass and weeds, bent down with a myriad little crystalline drops, ready to be frozen perhaps, are very interesting, but wet my feet through very soon. December 15, 1855

I seem to see somewhat more of my own kith and kin in the lichens on the rocks than in any books. December 15, 1841

A steady but gentle, warm rain. December 15, 1855

It still blows hard at 2 p. m., but it is not cold. December 15, 1856

8 p.m.. . .The high northwest wind of this morning, with what of cold we have, has made some of those peculiar rake-toothed icicles on the dead twigs, etc., about the edge of the pond at the east end. December 15, 1856

To produce this phenomenon is required only open water, a high wind, and sufficiently cold weather to freeze the spray. December 15, 1856

I still recall to mind that characteristic winter eve of December 9th; the cold, dry, and wholesome diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on, —

• oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow,
• the now dark green of the pines, and
• perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree sparrow;
• the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day;
• the short boreal twilight;
• the smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice;
• the melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with
• the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive,. . .
• the last strokes of the woodchopper,who presently bends his steps homeward;
• the gilded bar of cloud across the apparent outlet of the pond,
• conducting my thoughts into the eternal west;
• the deepening horizon glow; and
• the hasty walk homeward to enjoy the long winter evening.

December 15, 1856

December 15, 2023

The hooting of the owl! That is a sound which my red predecessors heard here more than a thousand years ago. December 15, 1856

It rings far and wide, occupying the spaces rightfully, — grand, primeval, aboriginal sound. December 15, 1856

Saw a small flock of geese go over. December 15, 1852

Looking from my window these bright moonlight nights, the ground being still bare, the whole landscape — fields, road, and roof — has a wintry aspect, as if covered with snow. It is the frost. December 15, 1853

It does seem as if mine were a peculiarly wild nature, which so yearns toward all wildness. December 15, 1841

One's life, the enterprise he is here upon, should certainly be a grand fact to consider . . . A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one. December 15, 1852

My love is invulnerable. December 15, 1841

December 15, 2019

*****

December 15, 2023

Li Po (There is bright moonlight so that it seems like frost on the ground")
Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”)
Walden ("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.")

December 15, 2023

April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”)
August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, ")
August 30, 1856 (“Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy”)
September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”)
October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”)
November 12, 1853 ("The meadows . . . look as if covered with frost in the moonlight.")
November 13, 1858 (“We looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight.")
November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of.”)
November 18, 1851(".Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo.. . . It is a sound admirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature . . . I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts I have. . . This sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live.") 

November 28, 1853 ("Boys skating in Cambridgeport, — the first ice to bear.")
December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”)
December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture.")
December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.”)
December 9, 1856 ("I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance, and the melodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as the axe or the locomotive whistle."

)December 9, 1856 ("The sun is near setting, away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland and over the snow-clad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. . . .Such is a winter eve")
December 10, 1856 ("the apparently full moon has fairly commenced her reign, and I go home by her light.")
December 10, 1856 ("The nights are light on account of the snow, and, there being a moon, there is no distinct interval between the day and night.")
December 11, 1854 (“The day is short; it seems to be composed of two twilights merely.”)
December 12, 1851 ("I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days.")
December 13, 1858 ("And on those fine grass heads which are bent over in the path the fine dew-like drops are frozen separately like a string of beads")
December 13, 1855 ("The countless flakes, seen against the dark evergreens like a web that is woven in the air, impart a cheerful and busy aspect to nature.")
.December 14, 1851 ("The chickadees remind me of Hudson's Bay for some reason. I look on them as natives of a more northern latitude")
December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business.")
December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. . . .That of the 11th was a still storm, of large flakes falling gently in the quiet air, like so many white feathers descending in different directions when seen against a wood-side, . . . A myriad falling flakes weaving a coarse garment by which the eye is amused.”)
December 14, 1854 ("Your eye slides first over a plane surface of smooth ice of one color to a water surface of silvery smoothness, like a gem set in ice, and reflecting the weeds and trees and houses and clouds with singular beauty. The reflections are particularly simple and distinct.")
December 14, 1859 ("This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north")
December 14, 1855 (" Looking more closely at the light snow... I found that it was sprinkled all over ... with regular star-shaped cottony flakes with six points, about an eighth of an inch in diameter and on an average a half an inch apart. It snowed geometry.")

December 16, 1852 ("Observe the reflection of the snow on Pine Hill from Walden")
December 16, 1855 ("Steady, gentle, warm rain all the forenoon, and mist and mizzling in the afternoon,")
December 16, 1855 ("As we go over the bridge, admire the reflection of the trees and houses from the smooth open water over the channel, where the ice has been dissolved by the rain.")
December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before.")
December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)
December 20, 1854 ("If there is a grub out, you are sure to detect it on the snow or ice.")

December 20, 1856 ("Rain more or less all day.")
December 20, 1855 ("A few chickadees busily inspecting the buds at the willow-row ivy tree, for insects, with a short, clear chink from time to time, as if to warn me of their neighborhood")
December 22, 1855 ("Warm rain and frost coming out and muddy walking.")
December 23, 1851 ("Gradually the sun sinks, the air grows more dusky, and I perceive that if it were not for the light reflected from the snow it would be quite dark. The woodchopper has started for home.")
December 28 1852 ("Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe,")
December 28, 1858 ("I notice a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines, in the sun, lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another, with a reference to me, I think, — the cunning and innocent little birds. ")

December 29, 1841 ("One does not soon learn the trade of life. That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work.")

Hearing the whistle

of the locomotive takes

me out of body.

I see clearly what

at other times I only

dimly remember.

The earth's extent

the freedom of all nature

and the sky's depth.

December 31, 1853

January 11, 1852 ("Let me not live as if time was short")

December 15, 2014

If you make the least correct

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

December 15

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 15

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

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

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2023

tinyurl.com/hdt15dec

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present.

December 28.

Brought my boat from Walden in rain.

December 28, 2019

No snow on ground. Grass in the churchyard and elsewhere green as in the spring.

I omitted some observations apparently between the 18th and 22d, to the effect that the berries that hold on into winter are to be remarked, — the winterberry, alder and birch fruit, smilax, pyrus, hips, etc. 

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. Embrace health wherever you find her.

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree.

The rosettes in the ice, as Channing calls them, now and for some time have attracted me.

It is worth the while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely. I find myself oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. That I may accomplish some particular petty affair well, I live my whole life coarsely.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? 

We live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food.

We consult our will and understanding and the expectation of men, not our genius.

I can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this I am but too inclined to do.

One moment of life costs many hours, hours not of business but of preparation and invitation.

Yet the man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a leader, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him.

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline.

How much, what infinite, leisure it requires, as of a lifetime, to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. It must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all things.

The least partialness is your own defect of sight and cheapens the experience fatally.

Unless the humming of a gnat is as the music of the spheres, and the music of the spheres is as the humming of a gnat, they are naught to me.

It is not communications to serve for a history, — which are science, — but the great story itself, that cheers and satisfies us.

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris nor the andromeda red the past fall, it suggests the great difference in seasons. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 28, 1852

Brought my boat from Walden in rain. No snow on ground. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it. I took my new boat out.”). Compare December 27, 1857 ("Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night”); December 28, 1856 ("Walden completely frozen over again last night.”; ); December 28, 1858 (“The ice is about six inches thick.”) ee also A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau, Annual ice-in at Walden; A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Boat in. Boat out.

Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. see January 7, 1851(“I must live above all in the present.”); Walden: Where I lived and what I lived for ("God Himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."); April 24, 1859 ("Find your eternity in each moment. Live in the present. On any other course life is a succession of regrets.")

Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe? See August 19, 1851 ("The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise? The humblest observer would see some stars shoot. A faithful description as by a disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind in threescore years and ten, as when one reports the number and character of the vehicles which pass a particular point.")

A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree. See January 9, 1860 ("I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond")

The rosettes in the ice. See December 21, 1854 ("What C. calls ice-rosettes, i.e. those small pinches of crystallized snow, . . .I think it is a sort of hoar frost on the ice. It was all done last night, for we see them thickly clustered about our skate-tracks on the river, where it was quite bare yesterday"); January 7, 1856 ("It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, — a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter"); February 2, 1860 ("The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized."); February 13, 1859 ("Ice which froze yesterday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn with fibrous frost crystals . . . sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two; . . . I think that this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice and froze in the night"). 

Moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe.  See  June 22, 1851("My pulse must beat with Nature"); December 12, 1851 ("I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days."); January 11, 1852 ("We cannot live too leisurely. Let me not live as if time was short. Catch the pace of the seasons; have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes."); January 26, 1852 ("Let us preserve, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature.");  May 28, 1854 ("To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe."); April 29, 1854 ("Find your eternity in each moment.");September 24, 1859 ("Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created.") See also notes to September 7, 1851 ("The art of life") 

That aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. See December 29, 1841("That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work."); December 15, 1852 ("A man should not live without a purpose"); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts . . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.") 

As I have not observed the rainbow on the Juncus militaris it suggests the great difference in seasons. See October 27, 1858 ("The bayonet rush also has partly changed, and now, the river being perhaps lower than before this season, shows its rainbow colors. . . .Though a single stalk would not attract attention, when seen in the mass they have this singular effect. I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush.")

 The highest aim in 

life requires the highest and 

finest discipline.

To appreciate

a single phenomenon 

requires a lifetime.

You must give yourself 

with divine leisure wholly

every moment

and your life becomes 

coincident with the life 

of the universe. 

One moment of life 

costs hours of preparation 

and invitation.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Both for bodily and mental health, court the present. 

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-521228 

My life flows with a deeper current.

August 17

haymakers

For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour. The coolness concentrated your thought, however. As I could not command a sunny window, I went abroad on the morning of the 15th and lay in the sun in the fields in my thin coat, though it was rather cool even there. I feel as if this coolness would do me good. 

If it only makes my life more pensive! 

Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It saves my life from being trivial. 

My life flows with a deeper current, no longer as a shallow and brawling stream, parched and shrunken by the summer heats. This coolness comes to condense the dews and clear the atmosphere. The stillness seems more deep and significant. Each sound seems to come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature, as if nature had acquired some character and mind. The cricket, the gurgling stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe. 

My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing. 

I see a goldfinch go twittering through the still, louring day, and am reminded of the peeping flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season. Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! that in the trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might be ripe also! that I could match nature always with my moods ! that in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish! 

Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety ! What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds ! For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it. 

And then to think of those I love among men, who will know that I love them though I tell them not! I some times feel as if I were rewarded merely for expecting better hours. I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me. 

I am not so poor: I can smell the ripening apples; the very rills are deep; the autumnal flowers, the Trichostema dichotomum, — not only its bright blue flower above the sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, — feed my spirit, endear the earth to me, make me value myself and rejoice; the quivering of pigeons' wings reminds me of the tough fibre of the air which they rend. 

I thank you, God. I do not deserve anything, I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. 

But I cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends I have. It seems to me that I am more rewarded for my expectations than for anything I do or can do. Ah, I would not tread on a cricket in whose song is such a revelation, so soothing and cheering to my ear! 

Oh, keep my senses pure! And why should I speak to my friends? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will meet, then, far away. The seeds of the summer are getting dry and falling from a thousand nodding heads. If I did not know you through thick and thin, how should I know you at all? 

Ah, the very brooks seem fuller of reflections than they were! Ah, such provoking sibylline sentences they are! The shallowest is all at once unfathomable. How can that depth be fathomed where a man may see himself reflected? 

The rill I stopped to drink at I drink in more than I expected. I satisfy and still provoke the thirst of thirsts. 

Nut Meadow Brook where it crosses the road beyond Jenny Dugan's that was. I do not drink in vain. I mark that brook as if I had swallowed a water snake that would live in my stomach. I have swallowed something worth the while. The day is not what it was before I stooped to drink. Ah, I shall hear from that draught! It is not in vain that I have drunk. 

I have drunk an arrowhead. It flows from where all fountains rise. How many ova have I swallowed? Who knows what will be hatched within me? There were some seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water, which are expanding in me. 

The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him, — to suckle monsters. 

The snake in my stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water. When was it that I swallowed a snake? I have got rid of the snake in my stomach. I drank of stagnant waters once. That accounts for it. I caught him by the throat and drew him out, and had a well day after all. Is there not such a thing as getting rid of the snake which you have swallowed when young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which has worried you in your waking hours and in your sleep ever since, and appropriated the life that was yours? Will he not ascend into your mouth at the sound of running water? Then catch him boldly by the head and draw him out, though you may think his tail be curled about your vitals. 

The farmers are just finishing their meadow-haying. (To-day is Sunday.) Those who have early potatoes may be digging them, or doing any other job which the haying has obliged them to postpone. For six weeks or more this has been the farmer's work, to shave the surface of the fields and meadows clean. This is done all over the country. The razor is passed over these parts of nature's face the country over. A thirteenth labor which methinks would have broken the back of Hercules, would have given him a memorable sweat, accomplished with what sweating of scythes and early and late! I chance know one young man who has lost his life in this season's campaign, by overdoing. In haying time some men take double wages, and they are engaged long before in the spring. To shave all the fields and meadows of New England clean ! If men did this but once, and not every year, we should never hear the last of that labor; it would be more famous in each farmer's case than Buonaparte's road over the Simplon. It has no other bulletin but the truthful "Farmer's Almanac." Ask them where scythe-snaths are made and sold, and rifles too, if it is not a real labor. In its very weapons and its passes it has the semblance of war. Mexico was won with less exertion and less true valor than are required to do one season's haying in New England. The former work was done by those who played truant and ran away from the latter. Those Mexicans were mown down more easily than the summer's crop of grass in many a farmer's fields. Is there not some work in New England men ? This haying is no work for marines, nor for deserters; nor for United States troops, so called, nor for West Point cadets. It would wilt them, and they would desert. Have they not deserted? and run off to West Point?

 Every field is a battle-field to the mower, — a pitched battle too, — and whole winrows of dead have covered it in the course of the season. Early and late the farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time, Time's weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch. It is the summer's enterprise. And if we were a more poetic people, horns would be blown to celebrate its completion. There might be a Hay makers' Day. New England's peaceful battles. At Bunker Hill there were some who stood at the rail- fence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.1 They have not yet quitted the field. They stand there still; they alone have not retreated. 


The Polygala sanguinea, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red or purple heads. 

The dandelion still blossoms, and the lupine still, belated. 

I have been to Tarbell's Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough road. It has promised rain all day; cloudy and still and rather cool; from time to time a few drops gently spit ting, but no shower. The landscape wears a sober autumnal look. I hear a drop or two on my hat. I wear a thick coat. The birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet. The swallows skim low over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing near me as if I scared up insects for them. I see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump. 

Tarbell's Swamp is mainly composed of low and even but dense beds of Andromeda calyculata, or dwarf andromeda, which bears the early flower in the spring. Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?) andromeda; also pitch pines, birches, hardhack, and the common alder (Alnus serrulata), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry; and probably the Rhodora Canadensis might be found. The lead-colored berries of the Viburnum dentatum now. Cow -wheat and indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway cinquefoil. 

I detected a wild apple on the Marlborough road by its fragrance, in the thick woods; small stems, four inches in diameter, falling over or leaning like rays on every side; a clean white fruit, the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid. The fruit covered the ground. It is unusual to meet with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods. It seemed admirable to me. One of the noblest of fruits. With green specks under the skin. 

Prenanthes alba, white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert and variously shaped leaves; neottia; and hypericum. 

I hear the rain (11 p. m.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves. The melons needed it. Their leaves were curled and their fruit stinted. 

I am less somnolent for the cool season. I wake to a perennial day. 

The hayer's work is done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns nor ringing of bells. He celebrates it by going about the work he had postponed "till after haying"! If all this steadiness and valor were spent upon some still worthier enterprise!! 

All men's employments, all trades and professions, in some of their aspects are attractive. Hence the boy I resolved to be a minister and make cider, not thinking, boy as he was, how little fun there was in being a minister, willing to purchase that pleasure at any price. 

When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge, their bench on the new planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with no railing yet to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that I would be a carpenter and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place to work. One of the men had a fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he looked at from time to time. 

John Potter told me that those root fences on the Corner road were at least sixty or seventy years old.

 I see a solitary goldfinch now and then. 

Hieracium Marianum or scabrum; H. Kalmii or Canadense; Marlborough road. Leontodon autumriale passim.

H. D.. Thoreau , Journal, August 17, 1851

I can smell the ripening apples. August 9, 1851 ("Now the earliest apples begin to be ripe, but none are so good to eat as some to smell.")

The Trichostema dichotomum [blue-curls], — not only its bright blue flower above the sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, -- feed my spirit. See  July 31, 1856 ("Trichostema has now for some time been springing up in the fields, giving out its aromatic scent when bruised, and I see one ready to open.");:August 9, 1851 ("The Trichostema dichotomum is quite beautiful now in the cool of the morning."); August 11, 1853 ("Evening draws on while I am gathering bundles of pennyroyal on the further Conantum height. I find it amid the stubble mixed with blue-curls and, as fast as I get my hand full, tie it into a fragrant bundle.”); August 13, 1856 (“Is there not now a prevalence of aromatic herbs in prime? — The polygala roots, blue-curls, wormwood, pennyroyal, . . . etc., etc. Does not the season require this tonic?“)

I thank you, God. . . .I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. . . .the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. See June 22, 1851 ("We live and rejoice. I awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it ? . . .I feel my Maker blessing me.")

When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge. See July 5, 1851 ("We sit a while on the rails that are destined for the new railing."); August 8, 1851 ("The planks and railing of Hubbard's Bridge are removed."); August 12, 1851  ("Sitting on the sleepers of Hubbard’s Bridge, which is being repaired, now, 3 o’clock A. M., I hear a cock crow.")

August 17. See   A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau, August 17

Now to be grateful 

for the flood of life that is 

flowing over me. 

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 © 2009-2022

***

Aug. 17. For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour.

 The coolness concentrated ,your thought, however.

 As 1 could not command a sunny window, I went abroad on the morning of the 15th and lay in the sun in the fields in my thin coat, though it was rather cool even there.

 I feel as if this coolness would do me good.

 If it only makes my life more pensive! 

Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness ? 

There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek.

 It is positively joyful to me.

 It saves my life from being trivial.

 My life flows with a deeper current, no longer as a shallow and brawling stream, parched and shrunken by the summer heats.

 This coolness comes to condense the dews and clear the atmosphere.

 The stillness seems more deep and significant.

 Each sound seems to come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature, as if nature: had acquired some character and mind.

 The cricket, the gurgling stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe.

 My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods.

 I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing.

 I see a goldfinch go twittering through the still, louring day, and am reminded of the peeping flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season.

 Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! that in the trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might he ripe also! that I could match nature always with my moods! that in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish!

 Ah, I would walk, I would sit and sleep, with natural piety! 

What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds!

For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be buried in it.

 And then to think of those I love among men, who will know that I love them though I tell them not!

I sometimes feel as if I were rewarded merely for expecting better hours.

 I did not despair of worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood of life that is flowing over me.

 I am not so poor : I can smell the ripening apples; the very rills are deep; the autumnal flowers, the Trichostetna dichotomum, -not only its bright blue flower above the sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season, - feed my spirit, endear the earth to me, make me value myself and rejoice; the quivering of pigeons' wings reminds me of the tough fibre of the air which they rend.

 I thank you, God.

 I do not deserve anything, I am unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice.

 I am impure and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers.

 But I cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends I have.

 It seems to me that I am more rewarded for my expectations than for anything I do or can do.

 Ah, I would not tread on a cricket in whose song is such a revelation, so soothing and cheering to my car!

 Oh, keep my senses pure!

And why should I speak to my friends ? for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? 

We will meet, then, far away.

 The seeds of the summer are getting dry and falling from a thousand nodding heads.

 If I did not know you through thick and thin, how should I know you at all ?

 Ah, the very brooks seem fuller of reflections than they were! 

Ah, such provoking sibylline sentences they are! 

The shallowest is all at once unfathomable.

 How can that depth be fathomed where a man may see himself reflected ? 

The rill I stopped to drink at I drink in more than I expected.

 I satisfy and still provoke the thirst  of thirsts.

 Nut Meadow Brook where it crosses the road beyond Jenny Dugan's that was.

 I do not drink in vain.

 I mark that brook as if I had swallowed a water snake that would live in my stomach.

 I have swallowed something worth the while.

 The day is not what it was before I stooped to drink.

 Ah, I shall hear from that draught!

 It is not in vain that I have drunk.

 I have drunk an arrowhead.

 It flows from where all fountains rise.

 How many ova have I swallowed? 

Who knows what will be hatched within me? 

There were some seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water, which are expanding in me.

 The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him, - to suckle monsters.

 The snake in my stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water.

 When was it that I swallowed a snake? 

I have got rid of the snake in my stomach.

 I drank of stagnant waters once.

 That accounts for it.

 I caught him by the throat and drew him out, and had a well day after all.

 Is there not such a thing as getting rid of the snake which you have swallowed when young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which has worried you in your waking hours and in your sleep ever since, and appropriated the life that was yours ? 

Will he not ascend into your mouth at the sound of running water- 

Then catch him boldly by the head and draw him out, though you may think his tail be curled about your vitals.

 The farmers are just finishing their meadow-haying.

 (To-day is Sunday.) 

Those who have early potatoes may be digging them, or doing any other job which the haying has obliged them to postpone.

 For six weeks or more this has been the farmer's work, to shave the surface of the fields and meadows clean.

 This is done all over the country.

 The razor is passed over these parts of nature's face the country over.

 A thirteenth labor which methinks would have broken the back of Hercules, would have given him a memorable sweat, accomplished with what sweating of scythes and early and late! I chance [to] know one young man who has lost his life in this season's campaign, by overdoing.

 In haying time some men take double wages, and they are engaged long before in the spring.

 To shave all the fields and meadows of New England clean! If men did this but once, and not every year, we should never hear the last of that labor ; it would be more famous in each farmer's case than Buonaparte's road over the Simplon.

 It has no other bulletin but the truthful "Farmer's Almanac.

" Ask them where scythe-snaths are made and sold, and rifles too, if it is not a real labor.

 In its very weapons and its passes it has the semblance of war.

 Mexico was won with less exertion and less true valor than are required to do one season's baying in New England.

 The former work was done by those who played truant and ran awav from the latter.

 Those Mexicans were mown dowT1 more easily than the summer's crop of grass in many a, Farmer's fields.

 Is there not some work in New England men` 

Haying is no work for marines, nor for deserters ; nor for United States troops, so called, nor for West Point cadets.

 It would wilt them, and they would desert.

 [lave they not deserted ? and run off to West Point?

Every field is a battle-field to the mower, - a pitched battle too, - and whole winrows of dead have covered it in the course of the season.

 Earlv and late the farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time, Time's weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch.

 It is the summer's enterprise.

 And if we were a more poetic people, horns would be blown to celebrate its completion.

 There might be a Haymakers' Day.

 New England's peaceful battles.

 At Bunker Hill there were some who stood at the railfence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.

' They have not yet quitted the field.

 They stand there still ; they alone have not retreated.

 The Polygala sanguinea, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red or purple heads.

 The dandelion still blossoms, and the lupine still, belated.

 I have been to Tarbell's Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon, and to the Marlborough road.

 It has promised rain all day ; cloudy and still and rather cool ; from time to time a few drops gently spitting, but no shower.

 The landscape wears a sober autumnal look.

 I hear a drop or two on my hat.

 I wear a thick coat.

 The birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet.

 The swallows skim low over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing near me as if I scared up insects for them.

 I see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump.

 Tarbell's Swamp is mainly composed of low and even but dense beds of Andromeda calyculata, or dwarf a dromeda, which bears the *early flower in the spring.

 ' Stark and his companions met the enemy in the hay-field.

 Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?) andromeda ; also pitch pines, birches, hardback, and the common alder (Alms serrulata), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry ; and probably the Rhodora Canadensis might be found.

 The lead-colored berries of the Viburnum dentatum now.

 Cow-wheat and indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway cinquefoil.

 I detected a wild apple on the Marlborough road by its fragrance, in the thick woods ; small stems, four inches in diameter, falling over or leaning like rays on every side; a clean white fruit, the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid.

 The fruit covered the ground.

 It is unusual to meet with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods.

 It seemed admirable to me.

 One of the noblest of fruits.

 With green specks under the skin.

 Prenanthes alba, white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert and variously shaped leaves ; neottia ; and hypericum.

 I hear the rain (11 P.M.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the grass and leaves.

 The melons needed it.

 Their leaves were curled and their fruit stinted.

 I am less somnolent for the cool season.

 I wake to a perennial day.

 The hayer's work is done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns nor ringing of bells.

 He celebrates it by going about the work he had postponed "till after haying"! 

If all this steadiness and valor were spent upon some still worthier enterprise!! 

All men's employments, mens trades and professions, in some of their aspects are attractive.

 Hence the boy I knew, having sucked cider at a minister's cider-mill, resolved to be a minister and make cider, not 'thinking, boy as he was, how little fun there was in being a minister, willing to purchase that pleasure at any price.

 When I saw the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard's Bridge, their bench on the new planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with no railing yet to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that 1 would be a carpenter and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place to work.

 One of the men had a fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he looked at from time to time.

 John Potter told me that those root fences on the Corner road were at least sixty or seventy years old.

 I see a solitary goldfinch now and then.

 Hieracium Marianum or scabrum ; H. Kalmii or Canadense ; Marlborough road. Leontodon autumnale passim.

***

 Coolness See September 2, 1851 ("The first coolness is welcome, so serious and fertile of thought.")

Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. See July 31, 1856 ("I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years."); August 9, 1853 ("This is the season of small fruits. I trust, too, that I am maturing some small fruit as palatable in these months, which will communicate my flavor to my kind.");  August 18, 1853 (“What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now? — now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit?); August 18, 1856 ("As I go along the hillsides in sprout-lands, amid the Solidago stricta, looking for the blackberries left after the rain, the sun warm as ever, but the air cool nevertheless, I hear the steady (not intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder cricket, clear, loud, and autumnal, a season sound. Hear it, but see it not. It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail. Such preparation, such an outfit has our life, and so little brought to pass.");August 19, 1851. "The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind,"); August 20, 1858 ("This weather is a preface to autumn. There is more shadow in the landscape than a week ago, methinks, and the creak of the cricket sounds cool and steady. The grass and foliage and landscape generally are of a more thought-inspiring color, suggest what some perchance would call a pleasing melancholy. ");August 28, 1851 ("The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods."); March 12, 1852 ("The whistling of the wind, which makes one melancholy, inspires another.")