Now begins the year's dark green early afternoon (The seasons of the day, the year . . . a life.)

August 23

August 23, 2013

Observing the blackness of the foliage, especially between me and the light, I am reminded that it begins in the spring, the dewy dawn of the year, with a silvery hoary downiness, changing to a yellowish or light green, — the saffron-robed morn, — then to a pure, spotless, glossy green with light under sides reflecting the light, — the forenoon, — and now the dark green, or early afternoon, when shadows begin to increase, and next it will turn yellow or red, — the sunset sky, — and finally sere brown and black, when the night of the year sets in.

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. Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring.

Poke stems are now ripe. I walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of Lee's Cliff, where they have ripened early. Their stems are a deep, rich purple with a bloom, contrasting with the clear green leaves. Its stalks, thus full of purple wine, are one of the fruits of autumn. It excites me to behold it. What a success is its! What maturity it arrives at, ripening from leaf to root! 

May I mature as perfectly, root and branch, as the poke! It is a royal plant. I could spend the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicines. In August live on berries. Be blown on by all the winds. 

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season's influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. 

For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. "Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health. 

Some men think that they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 23, 1853

The perfect correspondence of a day and the year. See August 19, 1853 (“The day is an epitome of the year.”)

Live in each season as it passes. See April 24 1859 (Find your eternity in each moment)

Seasons of life. See July 3, 1840 (We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves.); October 7, 1851 (There is a great difference between this season and a month ago, -- as between one period of your life and another); November 14, 1853. (October answers to that period in the life of man when he is no longer dependent on his transient moods, when all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer appears. He bears his fruit.); January 30, 1854 (We are not to suppose that there is no fruit left for winter to ripen. It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars…)

Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. See December 16, 1853 (Would you be well, see that you are attuned to each mood of nature); July 14, 1854 (Health is a sound relation to nature). See also Walden (" Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.").



The blackness of the
foliage between me and
the light reminds me

it begins in spring,
the dewy dawn of the year,
silver downiness,

the saffron-robed morn,
a yellowish or light green,--
then pure glossy green

undersides reflect
the light, — the forenoon -- and now
early afternoon,

the dark green shadows
begin to increase, and next
it will turn yellow

or red, — the sunset --
finally black when the night
of the year sets in.

Now begins the year's

dark green early afternoon

when shadows increase.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The year's

dark green early afternoon

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-530823

The infinite roominess of nature - relaxed attention to the unexpected flash of the infinite

November 18..

A man can hardly

be said to be there if he

knows that he is there

Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot. Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl,-- hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo. This is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were an echo. This is my music each evening. 

I heard it last evening. It is a sound admirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. 

I rejoice that there are owls. This sound suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. 

Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. 

The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. 

A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.)

November 18, 2013

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1851

A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there. See note to August 28, 1841:

My life hath been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and live to utter it.

I rejoice that there are owls, a world in which owls live.   See November 9, 1851 (“Observing me still scribbling, [Channing] will say that he confines himself to the ideal. . . he leaves the facts to me. Sometimes, too, he will say a little petulantly, "I am universal; I have nothing to do with the particular and definite." I, too, would fain set down something beside facts.”); November 17, 1859 ("Thus disappear the haunts of the owls. The time may come when their aboriginal hoo-hoo-hoo will not be heard hereabouts."). See also Walden ("I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”)

Rejoice there are owls,

the roominess of nature

this world where owls live. 

November 18, 1851

The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work.  .See April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work . . . that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.”); June 14, 1853 ("That favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before."); December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”) See also Walden ("Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.")

Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.  

Relaxed attention

to the unexpected flash

of the infinite.

See De Quincey LAKE REMINISCENCES; BY THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER  quoting Wordsworth's description of  the observations possible after a period of focused attention, such as a bright star "falling upon the eye" and "carried to the heart"  just when, ear to the ground, listening intensely for the arrival of the post:

 "At the very instant when the organs of attention were all at once relaxing from their tension, the bright star hanging in the air above those outlines of massy blackness fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite"

--  and as illustrated  in Wordsworth's poem, "There was a Boy"  by  the boy's "gentle shock of mild surprise . . .carried far into his  heart"  while listening for owls. ("in that silence, while he hung listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise has carried far into his heart the voice of mountain-torrents") See also  Erica McAlpine, The Poet's Mistake - Page 42 (2020)

:

There was a Boy

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs

And islands of Winander! many a time,

At evening, when the earliest stars began

To move along the edges of the hills,

Rising or setting, would he stand alone,

Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;

And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands

Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls

That they might answer him.—And they would shout

Across the watery vale, and shout again,

Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause

Of silence such as baffled his best skill:

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received

Into the bosom of the steady lake . . .

Solstice  2004

collecting moments

untouched by hope or regret

expanding the present with

relaxed attention to the unexpected

splash!

a blue heron floats reflected in the lake.

a doe alert on the lawn

a fox runs across the road

a loon calls in the night

the light on the water

the sound of the waves.

A sudden wind clears the air.

ZPHX

Nov. 18. Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot. 

Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo. It sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. This is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were the echo, i. e. so far as the succession is concerned. 

This is my music each evening. I heard it last evening. The men who help me call it the "hooting owl " and think it is the cat owl. It is a sound admirably suited [to] the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized nor satisfied. 

I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts  I have. Let owls do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. This sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. 

Yet how few are seen, even by the hunters! 

The sun has shone for a day over this savage swamp, where the single spruce stands covered with usnea moss, which a Concord merchant mortgaged once to the trustees of the ministerial fund and lost, but now for a different race of creatures a new day dawns over this wilderness, which one would have thought was sufficiently dismal before. 

Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. 

The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He is not liable to exaggerate insignificant features. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there.

A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth's observations on relaxed attention.) You must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them, like the moss which has hung from the spruce, and as the partridge and the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets and at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent. If the man of science can put all his knowledge into propositions, the woodman has a great deal of incommunicable knowledge. 

Deacon Brown told me to-day of a tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer who used to help draw the seine behind the Jones house, who once, when he had hauled it without getting a single shad, held up a little perch in sport above his face, to show what he had got. At that moment the perch wiggled and dropped right down his throat head foremost, and nearly suffocated him; and it was only after considerable time, during which the man suffered much, that he was extracted or forced down. He was in a worse predicament than a fish hawk would have been. 

In the woods south of the swamp are many great holes made by digging for foxes.

A tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer. See June 4, 1856 ("Dr. Heywood worked over him a fortnight, while the perch was dissolving in his throat. He got little compassion generally, and the nickname “Perch” into the bargain. Think of going to sleep for fourteen nights with a perch, his fins set and his scales (!), dissolving in your throat! ! What dreams! What waking thoughts ")

Its sound reminds me

this infinite roominess-

a world where owls live.

November 18, 1851

https://tinyurl.com/HDT511118

My life is an ecstasy.

July 16.

The morning and the evening are sweet to me. Nature develops as I develop, and grows up with me. I wonder if a mortal has ever known what I know.

My life is ecstasy. I am all alive, and inhabit my body with inexpressible satisfaction. Both its weariness and its refreshment are sweet to me. To have such sweet impressions made on me, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes! 

I  am astonished. I am daily intoxicated. There comes to me  such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion --  and yet I have had nought to do with it. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence that I have not procured myself. I am dealt with by superior powers.

The maker of me is improving me. When I detect this interference I am profoundly moved. With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  July 16, 1851

I am all alive, and inhabit my body with inexpressible satisfaction. See November 25, 1850 ("The satisfaction of existence. . . .Just as the sun shines into us warmly and serenely, our Creator breathes on us and re-creates us."); December 11, 1855 ("To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery.  The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. Now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser redpolls.”) March 30, 1853 ("Ah, those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker . . . sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart.”) August 23, 1852 ("There is something invigorating in this air, which I am peculiarly sensible is a real wind blowing from over the surface of a planet.”)

This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence that I have not procured myself. See May 23, 1854("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.")

My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me  This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes! I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, — I said to other , “There comes into my mind such an indescribable , infinite , all - absorbing , divine , heavenly pleasure , a sense of elevation and expansion, and [ I ] have had nought to do with it . I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself  I speak as a witness on the stand , and tell what I have perceived." The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men. I wondered if a mortal had ever known what I knew. I looked in books for some recognition of a kindred experience, but, strange to say, I found none 


What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than from impure to be becoming pure? It is almost desirable to be impure that we may be the subject of this improvement. That I am innocent to my self! That I love and reverence my life! That I am better fitted for a lofty society to-day than I was yesterday! To make my life a sacrament! What is nature without this lofty tumbling? May I treat myself with more and more respect and tenderness. May I not for get that I am impure and vicious. May I not cease to love purity. May I go to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more perfect day.  May I so live and refine my life as fitting myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy.  May I treat myself tenderly as I would treat the most innocent child whom I love; may I treat children and my friends as my newly discovered self. Let me forever go in search of myself; never for a moment think that I have found myself; be as a stranger to myself, never a familiar, seeking acquaintance still. May I be to myself as one is to me whom I love, a dear and cherished object. What temple, what fane, what sacred place can there be but the innermost part of my own being? The possibility of my own improvement, that is to be cherished. As I regard myself, so I am. O my dear friends, I have not forgotten you. I will know you to-morrow. I associate you with my ideal self. I had ceased to have faith in myself. I thought I was grown up and become what I was intended to be, but it is earliest spring with me. In relation to virtue and innocence the oldest man is in the beginning spring and vernal season of life. It is the love of virtue makes us young ever. That is the fountain of youth, the very aspiration after the perfect. I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world. The lecturer suggested to me that I might become better than I am. Was it not a good lecture, then? May I dream not that I shunned vice; may I dream that I loved and practiced virtue.

I feel my Maker blessing me.

June 22 

The world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. I awake to its music with the calmness of a lake when there is not a breath of wind. Whom shall I thank for it? 

To be calm, to be serene! 

Are our serene moments mere foretastes of heaven,  – or a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our lives? 

June 22, 2016

Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as never before in our lives. We become like a still lake of purest crystal. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. 

And without effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. Such clarity obtained by such pure means! -- by simple living, by honesty of purpose.

So is it with us.

We live and rejoice.

I feel my Maker blessing me. 

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, June 22, 1851

All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. See Walden ("A lake . . . is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.")

There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; See Day would not dawn if it were not for the inward Morning.("Waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather"); August 31, 1852 ("The wind is gone down; the water is smooth; a serene evening is approaching; the clouds are dispersing. . . .The reflections are the more perfect for the blackness of the water. This is the most glorious part of this day, the serenest, warmest, brightest part, and the most suggestive."); July 21, 1853 ("He who passes over a lake at noon, when the waves run, little imagines its serene and placid beauty at evening, as little as he anticipates his own serenity."). June 16, 1854 ("We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them. When we are not serene, we go not to them."); Walden ("By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent . . . I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it")

The unclouded mind,

serene, pure, ineffable

like the western sky.

January 17, 1852

Serene as the sky,

emulating nature with

calm and peaceful lives.

October 3, 1859

So perfectly calm,

yet no man but myself sees

the Pond this morning.

April 14, 1852

See  also  Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Serene as the Sky and  Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A body awake in the world.

Sometimes we are calmed

like a still lake when there is

not a breath of wind.

All the world goes by

 and without effort our depths 

revealed to ourselves.

We touch the world and

feel our Maker blessing us.

June 22, 1851

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I feel my Maker blessing 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 ©  2009-2025

My pulse must beat with Nature. After a hard day's work without a thought, turning my very brain into a mere tool, only in the quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the cricket, which in fact has been chirping all day.

In my better hours I am conscious of the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom ... What is that other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured ? which alone I love ? Is it a life for this world? ... Are our serene moments mere foretastes of heaven, — joys gratuitously vouchsafed to us as a consolation, — or simply a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our lives? 

To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch. So is it with us. 

Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to our selves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps. 

Such clarity! obtained by such pure means! by simple living, by honesty of purpose. We live and rejoice. I awoke into a music which no one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it ? 

The luxury of wisdom! the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things ? I feel my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

And I hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood thrushes whetting their steel-like notes. Such keen singers ! It takes a fiery heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strains! Always they are either rising or falling to a new strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again ! saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush discharges his song. It is delivered like a bolas, or a piece of jingling steel.

This is a very beautiful November day

November 22

This is a very beautiful November day, - a cool but clear, crystalline air. It is a day to behold and to ramble over the hard (stiffening) and withered surface of the tawny earth. 

Every plant's down glitters with a silvery light along the Marlborough road.  A thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun. 

I rejoice in the bare, bleak, hard, and barren-looking surface of the tawny pastures, the firm outline of the hills, and the air so bracing and wholesome.

You walk fast and far, and every apple left out is grateful to your invigorated taste. 

You enjoy not only the bracing coolness, but all the heat and sunlight that there is, reflected back to you from the earth. The sandy road itself, lit by the November sun, is beautiful. 

Shrub oaks and young oaks generally and hazel bushes and other hardy shrubs, now more or less bare, are your companions, as if it were an iron age yet in simplicity, innocence, and strength a golden one. 

Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him.

Though your hands are numb with cold, your sense of enjoyment is not benumbed. You cannot now find an apple but it is sweet to taste. 

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.

Though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on to your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1860

This is a very beautiful November day, See May 5, 1852 ("Every part of the world is beautiful today."); May 18, 1852 ("The world can never be more beautiful than now."); August 19, 1853 ("It is a glorious and ever-memorable day."); September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, It is glorious November weather

A thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun. See  November 3, 1857 ("It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig.");  November 28, 1856 ("The sunlight reflected from the many ascending twigs of bare young chestnuts and birches, very dense and ascendant with a marked parallelism, they remind me of the lines of gossamer at this season, being almost exactly similar to the eye. It is a true November phenomenon.")

You walk fast and far, and every apple left out is grateful to your invigorated taste. See October 27, 1855 (“To appreciate their wild and sharp flavors, it seems necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, the frosty weather nips your fingers (in November), the wind rattles the bare boughs and rustles the leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. Some of those apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”); November 4, 1855 ("It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild apple.“); November 11, 1850 ("Now is the time for wild apples.")

Summer is gone with all its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. Still he beholds the same inaccessible beauty around him. See Henry Thoreau, A Week (Wednesday) ("I have found all things thus far,persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources."); May 1850 ("It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is."); November 16, 1850 ("Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me. . . the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me."); November 21, 1850 ("How adapted these forms and colors to my eye! A meadow and an island! What are these things?") December 11, 1855 ("We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Nature is genial to man (the anthropic principle) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  We are made to love

To see a distant horizon through a clear air . . . is is wealth enough for one afternoon. See May 25, 1851 ("These are the resting-places in a walk . . .  A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth. The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood."); September 12, 1851 ("It is worth the while to see the mountains in the horizon once a day.") See also A Book of the Seasons,by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon

It is glorious November weather, and only November fruits are out. See November 21, 1850 ("I get nothing to eat in my walks now but wild apples, sometimes some cranberries, and some walnuts. The squirrels have got the hazelnuts and chestnuts."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, It is glorious November weather

November 22. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 22

November's bare bleak

inaccessible beauty

seen through a clear air.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, This is a very beautiful November 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 ©  2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-601122

Ripple of life

April 21.

April 21, 2019

 Setting pines all day. This makes two and a half days, with two men and a horse and cart to help me. We have set some four hundred trees at fifteen feet apart diamondwise, covering some two acres. 

I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate, and occasionally helps the other dig up the trees. 

We prefer bushy pines only one foot high which grow in open or pasture land, yellow-looking trees which are used to the sun, instead of the spindling dark-green ones from the shade of the woods. Our trees will not average much more than two feet in height, and we take a thick sod with them fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There are a great many more of these plants to be had along the edges and in the midst of any white pine wood than one would suppose. 

One man charged us five or six cents for them about a mile and a half distant! Got about one hundred and twenty from George Heywood's land and the rest from the Brister lot and this Wyman lot itself. 

R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound. 

We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us. 

See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day. 

I hear of a robin's nest begun, and that geese go over to-day. 

Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day. 

Storer's account of the salamanders concludes with these words, "All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large numbers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned." The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders. 

In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, — S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, — both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath. 

The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them.

What pretty things go to make up the sum of life in any valley! 

This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, the bright spotted butterflies that flutter from time to time over the dry leaves, and the minnows and salamanders that dart in the water itself. Beneath this play of ripples which reflect the sky, — a darker blue than the real, — the vermilion-spotted salamanders are darting at the various grotesque-formed larva? of the lake.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1859

Setting pines all day. See April 19, 1859 ("Began to set white pines in R.W.E.'s Wyman lot."); April 22, 1859 ("When setting the pines at Walden the last three days, I was sung to by the field sparrow.")

The first-named [salamander] is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, See April 18, 1859 (("Ed Emerson shows me his aquarium. He has two . . . salamanders, one from Ripple Lake and the other from the pool behind my house . . . One some four inches long, with a carinated and waved (crenated) edged tail as well as light-vermilion spots on the back, evidently the Salamandra dorsalis.")

The S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, See April 18, 1859 (“The other two thirds as large, a very handsome bright orange salmon, also with vermilion spots, which must be the true S. symmetrica.”); see also  December 5, 1858 ('Its back is indeed ornamented with two rows of bright vermilion spots, but these can only be detected on the very closest inspection”); December 3, 1858 ("a row of very minute vermilion spots, not detected but on a close examination, on each side of the back”) 

The sum of life. See Darwin, Origin of the Species (November 24, 1859) (Imagine a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.)

This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, ... this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real ... See April 9, 1859 ("Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days.”)