Evening Kosmos.

 August 31

Proserpinaca palustris, spear-leaved proserpinaca, mermaid-weed. (This in Hubbard's Grove on my way to Conantum.) 

A hornets' (?) nest in a rather tall huckleberry bush, the stems projecting through it, the leaves spreading over it. How these fellows avail themselves of the vegetables ! They kept arriving, the great fellows, but I never saw whence they came, but only heard the buzz just at the entrance. (With whitish abdomens.) At length, after I have stood before the nest five minutes, during which time they had taken no notice of me, two seemed to be consulting at the entrance, and then one made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint and retired. They spoke as plainly as man could have done.

 I see that the farmers have begun to top their corn. Examined my old friend the green locust ( ? ), shrilling on an alder leaf. What relation does the fall dandelion bear to the spring dandelion ? 

There is a rank scent of tansy now on some roads, disagreeable to many people from being associated in their minds with funerals, where it is sometimes put into the coffin and about the corpse. 

I have not observed much St. John's-wort yet. 

Galium triflorum, three-flowered cleavers, in Conant's Spring Swamp; also fever-bush there, now budded for next year. 

Tobacco-pipe (Monotropa uniflora) in Spring Swamp Path.

 I came out of the thick, dark, swampy wood as from night into day. Having forgotten the daylight, I was surprised to see how bright it was. I had light enough, methought, and here was an afternoon sun illumining all the landscape . It was a surprise to me to see how much brighter an ordinary afternoon is than the light which penetrates a thick wood. 

One of these drooping clusters of potato balls would be as good a symbol, emblem, of the year's fertility as anything, - better surely than a bunch of grapes. Fruit of the strong soil, containing potash ( ? ).The vintage is come; the olive is ripe. 

"I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;

And with forc'd fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year; "

Why not for my coat-of -arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato balls, - in a potato field ?  

What right has a New England poet to sing of wine, who never saw a vineyard, who obtains his liquor from the grocer, who would not dare, if he could, tell him what it is composed of. A Yankee singing in praise of wine! It is not sour grapes in this case, it is sweet grapes; the more inaccessible they are the sweeter they are. 

It seemed to me that the year had nothing so much to brag of as these potato balls. Do they not concern New-Englanders a thousand times more than all her grapes ? In Moore's new field they grow, cultivated with the bog hoe, manured with ashes and sphagnum. How they take to the virgin soil ! 

Shannon tells me that he took a piece of bog land of Augustus Hayden, cleared, turned up the stumps and roots and burned it over, making a coat of ashes six inches deep, then planted potatoes. He never put a hoe to it till he went to dig them; then between 8 o'clock A. M. and 5 P. M. he and another man dug and housed seventy - five bushels apiece !! 

Cohush now in fruit, ivory-white berries tipped now with black on stout red pedicels, - Actœa alba. Collinsonia Canadensis, horseweed  I had discovered this singular flower there new to me, and, having a botany by me, looked it out. What a surprise and disappointment, what an insult and impertinence to my curiosity and expectation, to have given me the name " horse- weed ! " 

Cohush Swamp is about twenty rods by three or four. Among rarer plants it contains the basswood, the black ( as well as white ) ash, the fever - bus, the cohush, the collinsonia, not to mention sassafras, poison sumach, ivy, agrimony, Arum triphyllum, ( sweet viburnum ( ? ) in hedges near by ), ground - nut, touch-me- not ( as high as your head ), and Eupatorium purpureum ( eight feet, eight inches high, with a large convex corymb ( hemi-spherical ) of many stories, fourteen inches wide; width of plant from tip of leaf to tip of leaf two feet, diameter of stalk one inch at ground, leaves seven in a whorl ). 

Rare plants seem to love certain localities. As if the original Conant had been a botanist and endeavored to form an arboretum. A natural arboretum ? The handsome sweet viburnum berries, now red on one cheek. It was the filiform crowfoot ( Ranunculus filiformis ) that I saw by the riverside the other day and to - day. The season advances apace.

 The flowers of the nettle-leaved vervain are now near the ends of the spike, like the blue. Utricularia inflata, whorled bladderwort, floating on the water at same place. Gentiana Saponaria budded. Gerardia flava at Conant's Grove. 

Half an hour before sunset I was at Tupelo Cliff, when, looking up from my botanizing ( I had been examining the Ranunculus filiformis, the Sium latifolium ( ?? ), and the obtuse galium on the muddy shore), I saw the seal of evening on the river. There was a quiet beauty in the landscape at that hour which my senses were prepared to appreciate. The sun going down on the west side, that hand being already in shadow for the most part, but his rays lighting up the water and the willows and pads even more than before. His rays then fell at right angles on their stems. 

I sitting on the old brown geologic rocks, their feet submerged and covered with weedy moss (utricularia roots? ) Sometimes their tops are submerged. The cardinal-flowers standing by me. The trivialness of the day is past. The greater stillness, the serenity of the air, its coolness and transparency, the mistiness being condensed, are favorable to thought. (The pensive eve.) 

The coolness of evening comes to condense the haze of noon and make the air transparent and the outline of objects firm and distinct, and chaste  (chaste eve); even as I am made more vigorous by my bath, am more continent of thought. After bathing, even at noonday, a man realizes a morning or evening life. 

The evening air is such a bath for both mind and body. When I have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has been all trivial, - as well field and wood as highway, - then at eve the sun goes down westward, and the wind goes down with it, and the dews begin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. 

I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty. Thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to feel their oats, their nutriment, and are not oppressed by the belly's load. It is abstinence from loading the belly anew until the brain and divine faculties have felt their vigor. Not till some hours does my food invigorate my brain, - ascendeth into the brain. We practice at this hour an involuntary abstinence. We are comparatively chaste and temperate as Eve herself; the nutriment is just reaching the brain.

 Every sound is music now. The grating of some distant boat which a man is launching on the rocky bottom, though here is no man nor inhabited house, nor even cultivated field, in sight, this is heard with such distinctness that I listen with pleasure as if it was [ sic ] music.

 The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting because of their nakedness below. How rich, like what we love to read of South American primitive forest, is the scenery of this river! What luxuriance of weeds, what depth of mud along its sides! These old antehistoric, geologic  ante-diluvian rocks, which only primitive wading birds, still lingering among us, are worthy to tread. 

The season which we seem to live in anticipation of is arrived. The water, indeed, reflects heaven because my mind does; such is its own serenity, its transparency and stillness. With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses! Such a medicated bath as only nature furnishes. A fish leaps, and the dimple he makes is observed now. How ample and generous was nature! My inheritance is not narrow. Here is no other this evening. 

Those resorts which I most love and frequent, numerous and vast as they are, are as it were given up to me, as much as if I were an autocrat or owner of the world, and by my edicts excluded men from my territories. Perchance there is some advantage here not enjoyed in older countries. 

There are said to be two thousand inhabitants in Concord, and yet I find such ample space and verge, even miles of walking every day in which I do not meet nor see a human being, and often not very recent traces of them . So much of man as there is in your mind, there will be in your eye . Methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as it is possible, I walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from society of men, but turned loose into the woods, the only man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent as if man and his customs and institutions were not . 

The catbird, or the jay, is sure of the whole of your ear now. Each noise is like a stain on pure glass. The rivers now, these great blue subterranean heavens, reflecting the supernal skies and red-tinted cloud. 

A fly (or gnat ?) will often buzz round you and persecute you like an imp. How much of imp-like, pestering character they express ! ( I hear a boy driving home his cows . ) 

What unanimity between the water and the sky! - one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale ! 

Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be. Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?

 We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night. It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars;

• if there were two persons whose pulses beat together, 
• if men cared for the κόσμος, or beauty of the world; 
• if men were social in a high and rare sense; 
• if they associated on high levels;
• if we took in with our tea a draught of the transparent, dew-freighted evening air;
• if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky;
• if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads. 

The air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all those fragrances which during the day have been filling and have been dispersed in the atmosphere. The fine fragrances, perchance, which have floated in the upper atmospheres have settled to these low vales ! 

I talked of buying Conantum once, but for want of money we did not come to terms. But I have farmed it in my own fashion every year since.

 I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants, if by their lives they have identified themselves with them. There may be a few Kalmias. But it must be done very sparingly, or, rather, discriminatingly, and no man's name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers that the flowers themselves may be supposed thus to reciprocate his love. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 31, 1851

One made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint. See August 7, 1854 ("A wasp stung me at one high blueberry bush on the forefinger of my left hand, just above the second joint. It was very venomous;. . . and the finger soon swelled much below the joint, so that I could not completely close the finger,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. Wasps and Hornets

There is a rank scent of tansy now.  See August 9, 1851 ("Tansy now in bloom and the fresh white clethra")

Why not for my coat-of -arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato balls. See July 28, 1860 ("A man shows me in the street a single bunch of potato-balls . . . to some extent emulating a cluster of grapes. The very sight of them supplies my constitution with all needed potash.")

The κόσμος, or beauty of the world. See August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world, — name for the world, — - Kosmos, or beauty"); January 5, 1856 ("Order, κóσμos.")

I have not observed much St. John's-wort yet. See September 1, 1853 ("Johnswort, the large and common, is about done.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

The pensive eve. See August 31, 1852 ("Evening is pensive. The serenity is far more remarkable to those who are on the water.")

I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants . . . no man's name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers. See June 13, 1852 ("But Gray should not name it from the Governor of New York. . .If named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. . . .Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.")

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.

January 29

We must be very active if we would be clean and live our own life, and not a languishing and scurvy one. 

The trees, which are stationary, are covered with parasites, especially those which have grown slowly. 

The air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces.

Under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle, flourish crops of mildew, algae, and fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, – the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place. 

And the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. Algae take root in the corners of his eyes, and lichens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head, etc., etc., the lowest forms of vegetable life. '

This is the definition of dirt. We fall a prey to others of nature's tenants, who take possession of the unoccupied house. 

With the utmost inward activity we have to wash and comb ourselves beside, to get rid of the adhering seeds. Cleanliness is by activity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on. 

If he cuts pines, the woodchopper's hands are covered with pitch.

The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots. 

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched. IIe derives inspiration from his chagrins and his satisfactions.  His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives  impetus to what he says. He minds his business. He does not speculate while others drudge for him. 

I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same. 

It still melts. 

I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was. 

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields, which deceive me as if it were the ground itself. 

That point where the sun goes down is the cynosure which attracts all eyes at sundown and half an hour before. What do all other parts of the horizon concern us ? Our eyes follow the path of that great luminary. We watch for his rising, and we observe his setting. He is a companion and fellow-traveller we all have. We pity him who has his cheerless dwelling elsewhere, even in the northwest or southwest, off the high road of nature. 

The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway. 

Few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody.  Though the wind may blow strong or soft, in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound; but at length, when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the conditions not easy to be detected arrive, it suddenly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing. 

So is it with the lyres of bards, and for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the melody you do not hear.  When the gale is modified, wlen the favorable conditions occur, and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music. 

Of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. It is like the hum of the shaft, or other machinery, of a steamboat, which at length might become music in a divine hand. I feel greatly enriched by this telegraph. 

I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains. An Indian hue is singularly agreeable, even exciting, to the eye. Here the whole bank is sliding. Even the color of the subsoil excites me, as if I were already getting near to life and vegetation. This clay is faecal in its color also. It runs off at bottom info mere shoals, shallows, vasa, vague sand-bars, like the mammoth leaves, –– makes strands. 

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. 

The snow on the slope of the Cliffs is dotted with black specks, the seeds of the mullein which the wind has shaken out. When I strike the dry stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black like charcoal dust or powder. 

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. 

Day before yesterday, I saw the hunters out with a dozen dogs, but only two pussies, one white and one lithe gray one, did I see, for so many men and dogs, who seem to set all the village astir as if the fox's trail led through it. 

And Stedman Buttrick, with whom I was walking, was excited as if in the heyday of his youth.

Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him and take his thought at. the same time. 

You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture I have heard. 

For, well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When 1 see him in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. 

It was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion. 

A thick succession of mountain passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. 

Yet it would be how much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if there [were] a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap! 

Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.

H. D. Thoreau Journal, January 29, 1852

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.  See January 30, 1852 ("It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. ");  February 3, 1852 ("The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.") See also November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes"); February 3, 1859 ("The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself . . . It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.");Compare March 18, 1861 ("A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius - a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.")

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. See February 18, 1852 ("The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs."); March 4, 1852 ("The snow is melting on the rocks; the water trickles down in shining streams; the mosses look bright;"); March 28, 1859 ("These earth colors, methinks, are never so fair as in the spring.. Now the green mosses and lichens contrast with the brown grass, but ere long the surface will be uniformly green."); April 25, 1857 ("The dense, green, rounded beds of mosses in springs and old water-troughs are very handsome now, — intensely cold green cushions.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau., signs of spring: mosses bright green

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields . . . When I strike the dry [mullein ] stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black. See December 31, 1859 ("The mulleins are full of minute brown seeds, which a jar sprinkles over the snow, and [they] look black there; also the primrose, of larger brown seeds, which rattle out in the same manner"); March 24, 1859 ("They [goldfinches] are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels."); see also January 30, 1853 ("The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.")

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. See January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write."); January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852 ("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky."); December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon");  January 22, 1854 ("Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely."); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs."); February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.").

No man writes on lichens without having something to say.

March 1.

March 1, 2019

Linnæus, speaking of the necessity of precise and adequate terms in any science, after naming some which he invented for botany, says, “Termini praeservarunt Anatomiam, Mathesin, Chemiam, ab idiotis; Medicinam autem eorum defectus conculcavit.” (Terms (well defined) have preserved anatomy, mathematics, and chemistry from idiots; but the want of them has ruined medicine.)

But I should say that men generally were not enough interested in the first-mentioned sciences to meddle with and degrade them.

There is no interested motive to induce them to listen to the quack in mathematics, as they have to attend to the quack in medicine; yet chemistry has been converted into alchemy, and astronomy into astrology.

However, I can see that there is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses, for instance. No one masters them so as to use them in writing on the subject without being far better informed than the rabble about it.

New books are not written on chemistry or cryptogamia of as little worth comparatively as are written on the spiritual phenomena of the day.

No man writes on lichens, using the terms of the science intelligibly, without having something to say, but every one thinks himself competent to write on the relation of the soul to the body, as if that were a phænogamous subject.

After having read various books on various subjects for some months, I take up a report on Farms by a committee of Middlesex Husbandmen, and read of the number of acres of bog that some farmer has redeemed, and the number of rods of stone wall that he has built, and the number of tons of hay he now cuts, or of bushels of corn or potatoes he raises there, and I feel as if I had got my foot down on to the solid and sunny earth, the basis of all philosophy, and poetry, and religion even.

I have faith that the man who re deemed some acres of land the past summer redeemed also some parts of his character. I shall not expect to find him ever in the almshouse or the prison. He is, in fact, so far on his way to heaven.

When he took the farm there was not a grafted tree on it, and now he realizes something handsome from the sale of fruit. These, in the absence of other facts, are evidence of a certain moral worth.

 H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 1, 1852

There is a certain advantage in these hard and precise terms, such as the lichenist uses. See August 20, 1851 ("Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms, — to learn the value of words and of system."); January 15, 1853 ("I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it, and it has suggested less to me and I have made less use of it. I now first feel as if I had got hold of it.")); March 23, 1853 ("One studies books of science merely to learn the language of naturalists , — to be able to communicate with them."); August 29, 1858 ( "With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of 'the thing."); Compare March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race."); February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us. "). 

 [On Feb 3 Thoreau had checked out Linnaeus' Philosophia botanica by Carl von Linnaeus from Harvard Library (Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence, 290).] 

No man writes on lichens without having something to say. See February 7, 1859 ("I expect that the lichenist will have the keenest relish for Nature in her every-day mood and dress.. . . To study lichens is to get a taste of earth and health, to go gnawing the rails and rocks. This product of the bark is the essence of all times. The lichenist extracts nutriment from the very crust of the earth. A taste for this study is an evidence of titanic health, a sane earthiness. It makes not so much blood as soil of life. It fits a man to deal with the barrenest and rockiest experience. . . . — so the lichenist loves the tripe of the rock, — that which eats and digests the rocks. He eats the eater. “Eat-all” may be his name. A lichenist fats where others starve. His provender never fails."),

March 1.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,   March 1

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,

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

Get yourself therefore a name.

November 15

Here is a rainy day, which keeps me in the house.

Asked Therien this afternoon if he had got a new idea this summer.

“Good Lord ” says he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you work with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.”

I am pleased to read in Stoever's Life of Linnæus (Trapp's translation) that his father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnæus (Linden-tree-man ) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place, “a custom,” he says, “not unfrequent in Sweden, to take fresh appellations from natural objects.”

What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patronymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name, as memorable and distinct as their characters.

It is refreshing to get to a man whom you will not be satisfied to call John's son or Johnson's son, but a new name applicable to himself alone, he being the first of his kind. We may say there have been but so many men as there are sur names, and of all the John-Smiths there has been but one true John Smith, and he of course is dead.

Get yourself therefore a name, and better a nickname than none at all.

There was one enterprising boy came to school to me whose name was “Buster,” and an honorable name it was. He was the only boy in the school, to my knowledge, who was named.

What shall we say of the comparative intellectual vigor of the ancients and moderns, when we read of Theophrastus, the father of botany, that he composed more than two hundred treatises in the third century before Christ and the seventeenth before printing, about twenty of which remain, and that these fill six volumes in folio printed at Venice? Among the last are two works on natural history and the generation of plants. What a stimulus to a literary man to read his works! They were opera, not an essay or two, which you can carry between your thumb and finger.

Dioscorides (according to Stoever), who lived in the first century after Christ, was the first to inquire into the medicinal properties of plants, “the literary father of the materia medica." His work remains.

And next comes Pliny the Elder, and “by his own avowal (?), his natural history is a compilation from about twenty five hundred (?) different authors."

Conrad Gesner, of the Sixteenth Century, the first botanist of note among the moderns; also a naturalist generally.

In this century botany first “became a regular academical study.”

I think it would be a good discipline for Channing, who writes poetry in a sublimo-lipshod style, to write Latin, for then he would be compelled to say something always, and frequently have recourse to his grammar and dictionary. Methinks that what a man might write in a dead language could be more surely translated into good sense in his own language, than his own language could be translated into good Latin, or the dead language.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 15, 1851 

Get yourself therefore a name, and better a nickname than none at all. See Walking (1861 ("Travelers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit.. . .So every man has an original wild name. . . . Our true names are nicknames."); August 19, 1851  ("There was one original name well given, Buster Kendal"); June 4, 1856 ("He pointed out the site of “Perch” Hosmer’s house in the small field south of road this side of Cozzens’s; all smooth now. 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.")

Theophrastus, the father of botany, . . Dioscorides . . . Pliny the Elder.. .Conrad Gesner. See February 17, 1852 ("If you would read books on botany, go to the fathers of the science.")

These evergreen wilderness names.

June 4.

Saturday.

The date of the introduction of the Rhododendron maximum into Concord is worth preserving, May 16th, ’53. They were small plants, one to four feet high, some with large flower-buds, twenty-five cents apiece; and I noticed next day one or more in every front yard on each side of the street, and the inhabitants out watering them. Said to be the most splendid native flower in Massachusetts; in a swamp in Medfield. I hear to-day that one in town has blossomed.

George Minott says he saw many lightning-bugs a warm evening the forepart of this week, after the rains. Probably it was the 29th.

P. M. – To Hubbard’s Close Swamp.

The vetch just out by Turnpike, — dark violet purple.

Horse-radish fully out (some time).

The great ferns are already two or three feet high in Hubbard’s shady swamp.

The clintonia is abundant there along by the foot of the hill, and in its prime. Look there for its berries. Commonly four leaves there, with an obtuse point, — the lady’s-slipper leaf not so rich, dark green and smooth, having several channels.

June 4, 2020

The bullfrog now begins to be heard at night regularly; has taken the place of the hylodes.

Looked over the oldest town records at the clerk’s office this evening, the old book containing grants of land. Am surprised to find such names as “Walden Pond” and “Fair Haven” as early as 1653, and apparently 1652; also, under the first date at least, “Second Division,” the rivers as North and South Rivers (no Assabet at that date), “Swamp bridge,” apparently on back road, “Goose Pond,” “Mr. Flints Pond,” “Nutt Meadow,” “Willow Swamp,” “Spruce Swamp,” etc., etc. “Dongy,” “Dung Hole,” or what-not, appears to be between Walden and Fair Haven.

Is Rocky Hill Mr. Emerson’s or the Cliffs? Where are South Brook, Frog Ponds, etc., etc., etc.? 

It is pleasing to read these evergreen wilderness names, i. e. of particular swamps and woods, then applied to now perchance cleared fields and meadows said to be redeemed. The Second Division appears to have been a very large tract between the two rivers.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 4, 1853

Hubbard's shady swamp. Thoreau’s first reference to this swamp (Clintonia Swamp, Clintonia Maple Swamp, E. Hubbard’s Clintonia Swamp, E. Hubbard’s Swamp, Hubbard’s Close Swamp) – a large swamp just to the northeast of Hubbard Close. ~ Ray Angelo, Thoreau's Place Names, Clintonia Swamp

The clintonia is abundant there along by the foot of the hill, and in its prime. See June 2, 1853 ("Clintonia borealis, a day or two. This is perhaps the most interesting and neatest of what I may call the liliaceous (?) plants we have. Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear dark-green leaves . . . arching over from a centre at the ground, sometimes very symmetrically disposed in a triangular fashion; and from their midst rises the scape [ a ] foot high, with one or more umbels of“green bell - shaped flowers,” yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward"); June 10, 1855 ("Clintonia, apparently four or five days (not out at Hubbard’s Close the 4th).")

The bullfrog now begins to be heard at night regularly; has taken the place of the hylodes. See May 10, 1858 ("At length, near Ball's Hill, I hear the first regular bullfrog's trump. . . . This sound, heard low and far off over meadows when the warmer hours have come, grandly inaugurates the summer. "); June 13, 1851 ("The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,- the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog, and the bullfrog."); June 15, 1860 ("The bullfrogs now commonly trump at night, and the mosquitoes are now really troublesome. For some time I have not heard toads by day, and the hylodes appear to have done. . . . A new season begun");See also June 16, 1860 ("It appears to me that these phenomena occur simultaneously, say June 12th . . .")

The old writers have left a more lively and lifelike account of the gorgon than modern writers give us of real animals.

February 18.

A snow-storm, falling all day; wind northeast. The snow is fine and drives low; is composed of granulated masses one sixteenth to one twentieth of an inch in diameter. Not in flakes at all. I think it is not those large-flaked snow-storms that are the worst for the traveller, or the deepest.

It would seem as if the more odd and whimsical the conceit, the more credible to the mass. They require a surprising truth, though they may well be surprised at any truth. For example, Gesner says of the beaver: “The biting of this beast is very deep, being able to crash asunder the hardest bones, and commonly he never loseth his hold until he feeleth his teeth gnash one against another. Pliny and Solinus affirm, that the person so bitten cannot be cured, except he hear the crashing of the teeth, which I take to be an opinion without truth.”

Gesner (unless we owe it to the translator) has a livelier conception of an animal which has no existence, or of an action which was never performed, than most naturalists have of what passes before their eyes. The ability to report a thing as if [it] had occurred, whether it did or not, is surely important to a describer. They do not half tell a thing because you might expect them to but half believe it.

I feel, of course, very ignorant in a museum. I know nothing about the things which they have there, — no more than I should know my friends in the tomb. I walk amid those jars of bloated creatures which they label frogs, a total stranger, without the least froggy thought being suggested. Not one of them can croak. They leave behind all life they that enter there, both frogs and men.

For example, Gesner says again, “The tree being down and prepared, they take one of the oldest of their company, whose teeth could not be used for the cutting, (or, as others say, they constrain some strange beaver whom they meet withal, to fall flat on his back),... and upon his belly lade they all their timber, which they so ingeniously work and fasten into the compass of his legs that it may not fall, and so the residue by the tail draw him to the water side, where those buildings are to be framed, and this the rather seemeth to be true, because there have been some such taken that had no hair on their backs, but were pilled, which being espied by the hunters, in pity of their slavery or bondage, they have let them go away free.” Gives Albertus and Olaus Magnus as authorities for this.

Melvin tells me that he went a day or two ago to where G. M. Barrett had placed a dead cow of his, and that he found the snow thickly tracked by foxes to within five feet around the carcass, and they appeared to have sat down there, but so suspicious of some trick were they that they had not touched it.

Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P. M., there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. The history of the sky for that after noon will be but the development of that cloud.

I think that the most important requisite in describing an animal, is to be sure and give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and effect of all its parts, known and unknown. You must tell what it is to man. Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. Yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are as it were phenomena of dead matter. What is most interesting in a dog, for example, is his attachment to his master, his intelligence, courage, and the like, and not his anatomical structure or even many habits which affect us less.

If you have undertaken to write the biography of an animal, you will have to present to us the living creature, i. e., a result which no man can understand, but only in his degree report the impression made on him.

Science in many departments of natural history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; i. e., it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of animated nature must itself be animated.

The ancients, one would say, with their gorgons, sphinxes, satyrs, mantichora, etc., could imagine more than existed, while the moderns cannot imagine so much as exists.

In describing brutes, as in describing men, we shall naturally dwell most on those particulars in which they are most like ourselves, — in which we have most sympathy with them.

We are as often injured as benefited by our systems, for, to speak the truth, no human system is a true one, and a name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it. As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but so soon as we have learned to distinguish them, the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned.

I think, therefore, that the best and most harmless names are those which are an imitation of the voice or note of an animal, or the most poetic ones. But the name adheres only to the accepted and conventional bird or quadruped, never an instant to the real one.

There is always something ridiculous in the name of a great man, — as if he were named John Smith. The name is convenient in communicating with others, but it is not to be remembered when I communicate with myself.

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith to-day.

When the ancients had not found an animal wild and strange enough to suit them, they created one by the mingled [traits] of the most savage already known, - as hyenas, lionesses, pards, panthers, etc., etc., - one with another. Their beasts were thus of wildness and savageness all compact, and more ferine and terrible than any of an unmixed breed could be. They allowed nature great license in these directions. The most strange and fearful beasts were by them supposed to be the off spring of two different savage kinds. So fertile were their imaginations, and such fertility did they assign to nature.

In the modern account the fabulous part will be omitted, it is true, but the portrait of the real and living creature also. The old writers have left a more lively and lifelike account of the gorgon than modern writers give us of real animals.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1860

Gesner (unless we owe it to the translator) has a livelier conception of an animal which has no existence than most naturalists have of what passes before their eyes See February 17, 1860 ("Edward Topsell in his translation of Conrad Gesner, in 1607, called “The History of Four-footed Beasts”")

Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P.M. there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. Compare October 28, 1852 ("The clouds lift in the west, — indeed the horizon is now clear all around. Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape. . .”); August 25, 1852 ("What a salad to my spirits is this cooler, darker day!”); April 15, 1856 (" By 9 A. M. the wind has risen, the water is ruffled, the sun seems more permanently obscured, and the character of the day is changed."); See also February 5, 1855 ("In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings.")

A name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it. As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. See February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us. "). See also Walking (1861) The names of men are meaningless. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. Compare January 15, 1853 ("Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. . ."); Sepptember 24, 1854 ("What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it , who has known it longest and best.");  and Claude Monet ("To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.")

We live and walk on solidified fluids.

February 12. 

Return on green ice

to walk amid purple clouds

of the sunset sky. 

February 12, 1860

February 12, 2020

Sunday. 2 p. m., 22°. Walk up river to Fair Haven Pond. Clear and windy, — northwest.

About a quarter of an inch of snow fell last evening. This scarcely colors that part of the ground that was bare, and on all icy surfaces which are exposed to the sweep of the wind it is already distributed very regularly in thin drifts. It lies on the ice in waving lines or in lunar or semicircular, often spread-eagle, patches with very regular intervals, quite like the openings lately seen in the river when breaking up. The whole surface of the icy field is thus watered. That is, it is not collected in one place more than another, but very evenly distributed in these patches over the whole surface. 

I speak of what lies on the open ice. It comes flowing like a vapor from the northwest, low over the ice and much faster than a man walks, and a part is ever catching and lodging here and there and building a low drift, the northwest side of which will be abrupt with a sharp, beetling edge an inch or a half-inch high. No doubt these drifts are constantly changing their ground or rolling over. 

I see now that this vapor-like snow-dust is really sometimes blown up six or eight feet into the air, though for the most part it merely slides low over the ice. 

The greater part of this snow is lodged a foot deep amid the button-bushes, and there it continues to accumulate as long as the wind blows strong. 

In this cold, clear, rough air from the northwest we walk amid what simple surroundings! Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him. 

Above me is a cloudless blue sky; beneath, the sky- blue, i. e. sky-reflecting, ice with patches of snow scattered over it like mackerel clouds. At a distance in several directions I see the tawny earth streaked or spotted with white where the bank or hills and fields appear, or else the green-black evergreen forests, or the brown, or russet, or tawny deciduous woods, and here and there, where the agitated surface of the river is exposed, the blue-black water.

That dark-eyed water, especially when I see it at right angles with the direction of the sun, is it not the first sign of spring? How its darkness contrasts with the general lightness of the winter! It has more life in it than any part of the earth's surface. It is where one of the arteries of the earth is palpable, visible. Those are peculiar portions of the river which have thus always opened first, — been open latest and longest.

In winter not only some creatures, but the very earth is partially dormant; vegetation ceases, and rivers, to some extent, cease to flow. Therefore, when I see the water exposed in midwinter, it is as if I saw a skunk or even a striped squirrel out. It is as if the woodchuck unrolled himself and snuffed the air to see if it were warm enough to be trusted. 

It excites me to see early in the spring that black artery leaping once more through the snow-clad town. 

All is tumult and life there, not to mention the rails and cranberries that are drifting in it. Where this artery is shallowest, i. e., comes nearest to the surface and runs swiftest, there it shows itself soonest and you may see its pulse beat. These are the wrists, temples, of the earth, where I feel its pulse with my eye. The living waters, not the dead earth. It is as if the dormant earth opened its dark and liquid eye upon us.

But to return to my walk. I proceed over the sky- blue ice, winding amid the flat drifts as if amid the clouds, now and then treading on that thin white ice (much marked) of absorbed puddles (of the surface), which crackles somewhat like dry hard biscuit. Call it biscuit ice. Some of it is full of internal eyes like bird's-eye maple, little bubbles that were open above, and elsewhere I tread on ice in which are traced all kinds of characters, Coptic and Syriac, etc.

How curious those crinkled lines in ice that has been partly rotted, reaching down half an inch per pendicularly, or else at an angle with the surface, and with a channel that may be felt above! 

There are places (a few), like that at Hubbard's Grove, commonly thin or open, leading to the shore, with the ice puffed up, as if kept open by a musquash, where apparently a spring comes in. Only betrayed by its being slow to freeze, or by the rottenness of the ice there. 

This is the least observed of all tributaries, the first evidence of a tributary. 

On the east side of the pond, under the steep bank, I see a single lesser redpoll picking the seeds out of the alder catkins, and uttering a faint mewing note from time to time on account of me, only ten feet off. It has a crimson or purple front and breast. 

How unexpected is one season by another! Off Pleasant Meadow I walk amid the tops of bayonet rushes frozen in, as if the summer had been overtaken by the winter.

Returning just before sunset, I see the ice beginning to be green, and a rose-color to be reflected from the  low snow-patches. I see the color from the snow first where there is some shade, as where the shadow of a maple falls afar over the ice and snow. From this is reflected a purple tinge when I see none elsewhere. Some shadow or twilight, then, is necessary, umbra mixed with the reflected sun. 

Off Holden Wood, where the low rays fall on the river from between the fringe of the wood, the snow-patches are not rose-color, but a very dark purple like a grape, and thus there are all degrees from pure white to black. 

When crossing Hubbard's broad meadow, the snow-patches are a most beautiful crystalline purple, like the petals of some flowers, or as if tinged with cranberry juice. It is quite a faery scene, surprising and wonderful, as if you walked amid those rosy and purple clouds that you see float in the evening sky. What need to visit the crimson cliffs of Beverly? 

I thus find myself returning over a green sea, winding amid purple islets, and the low sedge of the meadow on one side is really a burning yellow. 

The hunter may be said to invent his game, as Neptune did the horse, and Ceres corn. 

It is twenty above at 5.30, when I get home. 

I walk over a smooth green sea, or aequor, the sun just disappearing in the cloudless horizon, amid thousands of these flat isles as purple as the petals of a flower. It would not be more enchanting to walk amid the purple clouds of the sunset sky. 

And, by the way, this is but a sunset sky under our feet, produced by the same law, the same slanting rays and twilight. Here the clouds are these patches of snow or frozen vapor, and the ice is the greenish sky between them. Thus all of heaven is realized on earth. 

You have seen those purple fortunate isles in the sunset heavens, and that green and amber sky between them. Would you believe that you could ever walk amid those isles? You can on many a winter evening. I have done so a hundred times. The ice is a solid crystalline sky under our feet. 

Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us. 

Thus the sky and the earth sympathize, and are subject to the same laws, and in the horizon they, as it were, meet and are seen to be one. 

I have walked in such a place and found it hard as marble. Not only the earth but the heavens are made our footstool.

That is what the phenomenon of ice means. The earth is annually inverted and we walk upon the sky. The ice reflects the blue of the sky. The waters become solid and make a sky below. The clouds grow heavy and fall to earth, and we walk on them. We live and walk on solidified fluids. 

We have such a habit of looking away that we see not what is around us. How few are aware that in winter, when the earth is covered with snow and ice, the phenomenon of the sunset sky is double! The one is on the earth around us, the other in the horizon. 

These snow-clad hills answer to the rosy isles in the west. The winter is coming when I shall walk the sky. The ice is a solid sky on which we walk. It is the inverted year. 

There is an annual light in the darkness of the winter night. The shadows are blue, as the sky is for ever blue. In winter we are purified and translated. The earth does not absorb our thoughts. It becomes a Valhalla. 

Next above Good Fishing Bay and where the man was drowned, I pass Black Rock Shore, and over the Deep Causeway I come to Drifted Meadow. 

North of the Warm Woodside (returning) is Bulrush Lagoon, — off Grindstone Meadow, — a good place for lilies; then Nut Meadow Mouth; Clamshell Bend, or Indian Bend; Sunset Reach, where the river flows nearly from west to east and is a fine sparkling scene from the hills eastward at sunset; then Hubbard's Bathing-Place, and the swift place, and Lily Bay, or Willow Bay.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 12, 1860

Above me is a cloudless blue sky; beneath, the sky-blue, sky-reflecting ice with patches of snow scattered over it like mackerel clouds See February 8, 1860 ("The ice is thus marked under my feet somewhat as the heavens overhead; there is both the mackerel sky and the fibrous flame or asbestos-like form in both.")

It is as if I saw a skunk or even a striped squirrel out. It is as if the woodchuck unrolled himself and snuffed the air to see if it were warm enough to be trusted. See Walden ("I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters.")

Returning just before sunset, I see the ice beginning to be green . . . See January 7, 1856 ("Returning, just before sunset, the few little patches of ice look green as I go from the sun (which is in clouds). It is probably a constant phenomenon in cold weather when the ground is covered with snow and the sun is low, morning or evening, and you are looking from it.")

On the east side of the pond, under the steep bank, I see a single lesser redpoll picking the seeds out of the alder catkins, and uttering a faint mewing note from time to time on account of me, only ten feet off. It has a crimson or purple front and breast. See March 5, 1853 ("They have a sharp bill, black legs and claws, and a bright-crimson crown or frontlet, in the male reaching to the base of the bill, with, in his case, a delicate rose or carmine on the breast and rump. [I]t has been the prevailing bird here this winter."); January 8, 1860 ("See a few on the top of a small black birch by the pond-shore, of course eating the seed. . . .When I heard their note, I looked to find them on a birch, and lo, it was a black birch!"); January 24, 1860 (" See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder) in Dennis Swamp by railroad. . . . They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse"); January 29, 1860 ("To-day I see quite a flock of the lesser redpolls eating the seeds of the alder, picking them out of the cones just as they do the larch, often head downward; and I see, under the alders, where they have run and picked up the fallen seeds, making chain-like tracks, two parallel lines. "); ; See also A Book of the Seasons, the Lesser Redpoll

Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him. See Walking ("I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, —I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the 'woods?") See also November 6, 1853 (“It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.”); November 3, 1861 ("All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most.")

Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term See January 15, 1853 ("Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. . .") March 5, 1858 ("Our scientific names convey a very partial information only; they suggest certain thoughts only. It does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects, given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race.")

The phenomenon of ice . . . We live and walk on solidified fluids. See January 31, 1859 ("Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon. Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are!")

There is an annual light in the darkness of the winter night. The shadows are blue, as the sky is forever blue. See February 3. 1852 ("Is not the sky unusually blue to-night? dark blue? Is it not always bluer when the ground is covered with snow in the winter than in summer?"); February 4, 1852 ("The sky is the most glorious blue I ever beheld, even a light blue on some sides, as if I actually saw into day.); February 5, 1852 ("The sky last night was a deeper, more cerulean blue than the far lighter and whiter sky of to-day."). See also May 11, 1853 ("Blue is the color of the day, and the sky is blue by night as well as by day, because it knows no night."); January 21, 1853 ("The blueness of the sky at night — the color it wears by day — is an everlasting surprise to me, suggesting the constant presence and prevalence of light in the firmament, that we see through the veil of night to the constant blue, as by day.") See also  Night and Moonlight (first published in the Atlantic Monthly, November 1863) ("Nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are reveling.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 12

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