It must be the largest lake in Middlesex.

November 7. 


8 A. M. – To Long Pond with W. E. C. . . .

Close by we found Long Pond, in Wayland, Framingham, and Natick, a great body of water with singularly sandy, shelving, caving, undermined banks; and there we ate our luncheon.

The mayflower leaves we saw there, and the Viola pedata in blossom.

We went down it a mile or two on the east side through the woods on its high bank, and then dined, looking far down to what seemed the Boston outlet (opposite to its natural outlet), where a solitary building stood on the shore.

It is a wild and stretching loch, where yachts might sail, — Cochituate.

It was not only larger but wilder and more novel than I had expected.

In some respects unlike New England.

I could hardly have told in what part of the world I was, if I had been carried there blindfolded.

Yet some features, at least the composition of the soil, were familiar.

The glorious sandy banks far and near, caving and sliding, — far sandy slopes, the forts of the land, where you see  the naked flesh of New England, her garment being blown aside like that of the priests (of the Levites?) when they ascend to the altar.

Seen through this November sky, these sands are dear to me, worth all the gold of California, suggesting Pactolus, while the Saxonville, factory-bell sounds o'er the woods.

That sound perchance it is that whets my vision. . . .

Dear to me to lie in, this sand; fit to preserve the bones of a race for thousands of years to come. And this is my home, my native soil; and I am a New-Englander. Of thee, O earth, are my bone and sinew made; to thee, O sun, am I brother. It must be the largest lake in Middlesex. To this dust my body will gladly return as to its origin. Here have I my habitat I am of thee.

Dear to me to lie in, this sand;

fit to preserve the bones of a race

for thousands of years to come.

And this is my home,

my native soil; and I am

a New-Englander.

Of thee, O earth,

are my bone

and sinew made.

To thee,

O sun,

am I brother.

To this dust

my body will gladly return

as to its origin.

Here have I

my habitat

I am of thee.

Returned by the south side of Dudley Pond, which looked fairer than ever, though smaller, - now so still, the afternoon somewhat advanced, Nobscot in the west in a purplish light . . .

At Nonesuch Pond, in Natick, we saw a boulder some thirty-two feet square by sixteen high, with a large rock leaning against it, -- under which we walked, -- forming a triangular frame, through which we beheld the picture of the pond. How many white Indians have passed under it! Boulder Pond!

Thence across lots by the Weston elm, to the bounds of Lincoln at the railroad.

Saw a delicate fringed purple flower, Gentiana crinita, between those Weston hills, in a meadow, and after on higher land.
. . .

The sun sets while we are perched on a high rock in the north of Weston.  It soon grows finger cold.

At Walden are three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon, one moon and two sheens further off.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 7, 1851

It is a wild and stretching loch, where yachts might sail, —Cochituate. See August 24, 1857 ("B. says . . . that Cochituate Pond is only between three and four miles long, or five including the meadows that are flowed, yet it has been called even ten miles long.")

Lake Cochituate was created by the construction, beginning in 1846, of a dam to raise Long Pond, as it was then called , nine feet to create the first public drinking water reservoir for Boston. The Lake consists of three linked kettle ponds in "the Great Sand Plain of Framingham" having a general north and south direction, within the Middlesex County towns of Framingham, Wayland and Natick. The Pond is nearly three and one half miles long , and its greatest breadth about eighteen hundred feet. It naturally discharges into the Sudbury River about 14 miles above Concord where the Sudbury or North River joins the Assabet to form the Concord River. See Annual Report of the Cochituate Water Board For 1851.

And this is my home, my native soil; and I am a New-Englander. See November 8, 1851 ("When I saw the bare sand at Cochituate I felt my relation to the soil. These are my sands not yet run out. Not yet will the fates turn the glass. This air have I title to taint with my decay. In this clean sand my bones will gladly lie. Like Viola pedata, I shall be ready to bloom again here in my Indian summer days. Here ever springing, never dying, with perennial root I stand; for the winter of the land is warm to me. While the flowers bloom again as in the spring, shall I pine? When I see her sands exposed, thrown up from beneath the surface, it touches me inwardly, it reminds me of my origin; for I am such a plant, so native to New England, me thinks, as springs from the sand cast up from below")

The Weston elm. See October 24, 1852 ("There is an agreeable prospect from near the post-office in the northwest of Sudbury. The southeast (?) horizon is very distant. . .extending to the Weston elm in the horizon. You are more impressed with the extent of earth overlooked than if the view were bounded by mountains.")

Three reflections of the bright full (or nearly) moon. See October 8, 1851 ("The sun set red in haze,. . .and the moon rose in like manner at the same time. . . . The moon is full."); February 3, 1852 ("The moon is nearly full tonight,"); March 7, 1852 ("To the woods by the full moon."); April 3, 1852 ("I came out mainly to see the light of the moon reflected from the meadowy flood. It is a pathway of light, of sheeny ripples, extending across the meadow toward the moon, consisting of a myriad little bent and broken moons.")

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

November 1.

November 1, 2021

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly, to say “yes” and “no” with authority, to make a square edge, to conceive and suffer the truth to pass through us living and intact, even as a waterfowl an eel, as it flies over the meadows, thus stocking new waters.

First of all a man must see, before he can say.

Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to certain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely.

A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself.  See not with the eye of science, which is barren, nor of youthful poetry, which is impotent. But taste the world and digest it.

It would seem as if things got said but rarely and by chance.

As you see, so at length will you say.

When facts are seen superficially, they are seen as they lie in relation to certain institutions, perchance.

But I would have them expressed as more deeply seen, with deeper references; so that the hearer or reader cannot recognize them or apprehend their significance from the platform of common life, but it will be necessary that he be in a sense translated in order to understand them; when the truth respecting his things shall naturally exhale from a man like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of the trapper.

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first.

What was enthusiasm in the young man must become temperament in the mature man. Without excitement, heat, or passion, he will survey the world which excited the youth and threw him off his balance.

As all things are significant, so all words should be significant.

It is a fault which attaches to the speaker, to speak flippantly or superficially of anything.

Of what use are words which do not move the hearer, are not oracular and fateful? 

A style in which the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all.

In your thoughts no more than in your walks do you meet men.

In moods I find such privacy as in dismal swamps and on mountain-tops.

Man recognizes laws little enforced, and he condescends to obey them. In the moment that he feels his superiority to them as compulsatory, he, as it were, courteously reënacts them but to obey them.

This on my way to Conantum, 2.30 P. M. 

November 1, 2018

It is a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature.

The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and I see the sky through them as through a crow's wing in every direction.

For the most part only the pines and oaks (white?) retain their leaves. At a distance, accordingly, the forest is green and reddish.

The crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod.

Minott says that G. M. Barrett told him that Amos Baker told him that during Concord Fight he went over behind the hill to the old Whittaker place (Sam Buttrick's) and stayed. Yet he was described as the only survivor of Concord Fight. Received a pension for running away? 

Fall dandelions look bright still.

The grass has got a new greenness in spots.

At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about.

The skunk-cabbage is already pushing up again.

The alders have lost their leaves, and the willows except a few shrivelled ones.

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. Here in the causeway, as I walk toward the sun, I perceive that the air is full of them streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretching across the road, and yet I cannot see them in any other direction, and feel not one. It looks as if the birds would be incommoded. They have the effect of a shimmer in the air. This shimmer, moving along them as they are waved by the wind, gives the effect of a drifting storm of light. It is more like a fine snow-storm which drifts athwart your path than anything else. What is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere, to call forth this activity? If there were no sunshine, I should never find out that they existed, I should not know that I was bursting a myriad barriers. Though you break them with your person, you feel not one.
Why should this day be so distinguished? 

The rain of night before last has raised the river at least two feet, and the meadows wear a late-fall look. The naked and weedy stems of the button-bush are suddenly submerged; you no longer look for pickerel from the bridges. The shallow and shrunken shore is also submerged.

I see so far and distinctly, my eyes seem to slide in this clear air.

The river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual.

It is all in the air.

The cinquefoil on Conantum.

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward.

The red shrub oak leaves abide on the hills.

The witch-hazels have mostly lost their blossoms, perhaps on account of the snow.

The ground wears its red carpet under the pines.

The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes. How long this?

Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minott house; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs.
It is of a more unspotted, transparent, and perhaps pinkish white than the common, has considerable branches as well as white ones, and its branches do not droop and curl downward like that. There will be some loose curls of bark about it.

The common birch is finely branched and has frequently a snarly head; the former is a more open and free-growing tree.

If at a distance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. You can tell where it has grown after the wood has turned to mould by a small fragment of its bark still left,-if it divides readily.

The common birch is more covered with moss, has the aspect of having grown more slowly, and has many more branches.

I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible on to birch bark.

It was so much easier than to write that sentence which the birch tree stands for.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 1, 1851

I feel blessed. I love my life. I warm toward all nature. See July 16, 1851 ("I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.");  August 15, 1851 ("May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.")

At first blush a man is not capable of reporting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first. See November 1, 1857 ("A higher truth, though only dimly hinted at, thrills us more than a lower expressed. ");  See also December 16, 1837("The fact will one day flower out into a truth.");June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth.”); February 18, 1852 ("I have a commonplace-book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in my mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success . . . I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant . . . I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); February 23. 1860 ("A fact stated barely is dry. It must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. It is like giving a man a stone when he asks you for bread.")

It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately. See May 21, 1851 ("I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts."); November 9, 1851 ("Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing;. . .facts to tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought:. . . I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal."); February 18, 1852 ("I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, ... I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all."); June 19, 1852 (“Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth, samara?, tinged with his expectation.”); May 10, 1853 (“I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant”); May 6, 1854 (“There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i. e. to be significant, must be subjective. ”); November 5, 1857 ("I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you.”)

It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. See November 1, 1860 ("Gossamer on the withered grass is shimmering in the fields, and flocks of it are sailing in the air."). See also November 7, 1855 ("Looking west over Wheeler’s meadow, I see that there has been much gossamer on the grass, and it is now revealed by the dewy mist which has collected on it.”); November 15, 1858 ("Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November"); see also note to November 3, 1857 ("Looking westward now, at 4 P.M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. 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,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Gossamer Days

Counted one hundred and twenty five crows in one straggling flock moving westward. See November 1, 1853 ("I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end.") See also October 20, 1859 ("I see a large and very straggling flock of crows fly southwest from over the hill behind Bull's and contending with the strong and cold northwest wind. This is the annual phenomenon. They are on their migrations."); October 29, 1855 ("I see and count about a hundred crows advancing in a great rambling flock from the southeast and crossing the river on high, and cawing.");  October 28, 1860 ("See a very large flock of crows").Compare March 5, 1854 ("And crows, as I think, migrating northeasterly. They come in loose, straggling flocks, about twenty to each, commonly silent, a quarter to a half a mile apart, till four flocks have passed, perhaps more. Methinks I see them going southwest in the fall.") Also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau: The American Crow

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

It is a bright clear

warm November day.

I feel blessed.

I love my life.

I warm toward all nature.

Gossamer cobwebs

shimmer in the air as a

drifting storm of light

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, First of all a man must see, before he can say.

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-511101

My life flows with a deeper current.

August 17

haymakers

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

If it only makes my life more pensive! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I see a solitary goldfinch now and then. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now to be grateful 

for the flood of life that is 

flowing over me. 

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

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

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2022

***

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

 The coolness concentrated ,your thought, however.

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

 I feel as if this coolness would do me good.

 If it only makes my life more pensive! 

Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness ? 

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

 It is positively joyful to me.

 It saves my life from being trivial.

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

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

 The stillness seems more deep and significant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I thank you, God.

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

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

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

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

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

 Oh, keep my senses pure!

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

We will meet, then, far away.

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

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

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

Ah, such provoking sibylline sentences they are! 

The shallowest is all at once unfathomable.

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

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

 I satisfy and still provoke the thirst  of thirsts.

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

 I do not drink in vain.

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

 I have swallowed something worth the while.

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

 Ah, I shall hear from that draught!

 It is not in vain that I have drunk.

 I have drunk an arrowhead.

 It flows from where all fountains rise.

 How many ova have I swallowed? 

Who knows what will be hatched within me? 

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

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

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

 When was it that I swallowed a snake? 

I have got rid of the snake in my stomach.

 I drank of stagnant waters once.

 That accounts for it.

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

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

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

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

 The farmers are just finishing their meadow-haying.

 (To-day is Sunday.) 

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

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

 This is done all over the country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Is there not some work in New England men` 

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

 It would wilt them, and they would desert.

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

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

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

 It is the summer's enterprise.

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

 There might be a Haymakers' Day.

 New England's peaceful battles.

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

' They have not yet quitted the field.

 They stand there still ; they alone have not retreated.

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

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

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

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

 The landscape wears a sober autumnal look.

 I hear a drop or two on my hat.

 I wear a thick coat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 The lead-colored berries of the Viburnum dentatum now.

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

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

 The fruit covered the ground.

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

 It seemed admirable to me.

 One of the noblest of fruits.

 With green specks under the skin.

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

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

 The melons needed it.

 Their leaves were curled and their fruit stinted.

 I am less somnolent for the cool season.

 I wake to a perennial day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I see a solitary goldfinch now and then.

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

***

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

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

May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented.

August 15. 

Friday. 

Hypericum Canadense, Canadian St. John's-wort, distinguished by its red capsules. The petals shine under the microscope, as if they had a golden dew on them. 

Cnicus pumilus, pasture thistle. How many insects a single one attracts ! While you sit by it, bee after bee will visit it, and busy himself probing for honey and loading himself with pollen, regardless of your over shadowing presence. He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color. 

Oxalis stricta, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved flower in pastures and corn-fields. 

Sagittaria sagittifolia, or arrowhead. It has very little root that I can find to eat. 

Campanula crinoides, var. 2nd, slender bellflower, vine-like like a galium, by brook-side in Depot Field. 

Impatiens, noli-me-tangere, or touch-me-not, with its dangling yellow pitchers or horns of plenty, which I have seen for a month by damp causeway thickets, but the whole plant was so tender and drooped so soon I could not get it home. 

May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever invented. May I never let the vestal fire go out in my recesses.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal August 15, 1851

Hypericum Canadense, Canadian St. John's-wort, distinguished by its red capsules. See July 19, 1856 ("It is the Hypericum ellipticum and Canadense (linear- leaved) whose red pods are noticed now.");August 17, 1856 ("Hypericum Canadense well out at 2 p. m.")   See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)


He sees its purple flower from afar, and that use there is in its color. See August 6, 1852 ("I find a bumblebee asleep in a thistle blossom, having crowded himself in deep amid the dense florets, out of the reach of birds, while the sky was overcast"); ; September 30, 1852 ("If there are any sweet flowers still lingering on the hillside, it is known to the bees both of the forest and the village."); October 11, 1856 ("A pasture thistle with many fresh flowers and bees on it."); March 18, 1860 ("No doubt this flower, too, has learned to expect its winged visitor knocking at its door in the spring."); July 29, 1853 (“The insect that comes after the honey or pollen of a plant is necessary to it and in one sense makes a part of it”)

May I love and revere myself above all the gods See July 16, 1851 ("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. ...[May] I love and worship myself with a love which absorbs my love for the world.");  January 9, 1853 ("May I lead my life the following year as innocently! May it be as fair and smell as sweet!. . .. It will go forth in April, this vestal now cherishing her fire, to be married to the sun."); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); 

Stone fruit II

March 28. 

P. M. — Paddle to the Bedford line. 

It is now high time to look for arrowheads, etc. I spend many hours every spring gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some sandy field elsewhere has been plowed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. 

The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil. As much ground is turned up in a day by the plow as Indian implements could not have turned over in a month, and my eyes rest on the evidences of an aboriginal life which passed here a thousand years ago perchance. 

Especially if the knolls in the meadows are washed by a freshet where they have been plowed the previous fall, the soil will be taken away lower down and the stones left, — the arrow heads, etc., and soapstone pottery amid them, — some what as gold is washed in a dish or torn. 

I landed on two spots this afternoon and picked up a dozen arrowheads. It is one of the regular pursuits of the spring. As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travellers of adventures, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes round again. 

So I help my self to live worthily, and loving my life as I should. 

It is a good collyrium to look on the bare earth, — to pore over it so much, getting strength to all your senses, like Antaeus. If I did not find arrowheads, I might, per chance, begin to pick up crockery and fragments of pipes, — the relics of a more recent man. Indeed, you can hardly name a more innocent or wholesome entertainment. As I am thus engaged, I hear the rumble of the bowling-alley's thunder, which has be gun again in the village. It comes before the earliest natural thunder. But what its lightning is, and what atmospheres it purifies, I do not know. Or I might collect the various bones which I come across. They would make a museum that would delight some Owen at last, and what a text they might furnish me for a course of lectures on human life or the like! I might spend my days collecting the fragments of pipes until I found enough, after all my search, to compose one perfect pipe when laid together. 

I have not decided whether I had better publish my experience in searching for arrowheads in three volumes, with plates and an index, or try to compress it into one. These durable implements seem to have been suggested to the Indian mechanic with a view to my entertainment in a succeeding period. After all the labor expended on it, the bolt may have been shot but once perchance, and the shaft which was devoted to it decayed, and there lay the arrowhead, sinking into the ground, awaiting me.

They lie all over the hills with like expectation, and in due time the husbandman is sent, and, tempted by the promise of corn or rye, he plows the land and turns them up to my view. 

Many as I have found, methinks the last one gives me about the same delight that the first did.

 Some time or other, you would say, it had rained arrowheads, for they lie all over the surface of America. 

You may have your peculiar tastes. Certain localities in your town may seem from association unattractive and uninhabitable to you. You may wonder that the land bears any money value there, and pity some poor fellow who is said to survive in that neighborhood. 

But plow up a new field there, and you will find the omnipresent arrow-points strewn over it, and it will appear that the red man, with other tastes and associations, lived there too. 

No matter how far from the modern road or meeting-house, no matter how near. 

They lie in the meeting-house cellar, and they lie in the distant cow-pasture. 

And some collections which were made a century ago by the curious like myself have been dispersed again, and they are still as good as new. 

You cannot tell the third-hand ones (for they are all second-hand) from the others, such is their persistent out-of-door durability; for they were chiefly made to be lost. 

They are sown, like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. 

Like the dragon's teeth which bore a crop of soldiers, these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. 

It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. 

His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave or under a pyramid. No disgusting mummy, but a clean stone, the best symbol or letter that could have been transmitted to me. 

The Red Man, his mark 

At every step I see it, and I can easily supply the "Tahatawan" or 'Mantatuket " that might have been written if he had had a clerk. 

It is no single inscription on a particular rock, but a footprint — rather a mind-print — left everywhere, and altogether illegible. No vandals, however vandalic in their disposition, can be so industrious as to destroy them. 

Time will soon destroy the works of famous painters and sculptors, but the Indian arrowhead will balk his efforts and Eternity will have to come to his aid.

They are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts, forever reminding me of the mind that shaped them.

 I would fain know that I am treading in the tracks of human game, — that I am on the trail of mind, — and these little reminders never fail to set me right. When I see these signs I know that the subtle spirits that made them are not far off, into whatever form transmuted. What if you do plow and hoe amid them, and swear that not one stone shall be left upon another ? They are only the less like to break in that case. When you turn up one layer you bury another so much the more securely. They are at peace with rust. This arrow-headed character promises to outlast all others. The larger pestles and axes may, perchance, grow scarce and be broken, but the arrowhead shall, perhaps, never cease to wing its way through the ages to eternity. 

It was originally winged for but a short flight, but it still, to my mind's eye, wings its way through the ages, bearing a message from the hand that shot it. Myriads of arrow-points lie sleeping in the skin of the revolving earth, while meteors revolve in space. The footprint, the mind-print of the oldest men. 

When some Vandal chieftain has razed to the earth the British Museum, and, perchance, the winged bulls from Nineveh shall have lost most if not all of their features, the arrowheads which the museum contains will, perhaps, find themselves at home again in familiar dust, and resume their shining in new springs upon the bared surface of the earth then, to be picked up for the thousandth time by the shepherd or savage that may be wandering there, and once more suggest their story to him. Indifferent they to British Museums, and, no doubt, Nineveh bulls are old acquaintances of theirs, for they have camped on the plains of Mesopotamia, too, and were buried with the winged bulls. 

They cannot be said to be lost nor found. Surely their use was not so much to bear its fate to some bird or quadruped, or man, as it was to lie here near the surface of the earth for a perpetual reminder to the generations that come after. As for museums, I think  it is better to let Nature take care of our antiquities. These are our antiquities, and they are cleaner to think of than the rubbish of the Tower of London, and they are a more ancient armor than is there. It is a re commendation that they are so inobvious, — that they occur only to the eye and thought that chances to be directed toward them. When you pick up an arrowhead and put it in your pocket, it may say : 

"Eh, you think you have got me, do you ? But I shall wear a hole in your pocket at last, or if you put me in your cabinet, your heir or great-grandson will forget me or throw me out the window directly, or when the house falls I shall drop into the cellar, and there I shall lie quite at home again. Ready to be found again, eh ? Perhaps some new red man that is to come will fit me to a shaft and make me do his bidding for a bow-shot. What reck I ?" 

As we were paddling over the Great Meadows, I saw at a distance, high in the air above the middle of the meadow, a very compact flock of blackbirds advancing against the sun. Though there were more than a hundred, they did not appear to occupy more than six feet in breadth, but the whole flock was dashing first to the right and then to the left. When advancing straight toward me and the sun, they made but little impression on the eye, — so many fine dark points merely, seen against the sky, — but as often as they wheeled to the right or left, displaying their wings flat wise and the whole length of their bodies, they were a very conspicuous black mass. This fluctuation in the amount of dark surface was a very pleasing phenomenon. It reminded me [of] those blinds whose sashes [sic] ting nearly all the light and now entirely excluding it; so the flock of blackbirds opened and shut. But at length they suddenly spread out and dispersed, some flying off this way, and others that, as, when a wave strikes against a cliff, it is dashed upward and lost in fine spray. So they lost their compactness and impetus and broke up suddenly in mid-air. 

We see eight geese floating afar in the middle of the meadow, at least half a mile off, plainly (with glass) much larger than the ducks in their neighborhood and the white on their heads very distinct. When at length they arise and fly off northward, their peculiar heavy undulating wings, blue-heron-like and unlike any duck, are very noticeable. 

The black, sheldrake, etc., move their wings rapidly, and remind you of paddle-wheel steamers. Methinks the wings of the black duck appear to be set very far back when it is flying. The meadows, which are still covered far and wide, are quite alive with black ducks. 

When walking about on the low east shore at the Bedford bound, I heard a faint honk, and looked around over the water with my glass, thinking it came from that side or perhaps from a farmyard in that direction. I soon heard it again, and at last we detected a great flock passing over, quite on the other side of us and pretty high up. From time to time one of the company uttered a short note, that peculiarly metallic, clangorous sound. These were in a single undulating line, and, as usual, one or two were from time to time crowded out of the line, apparently by the crowding of those in the rear, and were flying on one side and trying to recover their places, but at last a second short line was formed, meeting the long one at the usual angle and making a figure somewhat like a hay-hook. I suspect it will be found that there is really some advantage in large birds of passage flying in the wedge form and cleaving their way through the air, — that they really do overcome its resistance best in this way, — and perchance the direction and strength of the wind determine the comparative length of the two sides. 

The great gulls fly generally up or down the river valley, cutting off the bends of the river, and so do these geese. These fly sympathizing with the river, — a stream in the air, soon lost in the distant sky. 

We see these geese swimming and flying at midday and when it is perfectly fair. 

If you scan the horizon at this season of the year you are very likely to detect a small flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undulating line of migrating geese against the sky. 

Perhaps it is this easterly wind which brings geese, as it did on the 24th. 

Ball's Hill, with its withered oak leaves and its pines, looks very fair to-day, a mile and a half off across the water, through a very thin varnish or haze. It reminds me of the isle which was called up from the bottom of the sea, which was given to Apollo. 

How charming the contrast of land and water, especially a temporary island in the flood, with its new and tender shores of waving outline, so withdrawn yet habitable, above all if it rises into a hill high above the water and contrasting with it the more, and if that hill is wooded, suggesting wildness ! 

Our vernal lakes have a beauty to my mind which they would not possess if they were more permanent. Everything is in rapid flux here, suggesting that Nature is alive to her extremities and superficies. To-day we sail swiftly on dark rolling waves or paddle over a sea as smooth as a mirror, unable to touch the bottom, where mowers work and hide their jugs in August; coasting the edge of maple swamps, where alder tassels and white maple flowers are kissing the tide that has risen to meet them. 

But this particular phase of beauty is fleeting. Nature has so many shows for us she cannot afford to give much time to this. In a few days, perchance, these lakes will have all run away to the sea. 

Such are the pictures which she paints. When we look at our masterpieces we see only dead paint and its vehicle, which suggests no liquid life rapidly flowing off from beneath. In the former case — in Nature — it is constant surprise and novelty. In many arrangements there is a wearisome monotony. We know too well what [we] shall have for our Saturday's dinner, but each day's feast in Nature's year is a surprise to us and adapted to our appetite and spirits. She has arranged such an order of feasts as never tires. Her motive is not economy but satisfaction. 

As we sweep past the north end of Poplar Hill, with a sand-hole in it, its now dryish, pale-brown mottled sward clothing its rounded slope, which was lately saturated with moisture, presents very agreeable hues. In this light, in fair weather, the patches of now dull- greenish mosses contrast just regularly enough with the pale-brown grass. It is like some rich but modest- colored Kidderminster carpet, or rather the skin of a monster python tacked to the hillside and stuffed with earth. 


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. I suspect that we are more amused by the effects of color in the skin of the earth now than in summer. Like the skin of a python, greenish and brown, a fit coat for it to creep over the earth and be concealed in. Or like the skin of a pard, the great leopard mother that Nature is, where she lies at length, exposing her flanks to the sun. I feel as if I could land to stroke and kiss the very sward, it is so fair. It is homely and domestic to my eyes like the rug that lies before my hearth-side. Such ottomans and divans are spread for us to recline on. Nor are these colors mere thin superficial figures, vehicles for paint, but wonderful living growths, — these lichens, to the study of which learned men have devoted their lives, — and libraries have been written about them. The earth lies out now like a leopard, drying her lichen and moss spotted skin in the sun, her sleek and variegated hide. I know that the few raw spots will heal over. Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man's loaf.  The bright tints are pies and cakes, good only for October feasts, which would make us sick if eaten every day. 

One side of each wave and ripple is dark and the other light blue, reflecting the sky, — as I look down on them from my boat, — and these colors (?) combined produce a dark blue at a distance. These blue spaces ever remind me of the blue in the iridescence produced by oily matter on the surface, for you are slow to regard it as a reflection of the sky. The rippling undulating surface over which you glide is like a changeable blue silk garment. 

Here, where in August the bittern booms in the grass, and mowers march en echelon and whet their scythes and crunch  the ripe wool-grass, raised now a  few feet, you scud before the wind in your tight bark and listen to the surge (or sough ?) of the great waves sporting around you, while you hold the steering-oar and your mast bends to the gale and you stow all your ballast to windward. The crisped sound of surging waves that rock you, that ceaseless roll and gambol, and ever and anon break into your boat. 

Deep lie the seeds of the rhexia now, absorbing wet from the flood, but in a few months this mile-wide lake will have gone to the other side of the globe; and the tender rhexia will lift its head on the drifted hum mocks in dense patches, bright and scarlet as a flame, — such succession have we here, — where the wild goose and countless wild ducks have floated and dived above them. So Nature condenses her matter. She is a thousand thick. So many crops the same surface bears. 

Undoubtedly the geese fly more numerously over rivers which, like ours, flow northeasterly, — are more at home with the water under them. Each flock runs the gantlet of a thousand gunners, and when you see them steer off from you and your boat you may remember how great their experience in such matters may be, how many such boats and gunners they have seen and avoided between here and Mexico, and even now, perchance (though you, low plodding, little dream it), they see one or two more lying in wait ahead. They have an experienced ranger of the air for their guide. The echo of one gun hardly dies away before they see another pointed at them. How many bullets or smaller shot have sped in vain toward their ranks! Ducks fly more irregularly and shorter distances at a time. The geese rest in fair weather by day only in the midst of our broadest meadow or pond. So they go, anxious and earnest to hide their nests under the pole. 

The gulls seem used to boats and sails and will often fly quite near without manifesting alarm.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 28, 1859

See November 2, 1852 (“The pond, dark before, was now a glorious and indescribable blue, mixed with dark, perhaps the opposite side of the wave, a sort of changeable or watered-silk blue, more cerulean if possible than the sky itself, which was now seen overhead. It required a certain division of the sight, however, to discern this. Like the colors on a steel sword-blade.”); April 9, 1859 (“ You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. Looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look dark-blue, almost black. Standing low and more opposite to the sun, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at. Water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Blue Waters in Spring

Each found arrow-point 

wings its way through the ages, 

bearing a message. 

It is a stone fruit,

mind-print of the oldest men.

Each one yields a thought.