The perfect correspondence of a life and the year.

September 8

September 8, 2019

While the grass is fresh, the earth is in its vigor. The greenness of the grass is the best symptom or evidence of the earth's youth or health.

Perhaps it will be found that when the grass ceases to be fresh and green, or after June, the birds have ceased to sing, and that the fireflies, too, no longer in myriads sparkle in the meadows.

Perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf, regarding the grass blades as leaves, for it is equally true that the leaves soon lose their freshness and soundness, and become the prey of insects and of drought.

Plants commonly soon cease to grow for the year, unless they may have a fall growth, which is a kind of second spring.

In the feelings of the man, too, the year is already past, and he looks forward to the coming winter.  His occasional rejuvenescence and faith in the current time is like the aftermath, a scanty crop.

The enterprise which he has not already undertaken cannot be undertaken this year.  The period of youth is past.

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age.  It is a season of withering, of dust and heat, a season of small fruits and trivial experiences.  Summer thus answers to manhood.

But there is an aftermath in early autumn, and some spring flowers bloom again, followed by an Indian summer of finer atmosphere and of a pensive beauty.

May my life be not destitute of its Indian summer, a season of fine and clear, mild weather in which I may prolong my hunting before the winter comes, when I may once more lie on the ground with faith, as in spring, and even with more serene confidence.

And then I will [wrap the] drapery of summer about me and lie down to pleasant dreams. As one year passes into another through the medium of winter, so does this our life pass into another through the medium of death.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1851

The year may be in its summer, in its manhood, but it is no longer in the flower of its age. See August 23, 1853 ("I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day — say an August day — and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year.”); Walden, "Spring" ("The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer."); July 3, 1840 (We will have a dawn, and noon, and serene sunset in ourselves.); March 18, 1853 ("This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer”); June 15, 1852 ("The year is in its manhood now."); July 27, 1853 ("This the afternoon of the year. How apt we are to be reminded of lateness, even before the year is half spent!"); 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? The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life."); August 18, 1853 ("The night of the year is approaching"); November 14, 1853. ("October answers to that period in the life of man when . . . all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer appears. He bears his fruit."); November 17, 1853 ("So some human beings in the November of their days exhibit some fresh radical greenness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential vitality. When their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring"); January 30, 1854 ("The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars… ") See also January 8 1854 ("We love not so well the landscape represented as in broad noon, but in a morning or evening twilight, those seasons when the imagination is most active, the more hopeful or pensive seasons of the day.")

Fall flowers.

September 8 

Roses, apparently R. lucida, abundantly out on a warm bank on Great Fields by Moore's Swamp, with Viola pedata.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1853

Roses, apparently R. lucida, abundantly out. See June 15, 1851 (“See the first wild rose to-day on the west side of the railroad causeway”); June 15, 1853 (“Here are many wild roses northeast of Trillium Woods. It is the pride of June. I bring home the buds ready to expand, put them in a pitcher of water, and the next morning they open and fill my chamber with fragrance.”); June 18, 1854 (“The Rosa lucida is pale and low on dry sunny banks like that by Hosmer's pines.”); September 25, 1852 ("A rose again, apparently lucida (?). This is always unexpected."); September 28, 1852 ("This is the commencement, then, of the second spring. Violets, Potentilla Canadensis, lambkill, wild rose, yellow lily, etc., etc., begin again")

Viola pedata. See August 12, 1858 (“Saw a Viola pedata blooming again.”); August 31, 1853 ("Viola pedata out again.") September 4, 1856 ("Viola pedata again."); September 28, 1852 (" I find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the Boulder Field. I have now seen all but the blanda, palmata, and pubescens blooming again .. . This is the commencement, then, of the second spring."); October 22, 1859 (" In the wood-path below the Cliffs I see perfectly fresh and fair Viola pedata flowers, as in the spring, though but few together. No flower by its second blooming more perfectly brings back the spring to us"); October 23, 1853 ("The Viola pedata looking up from so low in the wood-path makes a singular impression. "); November 9, 1850 ("I found many fresh violets (Viola pedata) to-day (November 9th) in the woods.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Violets

The State Muster

September 8. 

The 7th, 8th, and 9th, the State muster is held here.

The only observation I have to make is that [Concord] is fuller of dust and more uninhabitable than I ever knew it to be before. Not only the walls, fences, and houses are thickly covered with dust, but the fields and meadows and bushes; and the pads in the river for half a mile from the village are white with it. From a mile or two distant you see a cloud of dust over the town and extending thence to the muster-field. 

I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. "Aye," said he, "and the Legislature too." "Then I will take two bolts," said I. He said that there had been a steady demand for bolts and locks of late, for our protectors were coming. 

The surface of the roads for three to six inches in depth is a light and dry powder like ashes. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond. 

Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe. 

I see the black head and neck of a little dipper in mid stream, a few rods before my boat. It disappears, and though I search carefully, I cannot detect it again. It is undoubtedly hidden mid the weeds — pads, flags, and pontederia, etc. — along the shore. 

Ducks more common.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1859

The 7th, 8th, and 9th, the State muster is held here See May 27, 1857 ("I hear the sound of fife and drum the other side of the village, and am reminded that it is May Training. Some thirty young men are marching in the streets in two straight sections, with each a very heavy and warm cap for the season on his head and a bright red stripe down the legs of his pantaloons, and at their head march two with white stripes down their pants, one beating a drum, the other blowing a fife. ")

I see the black head and neck of a little dipper in mid stream See September 9, 1858 ("At length the walker who sits meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food along their edge: Yet ordinary eyes might range up and down the river all day and never detect its small black head above the water. ")

Grapes for some time have perfumed the house.

September 8. 

6 A. M. —On river. 

September 8 2018

It flows with a full tide. When it is thus deep its current is swift, and then its surface (commonly smooth and dark) is freckled with ripples, or rather I should say that swifter currents are here and there bursting up from be low and spreading out on every side, as if the river were breaking over a thousand concealed rocks. The surface is broken and dimpled with upswelling currents. 

Red oak acorns, yet green, are abundantly cut off by the squirrels. 

The yellow-legs is nodding its head along the edge of the meadow. I hear also its creaking te te te.

Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house. 

P. M. — To Owl Swamp. 

I perceive the dark-crimson leaves, quite crisp, of the white maple on the meadows, recently fallen. This is their first fall, i. e. of those leaves which changed long ago. They fall, then, with birches and chestnuts, etc. (lower leaves), before red maples generally begin to turn. 

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. So, in my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing. 

“Though man proposeth, God disposeth all.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1858

Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house. See September 8, 1852 (“Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days”) and  note to September 8, 1854 ("I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with..”); September 8, 1859 ("Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe")

Red oak acorns, yet green, are abundantly cut off by the squirrels. See September 12, 1854 (“The red oak began to fall first.”)

It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs. See April 29, 1852 ("The art of life, not having anything to do, is to do something.”); September 13, 1852 ("To the . . . idle man, the stillness of a placid September day sounds like the din and whirl of a factory. Only employment can still this din in the air.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, To effect the quality of the day

In my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing. See  March 18, 1858 ("Going by the epigaea on Fair Haven Hill, I thought I would follow down the shallow gully through the woods from it, that I might find more or something else.");  April 13, 1860 ("At first I had felt disinclined to make this excursion up the Assabet, but it distinctly occurred to me that, perhaps, if I came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, I might discover something else interesting.”); compare September 2, 1856; (" I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood.”);  November 18 1851 ("A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); April 12, 1854 ("I observe that it is when I have been intently, and it may be laboriously, at work . . . that the muse visits me, and I see or hear beauty. It is from out the shadow of my toil that I look into the light.")

  

Do I perceive the shadows lengthen already?

September 8. 

Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days.

September 8, 2017

Gentiana saponaria out. 

Carrion-flower berries ripe for some days. 

Polygala verticillata still, on left side of road beyond Lee place. I put it with the other polygalas in July. 

Do I perceive the shadows lengthen already?

September 8, 2017

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1852

Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days. See note to September 8, 1854 ("The grapes would no doubt be riper a week hence, but I am compelled to go now before the vines are stripped. I partly smell them out.")

Gentiana saponaria out. See September 6, 1857 ("Soapwort gentian, out not long"); September 19, 1851 ("The soapwort gentian now."); September 19, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian cheers and surprises, -- solid bulbs of blue from the shade, the stale grown purplish. It abounds along the river, after so much has been mown"); September 22, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian the flower of the river-banks now.") September 25, 1857 ("You notice now the dark-blue dome of the soapwort gentian in cool and shady places under the bank.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Soapwort Gentian (Gentiana saponaria)

Carrion-flower berries ripe. See September 3, 1856  ("One carrion-flower berry is turning blue in its dense spherical cluster.")


Polygala verticillata still, on left side of road. . .See September 10, 1856 ("Near the site of the old Bellows Fort, saw completely purple Polygala verticillata abundant in road.")   See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,The Polygala

. . .left side of road beyond Lee place. See February 15, 1857 ("When I returned from Worcester yesterday morning, I found that the Lee house, of which six weeks ago I made an accurate plan, had been completely burned up the evening before, i. e. the 13th, while I was lecturing in Worcester.")

A more indigenous plant than usual, so peculiarly useful to the aborigines.

September 8. 

Brattleboro. — Rains. 

Frost gives me an aster which he thinks A. concinnus of Wood; grows in woods and yet longer leaved. 

P. M. — Clearing up. 

I went a-botanizing by the Coldwater Path, for the most part along a steep wooded hillside on Whetstone Brook and through its interval. 

In the last heavy rain, two or three weeks since, there was a remarkable freshet on this brook, such as has not been known before, the bridge and road carried away, the bed of the stream laid bare, a new channel being made, the interval covered with sand and gravel, and trees (buttonwood, etc.) brought down; several acres thus buried. Frost escaped from his house on a raft. 

I observed a stream of large bare white rocks four or five rods wide, which at first I thought had been washed down, but it seems this was the former bed of the stream, it having worn a new channel further east. 

Witch-hazel out, maybe a day or two, in some places, but the Browns do not think the fringed gentian out yet. 

There for the first time I see growing indigenously the Dirca palustns, leather-wood, the largest on the low interval by the brook. I notice a bush there seven feet high. In its form it is somewhat like a quince bush, though less spreading, its leaves broad, like entire sassafras leaves; now beginning to turn yellow. It has a remarkably strong thick bark and soft white wood which bends like lead (Gray says it is brittle!), the different layers separating at the end. I cut a good- sized switch, which was singularly tough and flexible, just like a cowhide, and would answer the purpose of one admirably. The color of the bark is a very pale brown. 

I was much interested in this shrub, since it was the Indian's rope. Frost said that the farmers of Vermont used it to tie up their fences with. Certainly there can be no wood equal to it as a withe. He says it is still strong when dry. I should think it would be worth the while for the farmers to cultivate for this purpose. How often in the woods and fields we want a string or rope and cannot find one. This is the plant which Nature has made for this purpose. 

The Browns gave me some of the flowers, which appear very early in spring. Gray says that in northern New England it is called wicopy. Potter, in History of Manchester, says Indians sewed canoes with it. Beck says, "The bark has a sweetish taste, and when chewed excites a burning sensation in the fauces," and, according to Emerson, the bark of this family," taken into the stomach causes heat and vomiting, or purging" According to the latter, cordage has been made from the bark of this family, also paper. Emerson says of this plant in particular, "The fresh bark produces a sensation of heat in the stomach, and at last brings on vomiting. ... It has such strength that a man cannot pull apart so much as covers a branch of half or a third of an inch in diameter. It is used by millers and others for thongs." 

Indian cordage. I feel as if I had discovered a more indigenous plant than usual, it was so peculiarly useful to the aborigines. 

On that wooded hillside, I find small-flowered asters, A. miser-like, hairy, but very long linear leaves; possibly the var. hirsuta of A. miser (Oakes gives of A. miser, only the var. hirsuticaulis to Vermont) or else a neighboring species, for they seem distinct. (Vide press.) 

September 7, 2022

There is the hobble-bush with its berries and large roundish leaves, now beginning to turn a deep dull crimson red. 

Also mountain maples, with sharp-lobed leaves and downy beneath, the young plants numerous. 

The Ribes cynosbati, or prickly gooseberry, with its bur-like fruit, dry and still hanging here and there. 

Also the ground-hemlock, with its beautiful fruit, like a red waxen cup with a purple (?) fruit in it. 

By the edge of a ditch, where it had been overwhelmed and buried with mud by the later freshet, the Solidago Muhlenbergii in its prime. (Vide press.) 

Near by, on the bank of the ditch, leaves of coltsfoot. 

I had cut across the interval, but, taking to the Coldwater Path again near its southeast end, I found, at an angle in it near the canal, beech-drops under a beech, not yet out, and the Equisetum scirpoides, also radical leaves, very broad, perhaps of a sedge, some much longer. (Vide press.) 

Gathered flowering raspberries in all my walks and found them a pleasant berry, large, but never abundant. 

In a wet place on the interval the Veronica Americana, according to Frost (beccabunga of some), not in bloom. 

Along this path observed the Nabalus altissimus, flowers in a long panicle of axillary and terminal branches, small-flowered, now in prime. 

Leaves apparently of Oxalis Acetosella. 

Large roundish radical leaves on the moist wooded hillside, which the Browns thought of the round-leaved violet. 

Low, flat-topped, very rough hairy, apparently Aster acuminatus. 

Erigeron annuus, broad, thin, toothed leaves. Also another, perhaps hirsute A. miser, with toothed leaves. 

I hear that two thousand dollars' worth of huckleberries have been sold by the town of Ashby this season. 

Also gathered on this walk the Polypodium Dryop- teris and Polystichum acrostichoides and a short heavy-odored (like stramonium) plant with aspect of lilac, not in bloom. (Vide press.)

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1856

Witch-hazel out, maybe a day or two, in some places . . . See September 8, 1854 ("The witch-hazel on Dwarf Sumach Hill looks as if it would begin to blossom in a day or two.")

A Book of the Seasons: September 8. (the ripening year, grapes)

September 8

September 8, 2014

The ripening year 

excites me to a sort of 

autumnal madness . . .

while gathering grapes

all my thoughts break out spotted 

yellow green and brown.

September 8, 1854

Blue-stem goldenrod September 8, 2017

 September 8, 2019

Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days. September 8, 1852 

Some goldfinches twitter over, while I am pulling down the vines from the birch tops. September 8, 1854

The witch-hazel on Dwarf Sumach Hill looks as if it would begin to blossom in a day or two. September 8, 1854

Many green-briar leaves are very agreeably thickly spotted now with reddish brown, or fine green on a yellow or green ground, producing a wildly variegated leaf. I have seen nothing more rich. September 8, 1854

Now, while I am gathering grapes, I see them. It excites me to a sort of autumnal madness. My thoughts break out like them, spotted all over, yellow and green and brown. Now for the ripening year! September 8, 1854

I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with. September 8, 1854

As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore.  September 8, 1854

Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house. September 8, 1858

Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe. September 8, 1859

*****

August 30, 1853 ("Grapes are already ripe; I smell them first.")

September 13, 1856 ("Up Assabet. Gather quite a parcel of grapes, quite ripe.. . . the best are more admirable for fragrance than for flavor. Depositing them in the bows of the boat, they fill all the air with their fragrance, as we row along against the wind, as if we were rowing through an endless vineyard in its maturity.")

October 9, 1853 ("I smell grapes, . . . their scent is very penetrating and memorable.")

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 © 2009-2015

The ripening year. My thoughts break out spotted yellow and green and brown.

September 8

September 8, 2014

The grapes would no doubt be riper a week hence, but I am compelled to go now before the vines are stripped. I partly smell them out. 

I pluck splendid great bunches of the purple ones, with a rich bloom on them and the purple glowing through it like a fire; large red ones, also, with light dots, and some clear green. Sometimes I crawl under low and thick bowers, where they have run over the alders only four or five feet high, and see the grapes hanging from a hollow hemisphere of leaves over my head. At other times I see them dark-purple or black against the silvery undersides of the leaves, high overhead where they have run over birches or maples, and either climb or pull them down to pluck them. 

Some goldfinches twitter over, while I am pulling down the vines from the birch tops. 

The witch-hazel on Dwarf Sumach Hill looks as if it would begin to blossom in a day or two.

Many green-briar leaves are very agreeably thickly spotted now with reddish brown, or fine green on a yellow or green ground, producing a wildly variegated leaf. I have seen nothing more rich. Now, while I am gathering grapes, I see them. It excites me to a sort of autumnal madness. My thoughts break out like them, spotted all over, yellow and green and brown. Now for the ripening year! Even leaves are beginning to be ripe.

I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with. As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 8, 1854

I partly smell them out. . . . As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore. See September 8, 1852 (“Grapes ripe on the Assabet for some days”); September 8, 1858 (“Gather half my grapes, which for some time have perfumed the house.”); September 8, 1859 ("Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe."); See also August 30, 1853 ("Grapes are already ripe; I smell them first."); September 13, 1856 ("Up Assabet. Gather quite a parcel of grapes, quite ripe.. . . the best are more admirable for fragrance than for flavor. Depositing them in the bows of the boat, they fill all the air with their fragrance, as we row along against the wind, as if we were rowing through an endless vineyard in its maturity."); October 9, 1853 ("I smell grapes, . . . their scent is very penetrating and memorable."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Grape

Some goldfinches twitter over, while I am pulling down the vines from the birch tops.See September 16, 1852 (" The jay screams; the goldfinch twitters; the barberries are red. The corn is topped. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Goldfinch

The witch-hazel on Dwarf Sumach Hill looks as if it would begin to blossom in a day or two. See September 8, 1856 ("Witch-hazel out, maybe a day or two, in some places."); September 15, 1854 ("The witch-hazel has opened since the 8th; say 11th. Its leaves, a third or a half of them, are yellow and brown."); September 18, 1856 ("The witch-hazel at Conantum just begun here and there; some may have been out two or three days. Yet I saw the witch-hazel out in Brattleboro September 8th, then apparently for a day or two.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Witch-Hazel

The ripening year 

excites me to a sort of 

autumnal madness 

while gathering grapes

all my thoughts break out spotted 

yellow green and brown.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Autumnal madness. 

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

tinyurl.com/HDTgrapes