This is my year of observation.

July 2. 

July 2, 2014

Bigelow tells me that saddlers sometimes use the excrescence, the whitish fungus, on the birch to stick their awls in. Men find a use for everything at last. I saw one nailed up in his shop with an awl in it. 

Last night, as I lay awake, I dreamed of the muddy and weedy river on which I had been paddling, and I seemed to derive some vigor from my day's experience like the lilies which have their roots at the bottom. 

I have plucked a white lily bud just ready to expand, and, after keeping it in water for two days,  have turned back its sepals with my hand and touched the lapped points of the petals, when they sprang open and rapidly expanded in my hand into a perfect blossom, with the petals as perfectly disposed at equal intervals as on their native lakes, and in this case, of course, untouched by an insect. 

I cut its stem short and placed it in a broad dish of water, where it sailed about under the breath of the beholder with a slight undulatory motion. The breeze of his half-suppressed admiration it was that filled its sail. 

It was a rare-tinted one. A kind of popular aura that may be trusted, methinks. Men will travel to the Nile to see the lotus flower  who have never seen in their glory the lotuses of their native streams. 

The Mollugo verticillata, carpet-weed, is just beginning in the garden, and the Polygonum convolvulus, black bindweed. 

The spikes of the pale lobelia, some  blue, some white, passing insensibly from one to the other, and especially hard to distinguish in the twilight, are quite handsome now in moist ground, rising above the grass. 

The prunella has various tints in various lights, now blue, now lilac. As the twilight deepens into night, its color changes. It always suggests freshness and coolness, from the places where it grows. 

I see the downy heads of the senecio gone to seed, thistle-like but small. 

The gnaphaliums and this are among the earliest to present this appearance. 

On my way to the Hubbard Bathing-Place, at sun-down. 

The blue-eyed grass shuts up before night, and me-thinks it does not open very early the next morning. 

The Cornus stolonifera, red osier, osier rouge, well out, and probably has been a day or two. I have got the order of the cornels, I think, pretty well. 

I see plenty of the Peltandra Virginica coming forward in Hubbard's meadow, and its lobes are more blunt than the sagittaria. 

Pogonias are very common in the meadows now. 

The seed-vessels of the Iris Virginica are formed. 

At the bathing-place there is [a] hummock which was floated on to the meadow some springs ago, now densely covered with the handsome red-stemmed wild rose, a full but irregular clump, from the ground, showing no bare stems below, but a dense mass of shining leaves and small red stems above in their midst, and on every side now, in the twilight, more than usually beautiful they appear. Countless roses, partly closed, of a very deep rich color, as if the rays of the departed sun still shone through them; a more spiritual rose this hour, beautifully blushing; and then the unspeakable beauty and promise of those fair swollen buds that spot the mass, which will blossom to-morrow, and the more distant promise of the handsomely formed green ones, which yet show no red, for few things are handsomer than a rosebud in any stage; these mingled with a few pure white elder blossoms and some rosaceous or pinkish meadow-sweet heads. I am confident that there can be nothing so beautiful in any cultivated garden, with all their varieties, as this wild clump. 

I afterwards found a similar though not so large and dense a clump of sweetbriars. Methinks their flowers are not so fragrant, and perhaps never of so deep a red. Perhaps they are more sure to open in a pitcher than the last. 

It is starlight. Near woods the veery is a steady singer at this hour. 

I notice that the lowest leaves of my potamogeton are pellucid and wavy, which  combined with their purplish tinge on the surface, makes me doubt if it be not the pulcher. 

Do the hardhack leaves stand up and hug the stem at night, that they show their under sides so? 

Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report. To the full heart she is all but a figure of speech. This is my year of observation and I fancy that my friends are also more devoted to outward observation than ever before, as if it were an epidemic. 

I cross the brook by Hubbard's little bridge. 

Now nothing but the cool invigorating scent which is perceived at night in these low meadowy places where the alder and ferns grow can restore my spirits. (I made it an object to find a new Parmelia caperata in fruit in each walk.) 

At this season, methinks, we do not regard the larger features of the landscape, as in the spring, but are absorbed in details. 

Then, when the meadows were flooded, I looked far over them to the distant woods and the outlines of hills, which were more distinct. I should not have so much to say of extensive water or landscapes at this season. 

You are a little bewildered by the variety of objects. There must be a certain meagreness of details and nakedness for wide views. (The obtuse galium shows its minute white flowers in the meadows.) 

If I remember, the early part of June was cool, as also the latter, though we had some hot weather, perhaps, toward the middle. 

The clover heads are drying up except in meadows. 

9 o'clock. The full moon rising (or full last night) is revealed first by some slight clouds above the eastern horizon looking white, the first indication that she is about to rise, the traces of day not yet gone in the west . In the west, similar clouds, seen against a lighter sky, look dark and heavy. Now a lower cloud in the east reflects a more yellowish light. The moon, far over the round globe travelling this way, sends her light forward to yonder cloud, from which the news of her coming is reflected to us. 

The moon's aurora! it is without redness or fulgidness, like the dawn of philosophy, and its noon, too. At her dawning no cocks crow. How few creatures to hail her rising! Only some belated travellers that may be abroad this night. 

What graduated information of her coming! More and more yellow glows the low cloud, with concentrating light, and now the moon's edge suddenly appears above a low bank of cloud not seen before, and she seems to come forward apace without introduction, after all; and the steadiness with which she rises with undisturbed serenity, like a queen who has learned to walk before her court, is glorious, and she soon reaches the open sea of the heavens. She seems to advance (so, perchance, flows the blood in the veins of the beholder) by graceful sallying essays, trailing her garment up the sky.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 2, 1852

Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. See September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you."); May 10, 1853 ("He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. . . .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."

I have plucked a white lily bud just ready to expand, and, after keeping it in water for two days, have turned back its sepals with my hand and touched the lapped points of the petals, when they sprang open and rapidly expanded in my hand into a perfect blossom. See July 4, 1852 ("I bring home a dozen perfect lily buds. . .which have never yet opened; I prepare a large pan of water; I cut their stems quite short; I turn back their calyx-leaves with my fingers, so that they may float upright; I touch the points of their petals, and breathe or blow on them, and toss them in. They spring open rapidly, or gradually expand in the course of an hour.")

It is starlight. Near woods the veery is a steady singer at this hour. See June 28,1852 ("When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard."). See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Veery

A record of a sunset. Midnight by moonlight.

June 28

OEnothera biennis, evening-primrose, with its conspicuous flowers but rather unsightly stem and leaves. 

The Rubus odorata, purple flowering raspberry, in gardens. 

Potatoes for some time. 

Evening. 7 p.m. — Moon more than half. 

There are meteorologists, but who keeps a record of the fairer sunsets? 

While men are recording the direction of the wind, they neglect to record the beauty of the sunset or the rainbow. 

The sun not yet set. 

The bobolink sings descending to the meadow as I go along the railroad to the pond. 

The seringo-bird and the common song sparrow, — and the swallows twitter. 

The plaintive strain of the lark, coming up from the meadow, is perfectly adapted to the hour. 

When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard, and the oven-bird, or whet-saw, sounds hollowly from within the recesses of the wood. 

The clouds in the west are edged with fiery red. A few robins faintly sing. 

The huckleberry-bird in more open fields in the woods. The thrasher?

The sun is down. 

The night-hawks are squeaking in the somewhat dusky air and occasionally making the ripping sound; the chewinks sound; the bullfrogs begin, and the toads; also tree-toads more numerously. 

Walden imparts to the body of the bather a remarkably chalky-white appearance, whiter than natural, tinged with blue, which, combined with its magnifying and distorting influence, produces a monstrous and ogre like effect, proving, nevertheless, the purity of the water. 

The river water, on the other hand, imparts to the bather a yellowish tinge.

There is a very low mist on the water close to the shore, a few inches high. 

The moon is brassy or golden now, and the air more dusky; yet I hear the pea-wai and the wood thrush, and now a whip-poor-will before I have seen a star. 

The walker in the woods at this hour takes note of the different veins of air through which he passes, — the fresher and cooler in the hollows, laden with the condensed fragrance of plants, as it were distilled in dews; and yet the warmer veins in a cool evening like this do not fail to be agreeable, though in them the air is comparatively lifeless or exhausted of its vitality. It circulates about from pillar to post, from wood-side to side-hill, like a dog that has lost its master, now the sun is gone. 

Now it is starlight; perhaps that dark cloud in the west has concealed the evening star before.

Yet I hear a chewink, veery, and wood thrush. 

Nighthawks and whip-poor-wills, of course. 

A whip-poor-will whose nest, perchance, I am near, on the side of the Cliff, hovers in the dusky air about ten feet from me, now on this side, then on that, on quivering wings, inspecting me, showing the white on its wings. It holds itself stationary for a minute. 

It is the first warm night for a week, and I hear the toads by the river very numerous. 

First there was sundown, then starlight. 

Starlight! That would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise. 

That is an epoch, when the last traces of daylight have disappeared and the night (nox) has fairly set in. 

Is not the moon a mediator? 

She is a light-giver that does not dazzle me. 

I have camped out all night on the tops of four mountains, — Wachusett, Saddle-back, Ktaadn, and Monadnock, — and I usually took a ramble over the summit at midnight by moonlight. 

I remember the moaning of the wind on the rocks, and that you seemed much nearer to the moon than on the plains. The light is then in harmony with the scenery. Of what use the sunlight to the mountain-summits? From the cliffs you looked off into vast depths of illumined air.

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

The Rubus odorata, purple flowering raspberry, in gardens. See September 6, 1856 ("I see the flowering raspberry still in bloom. This plant is quite common here [Brattleboro]. The fruit, now ripe, is red and quite agreeable, but not abundant."); September 8, 1856 ("Gathered flowering raspberries in all my walks and found them a pleasant berry, large, but never abundant.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Raspberry

When I get nearer the wood, the veery is heard, and the oven-bird, or whet-saw, sounds hollowly from within the recesses of the wood. ...  Now it is starlight [y]et I hear a chewink, veery, and wood thrush. Compare July 28, 1854 ("Veery and wood thrush not very lately, nor oven-bird"); See also May 13, 1856 (“At the swamp, hear the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush; the tweezer-bird or Sylvia Americana. Also the oven-bird sings.”); May 19, 1860 (“By the path-side near there, what I should call a veery's nest with four light-blue eggs, but I have not heard the veery note this year, only the yorrick.“); June 11, 1852 ("The oven-bird and the thrasher sing. "); June 15, 1854 ("Thrasher and catbird sing still; summer yellowbird and Maryland yellow-throat sing still; and oven-bird and veery"); June 16, 1856 (“Heard . . . not only Wilson’s thrush, but evergreen forest note and tanager.”); June 21, 1852 (“I hear the veery and the huckleberry-bird and the catbird.”); July 10, 1854 ("The singing birds at present are . . . Red-eye, tanager, wood thrush, chewink, veery, oven-bird, — all even at midday.") July 27, 1852 (" Have I heard the veery lately?"): July 30, 1852 ("How long since I heard a veery? Do they go, or become silent, when the goldfinches herald the autumn? ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Veery

Now it is starlight; perhaps that dark cloud in the west has concealed the evening star before . . . Starlight! That would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise. See  August 8, 1851 ("Starlight! that would be a good way to mark the hour, if we were precise.”); May 8, 1852 (“Starlight marks conveniently a stage in the evening, i. e. when the first star can be seen. ”); June 30, 1852 (“It is starlight about half an hour after sunset to-night; i. e. the first stars appear”); July 20, 1852 ("It is starlight. You see the first star in the southwest, and know not how much earlier you might have seen it had you looked.")

I have camped out all night on the tops of four mountains . . . and I usually took a ramble over the summit at midnight by moonlight. See March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to sec a distant mountain-top . . . whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Mountains in the Horizon and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June Moonlight

June 28. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 28

Starlight!  Mark the hour

when daylight disappears and 

the night (nox) sets in. 

Now it is starlight. 

Did that dark cloud conceal the 

evening star before? 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  A record of a sunset. Midnight by moonlight.

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-520628

To paddle now at evening when the water is smooth and the air begins to be warm.

May 9. 

May 9, 2020

Since I returned from Haverhill not only I find the ducks are gone but I no longer hear the chill lill of the blue snowbird or the sweet strains of the fox-colored sparrow and the tree sparrow. The robin's strain is less remarkable. 

I have devoted most of my day to Mr. Alcott. He is broad and genial but indefinite; some would say feeble; forever feeling about vainly in his speech and touching nothing. But this is a very negative account of him for he thus suggests far more than the sharp and definite practical mind. The feelers of his thought diverge — such is the breadth of their grasp — not converge; and in his society almost alone I can express at my leisure with more or less success my vaguest but most cherished fancy or thought. There are never any obstacles in the way of our meeting. He has no creed. He is not pledged to any institution. The sanest man I ever knew; the fewest crotchets after all has he? 

It has occurred to me while I am thinking with pleasure of our day's intercourse, “Why should I not think aloud to you?” Having each some shingles of thought well dried we walk and whittle them trying our knives and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We wade so gently and reverently or we pull together so smoothly that the fishes of thought are not scared from the stream but come and go grandly like yonder clouds that float peacefully through the western sky. When we walk it seems as if the heavens — whose mother-oʻ-pearl and rainbow tints come and go form and dissolve — and the earth had met together and righteousness and peace had kissed each other. I have an ally against the arch-enemy. A blue robed man dwells under the blue concave. The blue sky is a distant reflection of the azure serenity that looks out from under a human brow. We walk together like the most innocent children going after wild pinks with case-knives. Most with whom I endeavor to talk soon fetch up against some institution or particular way of viewing things theirs not being a universal view. They will continually bring their own roofs or — what is not much better — their own narrow skylights between us and the sky when it is the unobstructed heavens I would view. Get out of the way with your old Jewish cobwebs. Wash your windows. 

Saw on Mr. Emerson's firs several parti-colored warblers or finch creepers (Sylvia Americana) a small blue and yellow bird somewhat like but smaller than the indigo-bird; quite tame about the buds of the firs now showing red; often head downward. Heard no note. He says it has been here a day or two. 

At sundown paddled up the river. The pump-like note of a stake-driver from the fenny place across the Lee meadow. 

The greenest and rankest grass as yet is that in the water along the sides of the river. The hylodes are peeping. 

I love to paddle now at evening when the water is smooth and the air begins to be warm. 

The rich warble of blackbirds about retiring is loud and incessant not to mention the notes of numerous other birds. The black willow has started but not yet the button-bush. Again I think I heard the night-warbler. 

Now at starlight that same nighthawk or snipe squeak is heard but no hovering. 

The first bat goes suddenly zigzag overhead through the dusky air; comes out of the dusk and disappears into it. 

That slumbrous snoring croak far less ringing and musical than the toad' s (which is occasionally heard) now comes up from the meadows edge. 

I save a floating plank which exhales and imparts to my hands the rank scent of the muskrats which have squatted on it. I often see their fresh green excrement on rocks and wood. 

Already men are fishing for pouts. 

This has been almost the first warm day; none yet quite so warm. Walking to the Cliffs this afternoon I noticed on Fair Haven Hill a season stillness as I looked over the distant budding forest and heard the buzzing of a fly.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 9, 1853

I no longer hear the chill lill of the blue snowbird or the sweet strains of the fox-colored sparrow and the tree sparrow. See April 17, 1855 ("The fox-colored sparrows seem to be gone, and I suspect that most of the tree sparrows and F. hyemalis, at least, went yesterday.")

I have devoted most of my day to Mr. Alcott. See July 4, 1855 ("So we have to spend the day in Boston, —at Athenaeum gallery, Alcott’s, and at the regatta. Lodge at Alcott’s, who is about moving to Walpole."); September 11, 1856  ("Walked over what Alcott calls Farm Hill, east of his house."); January 17, 1860 ("Alcott said well the other day that this was his definition of heaven, 'A place where you can have a little conversation.'")

Several parti-colored warblers or finch creepers (Sylvia Americana) a small blue and yellow bird quite tame about the buds of the firs now showing red; often head downward. Heard no note. See May 9, 1858  ("The parti-colored warbler . . .— my tweezer-bird, – making the screep screep screep note. It is an almost incessant singer . . . utters its humble notes, like ah twze twze twze, or ah twze twze twze twze."). See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the parti-colored warbler (Sylvia Americana)

 The pump-like note of a stake-driver from the fenny place across the Lee meadow. See  May 9, 1857 ("Hear stake-driver"), See also  April 24, 1854 (" As I stand still listening . . . I hear the loud and distinct pump-a-gor of a stake-driver. Thus he announces himself.”)..

That slumbrous snoring croak far less ringing and musical than the toad's now comes up from the meadows edge. See May 8. 1857 ("The full moon rises, and I paddle by its light, It is an evening for the soft-snoring, purring frogs (which I suspect to be Rana palustris).. . . Their croak is very fine or rapid, and has a soft, purring sound at a little distance")

The first autumnal evening. A newly hatched turtle as "the result of all turtles that have been."

September 11.


Measured to-day the little Sternothærus odoratus which came out the ground in the garden September 9th.

Its shell is thirty-two fortieths of an inch long, by twenty-five fortieths wide.

It has a distinct dorsal ridge, and its head and flippers are remarkably developed. Its raised back and dorsal ridge, as in the case of the mud turtle, enable it to turn over very easily. 

It may have been hatched some time be fore it came out, for not only there was no trace of the yolk (?), but its shell was much wider than the egg, when it first came out of the ground. 

I placed a sieve over it, and it remained in the hole it had made mostly concealed the two rainy days, — the 9th and 10th, — but to-day I found it against the edge of the sieve, its head and legs drawn in and quite motionless, so that you would have said the pulses of life had not fairly begun to beat. 

I put it into the tub on the edge of the mud. 

It seems that it does not have to learn to walk, but walks at once. It seems to have no infancy such as birds have. 

It is surprising how much cunning it already exhibits. It is defended both by its form and color and its instincts. 

As it lay on the mud, its color made it very inobvious, but, besides, it kept its head and legs drawn in and perfectly still, as if feigning death; but this was not sluggishness. 

At a little distance I watched it for ten minutes or more. 

At length it put its head out far enough to see if the coast was clear, then, with its flippers, it turned itself toward the water (which element it had never seen before), and suddenly and with rapidity launched itself into it and dove to the bottom. Its whole behavior was calculated to enable it to reach its proper element safely and without attracting attention.

Not only was it made of a color and form (like a bit of coal) which alone almost effectually concealed it, but it was made, infant as it was, to be perfectly still as if inanimate and then to move with rapidity when unobserved.

The oldest turtle does not show more, if so much, cunning. I think I may truly say that it uses cunning and meditates how it may reach the water in safety. 

When I first took it out of its hole on the morning of the 9th, it shrunk into its shell and was motionless, feigning death.

That this was not sluggishness, I have proved. 

When to-day it lay within half an inch of the water's edge, it knew it for a friendly element and, without deliberation or experiment, but at last, when it thought me and all foes unobservant of its motions, with remarkable precipitation it committed itself to it as if realizing a long-cherished idea. 

Plainly all its motions were as much the result of what is called instinct as is the act of sucking in infants.

Our own subtlest [sic] is likewise but another kind of instinct. The wise man is a wise infant obeying his finest and never-failing instincts. 

It does not so much impress me as an infantile beginning of life as an epitome of all the past of turtledom and of the earth. I think of it as the result of all the turtles that have been. 

The little snapping turtle lies almost constantly on the mud with its snout out of water. 

It does not keep under water long. 

Yesterday in the cold rain, however, it lay buried in the mud all day! 

Surveying this forenoon, I saw a small, round, bright-yellow gall (some are red on one side), as big as a moderate cranberry, hard and smooth, saddled on a white oak twig. 

So I have seen them on the swamp white, the chinquapin, and the white, not to mention the Castile-soap one on the ilicifolia acorn edge. 

This is a cold evening with a white twilight, and threatens frost, the first in these respects decidedly autumnal evening. 

It makes us think of wood for the winter. 

For a week or so the evenings have been sensibly longer, and I am beginning to throw off my summer idleness. 

This twilight is succeeded by a brighter starlight than heretofore.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 11, 1854

The little Sternotherus odoratus which came out the ground in the garden September 9th [impresses me as]  all the past of turtledom and of the earth. . . the result of all the turtles that have been. See September 9, 1854 ("The earth has some virtue in it; when seeds are put into it, they germinate; when turtles’ eggs, they hatch in due time. Though the mother turtle remained and brooded them, it would still nevertheless be the universal world turtle which, through her, cared for them as now. Thus the earth is the mother of all creatures.")

At length it put its head out far enough to see if the coast was clear, then, with its flippers, it turned itself toward the water. See September 16, 1854 ("I find the mud turtle’s eggs at the Desert all hatched, one still left in the nest . . . At length it puts out its head and legs, turns itself round, and crawls to the water.")

This is a cold evening with a white twilight, and threatens frost, the first - in these respects- decidedly autumnal evening. See September 11, 1853 ("Cool weather. Sit with windows shut, and many by fires. A great change . . . The air has got an autumnal coolness which it will not get rid of again. Signs of frost last night.") See also   August 28, 1853 ("A cool, white, autumnal evening.");September 7, 1857 ("Our first slight frost in some places this morning. Northwest wind to-day and cool weather; such weather as we have not had for a long time, a new experience, which arouses a corresponding breeze in us. "); September 10, 1860 ("There was a frost this morning. "); September 14, 1852 ("This morning the first frost"); September 29, 1854 ("This evening is quite cool and breezy, with a prolonged white twilight, quite Septemberish.")

This cold evening with 

a white twilight makes us think –

wood for the winter. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,   The first autumnal evening

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-540911

The increased length of the days

January 23

Love tends to purify and sublime itself. It mortifies and triumphs over the flesh, and the bond of its union is holiness. 

January 23, 2015

The increased length of the days is very observable of late. What is a winter unless you have risen and gone abroad frequently before sunrise and by starlight?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 23, 1854

The increased length of the days. See January 3, 1854 ("The twilight appears to linger. The day seems suddenly longer."); January 7, 1853 ("I perceive the increased length of the day on returning from my afternoon walk. Can it be? The sun sets only about five minutes later, and the day is about ten minutes longer."); January 20, 1852 ("The days are now sensibly longer, and half past five is as light as five was."); January 24, 1852 ("The sun sets about five.”); January 25, 1853 ("The earth and sun appear to have approached some degrees.");  January 25, 1855 ("For a week or two the days have been sensibly longer, and it is quite light now when the five-o’clock train comes in.)

Rise and go abroad before sunrise and by starlight.  See November 13, 1857 ("See the sun rise or set if possible each day."); December 20, 1851 ("Go out before sunrise or stay out till sunset."); January 20, 1852 ("To see the sun rise or go down every day would preserve us sane forever.”)

January 23. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 23 

What is a winter

unless you have risen and

gone out by starlight?

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

tinyurl.com/hdt18540123

The day is an epitome of the year.

August  19. 

As the rays of the sun fall horizontally across the placid pond, they light up the side of Baker's Pleasant Meadow Wood, which covers a hill. The different shades of green of different and the same trees, — alders, pines, birch, maple, oak, etc., — melting into one another on their rounded bosky edges, make a most glorious soft and harmonious picture, only to be seen at this season of the day and perhaps of the year. 

It is a beautiful green rug with lighter shadings and rounded figures like the outlines of trees and shrubs of different shades of green. In the case of a single tree there is the dark glossy green of the lower, older leaves, — the spring growth, — which hang down, fading on every side into the silvery hoariness of the younger and more downy leaves on the edges, — the fall growth, — whose under sides are seen, which stand up, and more perhaps at this hour. This is also the case with every bush along the river, — the larger glossy dark -green watery leaves beneath and in the recesses, the upright hoary leaves whose under sides are seen on the shoots which rise above. These lighter shades in the rug had the effect of watered silks, — the edges lit, the breasts dark-green, almost the cast on green crops seen by moon-light. I never saw a forest-side look more luxuriantly and at the same time freshly beautiful.

As toward the evening of the day the lakes and streams are smooth, so in the fall, the evening of the year, the waters are smoothed more perfectly than at any other season. The day is an epitome of the year.

The smaller, or green, bittern goes over. Now, while off Conantum, we have a cool, white, autumnal twilight, and as we pass the Hubbard Bridge, see the first stars.

H. D. Thoreau, August 19, 1853

 . . . only to be seen at this season of the day and perhaps of the year. See August 19, 1851 ("The seasons do not cease a moment to revolve, and therefore Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other.”); June 6, 1857 ("Each season is but an infinitesimal point.”); November 3, 1853 (“There are very few phenomena which can be described indifferently as occurring at different seasons of the year, for they will occur with some essential difference. ”);April 24, 1859("There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed, it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season.")

As toward the evening of the day the lakes and streams are smooth, so in the fall, the evening of the year, the waters are smoothed more perfectly than at any other season. See October 17, 1858 ("One reason why I associate perfect reflections from still water with this and a later season may be that now, by the fall of the leaves, so much more light is let in to the water. The river reflects more light, therefore, in this twilight of the year, as it were an afterglow.")

The day is an epitome of the year. 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."); August 31, 1852 ("The evening of the year is colored like the sunset.");August 15, 1853 ("an inky darkness as of night under the edge of the woods, now at noonday heralding the evening of the year.”); March 18, 1853 ("This the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer”); 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 ("The night of the year is approaching.");

See also August 24, 1852 (“The year is but a succession of days, and I see that I could assign some office to each day which, summed up, would be the history of the year.”)

We have a cool, white, autumnal twilight, and as we pass the Hubbard Bridge, see the first stars. See August 28, 1853 ("A cool, white, autumnal evening.") ; August 30, 1856 ("A cold white horizon sky in the north, forerunner of the fall of the year."); September 11, 1854 ("This is a cold evening with a white twilight, and threatens frost, the first in these respects decidedly autumnal evening.");September 29, 1854 ("This evening is quite cool and breezy, with a prolonged white twilight, quite Septemberish."); November 2, 1853 ("We come home in the autumn twilight, which lasts long and is remarkably light, the air being purer, — clear white light, which penetrates the woods.");  November 14, 1853 ("This [October] light fades into the clear, white, leafless twilight of November, ")

August 19. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, August 19

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 © 2009-2021

Sunset from Fair Haven Hill.

July 27.

It has been a clear, cool, breezy day for the season. There is only one white bar of cloud in the north.  The river is silvery, as it were plated and polished smooth, with the slightest possible tinge of gold, to-night. The sun is now set.  All glow on the clouds is gone, except from one higher, small, rosy pink isle.  The solemnity of the evening sky!  Just before the earliest star I turn round, and there shines the moon, silvering the small clouds.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 27, 1852


Tuesday. 4 p. m. — To Assabet behind Lee place. 

It is pleasing to behold at this season contrasted shade and sunshine on the side of neighboring hills. They are not so attractive to the eye when all in the shadow of a cloud or wholly open to the sunshine. Each must enhance the other. 

That the luxury of walking in the river may be perfect it must be very warm, such as are few days even in July, so that the breeze on those parts of the body that have just been immersed may not produce the least chilliness. It cannot be too warm, so that, with a shirt to fend the sun from your back, you may walk with perfect indifference, or rather with equal pleasure, alternately in deep and in shallow water. Both water and air must be unusually warm; otherwise we shall feel no impulse to cast ourselves into and remain in the stream. To-day it is uncomfortably cool for such a walk. 

It is very pleasant to walk up and down the stream, however, studying the further bank, which is six or seven feet high and completely covered with verdure of various kinds. 

I observe grape-vines with green clusters almost fully grown hanging over the water, and hazelnut husks are fully formed and are richly, autumnally, significant. Viburnum dentatum, elder, and red-stemmed cornel, all with an abundance of green berries, help clothe the bank, and the Asclepias incarnata and meadow-rue fill the crevices. Above all there is the cardinal-flower just opened, close to the water's edge, remarkable for its intense scarlet color, contrasting with the surrounding green. 

I see young breams in small schools, only one inch long, light-colored and semitransparent as yet, long in proportion to their depth. Some two inches long are ludicrously deep already, like little halibuts, making the impression, by their form, of vast size like halibuts or whales. They appear to be attended and guarded still by their parents. What innumerable enemies they have to encounter! 

The sun on the bottom is indispensable, and you must have your back to it. 

Woodcocks have been common by the streams and springs in woods for some weeks. 

Aster dumosus ( ?) by wood-paths. 

A quarter before seven p. m. — To Cliffs. 

It has been a clear, cool, breezy day for the season.

There is only one white bar of cloud in the north. I now perceive the peculiar scent of the corn-fields. The corn is just high enough, and this hour is favorable. I should think the ears had hardly set yet. Half an hour before sundown, you perceive the cool, damp air in valleys surrounded by woods, where dew is already formed. 

I am sure that if I call for a companion in my walk I have relinquished in my design some closeness of communion with Nature. The walk will surely be more commonplace. The inclination for society indicates a distance from Nature. I do not design so wild and mysterious a walk. 

The bigoted and sectarian forget that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished. 

On Fair Haven Hill. The slight distraction of picking berries is favorable to a mild, abstracted, poetic mood, to sequestered or transcendental thinking. I return ever more fresh to my mood from such slight interruptions. 

All the clouds in the sky are now close to the west horizon, so that the sun is nearly down before they are reached and lighted or gilded. Wachusett, free of clouds, has a fine purplish tinge, as if the juice of grapes had been squeezed over it, darkening into blue. I hear the scratching sound of a worm at work in this hardwood-pile on which I sit. 

We are most disturbed by the sun's dazzle when it is lowest. Now the upper edge of that low blue bank is gilt where the sun has disappeared, leaving a glory in the horizon through which a few cloudy peaks send raylike shadows. Now a slight rosy blush is spreading north and south over the horizon sky and tingeing a few small scattered clouds in the east. A blue tinge south ward makes the very edge of the earth there a mountain. That low bank of cloud in the west is now exactly the color of the mountains, a dark blue. 

We should think sacredly, with devotion. That is one thing, at least, we may do magnanimously. May not every man have some private affair which he can conduct greatly, unhurriedly? 

The river is silvery, as it were plated and polished smooth, with the slightest possible tinge of gold, tonight. How beautiful the meanders of a river, thus revealed! How beautiful hills and vales, the whole surface of the earth a succession of these great cups, falling away from dry or rocky edges to gelid green meadows and water in the midst, where night already is setting in! 

The thrush, now the sun is apparently set, fails not to sing. Have I heard the veery lately ? 

All glow on the clouds is gone, except from one higher, small, rosy pink or flesh-colored isle. The sun is now probably set. There are no clouds on high to reflect a golden light into the river. 

How cool and assuaging the thrush's note after the fever of the day! I doubt if they have anything so richly wild in Europe. So long a civilization must have banished it. It will only be heard in America, perchance, while our star is in the ascendant. I should be very much surprised if I were to hear in the strain of the nightingale such unexplored wildness and fertility, reaching to sundown, inciting to emigration. Such a bird must itself have emigrated long ago. 

Why, then, was I born in America ? I might ask. I should like to ask the assessors what is the value of that blue mountain range in the northwest horizon to Concord, and see if they would laugh or seriously set about calculating it. How poor, comparatively, should we be without it ! It would be descending to the scale of the merchant to say it is worth its weight in gold. The privilege of beholding it, as an ornament, a suggestion, a provocation, a heaven on earth. 

If I were one of the fathers of the town I would not sell this right which we now enjoy for all the merely material wealth and prosperity conceivable. If need were, we would rather all go down together. 

The huckleberry-bird as usual, and the nighthawk squeaks and booms, and the bullfrog trumps, just before the earliest star. The evening red is much more remarkable than the morning red. 

The solemnity of the evening sky! I turn round, and there shines the moon, silvering the small clouds which have gathered; she makes nothing red. 

New creaking or shrilling from crickets (?) for a long time past, more fine and piercing than the other.

 Aster dumosus (?) by wood-paths.

That the luxury of walking in the river may be perfect it must be very warm, such as are few days even in July .. See July 10, 1852 (" I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk. . . .Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head.”); July 17, 1860 ("The soft sand on the bottom of Walden, as deep as I can wade, feels very warm to my feet, while the water feels cold.");July 22, 1851("I bathe, and in a few hours I bathe again, not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river, I take off my clothes and carry them over, then bathe and wash off the mud and continue my walk. I would fain take rivers in my walks endwise.”).

If I call for a companion in my walk I have relinquished in my design some closeness of communion with Nature. The inclination for society indicates a distance from Nature. See July 26, 1852 ("By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. . . .The mind that perceives clearly any natural beauty is in that instant withdrawn from human society.")

 The solemnity of the evening sky! See July 26, 1852 ("The grandest picture in the world is the sunset sky."); December 27, 1851 ("Sunset from Fair Haven Hill.")

New creaking or shrilling from crickets . . . more fine and piercing than the other. See July 28, 1854 ("Last evening it was much cooler, and I heard a decided fall sound of crickets"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in July

Before the first star

turn round and there shines the moon 

silvering small clouds.