June 15.
Tuesday. Silene Antirrhina, sleepy catch-fly, or snapdragon catch-fly, the ordinarily curled-up petals scarcely noticeable at the end of the large oval calyx. Gray says opening only by night or cloudy weather. Bigelow says probably nocturnal, for he never found it expanded by day. (I found it June 16th at 6 a. m. expanded, two of its flowers, — and they remained so for some hours, in my chamber.)
By railroad near Badger's.
Yesterday we smelt the sea strongly; the sea breeze alone made the day tolerable.
This morning, a shower! The robin only sings the louder for it. He is inclined to sing in foul weather.
To Clematis Brook, 1.30 p. m. Very warm. Now for a thin coat. This melting weather makes a stage in the year.
The crickets creak louder and more steadily; the bullfrogs croak in earnest.
The drouth begins. The dry z-ing of the locust is heard.
The potatoes are of that height to stand up at night.
Bathing cannot be omitted. The conversation of all boys in the streets is whether they will or not or who will go in a-swimming, and how they will not tell their parents. You lie with open windows and hear the sounds in the streets.
The seringo sings now at noon on a post; has a light streak over eye.
The autumnal dandelion (Leontodon, or Apargia). Erigeron integrifolius of Bigelow (strigosus, i. e. narrow- leaved daisy fleabane, of Gray) very common, like a white aster. I will note such birds as I observe in this walk, beginning on the railroad causeway in middle of this hot day.
The chuckling warble of martins heard over the meadow, from a village box. The lark.
The fields are blued with blue-eyed grass, — a slaty blue. The epilobium shows some color in its spikes.
How rapidly new flowers unfold! as if Nature would get through her work too soon. One has as much as he can do to observe how flowers successively unfold.
It is a flowery revolution, to which but few attend. Hardly too much attention can be bestowed on flowers. We follow, we march after, the highest color; that is our flag, our standard, our "color."
Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colors imply eyes, spectators.
There have been many flower men who have rambled the world over to see them. The flowers robbed from an Egyptian traveller were at length carefully boxed up and forwarded to Linnaeus, the man of flowers.
The common, early cultivated red roses are certainly very handsome, so rich a color and so full of blossoms; you see why even blunderers have introduced them into their gardens.
Ascending to pigeon-place plain, the reflection of the heat from the dead pine-needles and the boughs strewn about, combined with the dry, suffocating scent, is oppressive and reminds me of the first settlers of Concord.
The oven-bird, chewink, pine warbler (?), thrasher, swallows on the wire, cuckoo, phoebe, red eye, robin, veery.
The maple-leaved viburnum is opening with a purplish tinge.
Wood thrush.
Is not that the Prunus obovata, which I find in fruit, a mere shrub, in Laurel Glen, with oval fruit and long pedicels in a raceme? And have I not mistaken the P. Virginiana, or northern red cherry, for this?
Vide Virginiana and also vide the P. depressa.
Golden and coppery reflections from a yellow dor-bug's coat of mail in the water.
Is it a yellowbird or myrtle-bird?
Huckleberry-bird.
Walden is two inches above my last mark. It must be four or five feet, at least, higher than when I sounded it.
Men are inclined to be amphibious, to sympathize with fishes, now. I desire to get wet and saturated with water.
The North River, Assabet, by the old stone bridge, affords the best bathing-place I think of, — a pure sandy, uneven bottom, — with a swift current, a grassy bank, and overhanging maples, with transparent water, deep enough, where you can see every fish in it. Though you stand still, you feel the rippling current about you.
First locust.
The pea-wai.
There is considerable pollen on the pond; more than last year, notwithstanding that all the white pines near the pond are gone and there are very few pitch. It must all come from the pitch pine, whose sterile blossoms are now dry and empty, for it is earlier than the white pine. Probably I have never observed it in the river because it is carried away by the current.
The umbellefl pyrola is just ready to bloom.
Young robins, dark-speckled, and the pigeon woodpecker flies up from the ground and darts away.
I forget that there are lichens at this season.
The farmhouses under their shady trees (Baker's) look as if the inhabitants were taking their siesta at this hour. I pass it in the rear, through the open pitch pine wood.
Why does work go forward now? No scouring of tubs or cans now. The cat and all are gone to sleep, preparing for an early tea, excepting the indefatigable, never-resting hoers in the corn-field, who have carried a jug of molasses and water to the field and will wring their shirts to-night.
I shall ere long hear the horn blow for their early tea. The wife or the hired Irish woman steps to the door and blows the long tin horn, a cheering sound to the laborers in the field.
The motive of the laborer should be not to get his living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work.
A town must pay its engineers so well that they shall not feel that they are working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific ends.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love, and pay him well.
On Mt. Misery, panting with heat, looking down the river. The haze an hour ago reached to Wachusett; now it obscures it.
Methinks there is a male and female shore to the river, one abrupt, the other flat and meadowy. Have not all streams this contrast more or less, on the one hand eating into the bank, on the other depositing their sediment?
The year is in its manhood now.
The very river looks warm, and there is none of that light celestial blue seen in far reaches in the spring. I see fields a mile distant reddened with sorrel. The very sight of distant water is refreshing, though a bluish steam appears to rest on it.
Catbird.
The waxwork is just in blossom and groves [of] hickories on the south of Mt. Misery. How refreshing the sound of the smallest waterfall in hot [weather]
I sit by that on Clematis Brook and listen to its music. The very sight of this half-stagnant pond-hole, drying up and leaving bare mud, with the pollywogs and turtles making off in it, is agreeable and encouraging to behold, as if it contained the seeds of life, the liquor rather, boiled down. The foulest water will bubble purely.
They speak to our blood, even these stagnant, slimy pools. It, too, no doubt, has its falls nobler than Montmorenci, grander than Niagara, in the course of its circulations.
Here is the primitive force of Egypt and the Nile, where the lotus grows.
Some geraniums are quite rose-colored, others pale purplish-blue, others whitish.
The blossom of the Zentago is rather sweet smelling.
Orobanche uniflora, sin gle-flowered broom-rape (Bigelow), [or] Aphyllon uniflorum, one-flowered cancer-root (Gray), grows by this brook-side, — a naked, low, bluish-white flower, even re minding you of the tobacco-pipe.
Cattle walk along in a brook or ditch now for coolness, lashing their tails, and browse the edges; or they stand concealed for shade amid thick bushes. How perfectly acquainted they are with man, and never run from him!
Thorn bushes appear to be just out of blossom. I have not observed them well.
Woodchucks and squirrels are seen and heard in a walk.
How much of a tortoise is shell! But little is gone with its spirit. It is well cleaned out, I trust. It is emptied of the reptile. It is not its exuviae.
I hear the scream of a great hawk, sailing with a ragged wing against the high wood-side, apparently to scare his prey and so detect it, — r- shrill, harsh, fitted to excite terror in sparrows and to issue from his split and curved bill. I see his open bill the while against the sky. Spit with force from his mouth with an undulatory quaver imparted to it from his wings or motion as he flies. A hawk's ragged wing will grow whole again, but so will not a poet's.
By half past five, robins more than before, crows, of course, and jays.
Dogsbane is just ready to open.
Swallows.
It is pleasant walking through the June-grass (in Pleasant Meadow), so thin and offering but little obstruction.
The nighthawk squeaks and booms.
The Veratrum viride top is now a handsome green cluster, two feet by ten inches.
Here also, at Well Meadow Head, I see the fringed purple orchis, unexpectedly beautiful, though a pale lilac purple, — a large spike of purple flowers.
I find two, — the grandiflora of Bigelow and fimbriata of Gray. Bigelow thinks it the most beautiful of all the orchises.
I am not prepared to say it is the most beautiful wild flower I have found this year. Why does it grow there only, far in a swamp, remote from public view? It is somewhat fragrant, reminding me of the lady's-slipper.
Is it not significant that some rare and delicate and beautiful flowers should be found only in unfrequented wild swamps? There is the mould in which the orchis grows. Yet I am not sure but this is a fault in the flower. It is not quite perfect in all its parts.
A beautiful flower must be simple, not spiked. It must have a fair stem and leaves.
This stem is rather naked, and the leaves are for shade and moisture. It is fairest seen rising from amid brakes and hellebore, its lower part or rather naked stem concealed.
Where the most beautiful wild-flowers grow, there man's spirit is fed, and poets grow. It cannot be high-colored, growing in the shade. Nature has taken no pains to exhibit [it], and few that bloom are ever seen by mortal eyes.
The most striking and handsome large wild-flower of the year thus far that I have seen.
Disturbed a company of tree-toads amid the bushes. They seemed to bewilder the passer by their croaking; when he went toward one, he was silent, and another sounded on the other side.
The hickory leaves are fra grant as I brush past them.
Quite a feast of strawberries on Fair Haven, — the upland strawberry. The largest and sweetest on sand. The first fruit.
The night-warbler.
There are few really cold springs. I go out of my way to go by the Boiling Spring. How few men can be believed when they say the spring is cold! There is one cold as the coldest well water. What a treasure is such a spring! Who divined it?
The cistuses are all closed. Is it because of the heat, and will they be open in the morning?
C. found common hound's-tongue (Cynoglossum officinale) by railroad.
8 p. m. — On river. No moon.
A deafening sound from the toads, and intermittingly from bullfrogs. What I have thought to be frogs prove to be toads, sitting by thousands along the shore and trilling short and loud, — not so long a quaver as in the spring, — and I have not heard them in those pools, now, indeed, mostly dried up, where I heard them in the spring. (I do not know what to think of my midsummer frog now.)
The bullfrogs are very loud, of various degrees of baseness and sonorousness, answering each other across the river with two or three grunting croaks. They are not nearly so numerous as the toads.
It is candle-light. The fishes leap.
The meadows sparkle with the coppery light of fireflies. The evening star, multiplied by undulating water, is like bright sparks of fire continually ascending.
The reflections of the trees are grandly indistinct.
There is a low mist slightly enlarging the river, through which the arches of the stone bridge are' just visible, as a vision. The mist is singularly bounded, collected here, while there is none there; close up to the bridge on one side and none on the other, depending apparently on currents of air. A dew in the air for it is, which in time will wet you through.
See stars reflected in the bottom of our boat, it being a quarter full of water. There is a low crescent of northern light and shooting stars from time to time.
(We go only from Channing's to the ash above the railroad.) I paddle with a bough, the Nile boatman's oar, which is rightly pliant, and you do not labor much. Some dogs bay. A sultry night.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 15, 1852
The drouth begins. The dry z-ing of the locust is heard. See June 14, 1853 ("Heard the first locust from amid the shrubs by the roadside. He comes with heat.")
The fields are blued with blue-eyed grass, — a slaty blue. See
June 15, 1851 ("The blue-eyed grass, well named, looks up to heaven."); June 15, 1859 ("Blue-eyed grass at height.")
Methinks there is a male and female shore to the river, one abrupt, the other flat and meadowy.See
July 19, 1859 ("It is remarkable how the river, while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up the other side") See also
August 7, 1858 ("The most luxuriant groves of black willow are on the inside curves, —but rarely ever against a firm bank or hillside, the positive male shore. “);
August 15, 1858 (“I notice the black willows . . . to see where they grow, distinguishing ten places. In seven instances they are on the concave or female side distinctly.”);
July 5, 1859 ("The deepest part of the river is generally rather toward one side, especially where the stream is energetic. On a curve it is generally deepest on the inside bank, and the bank most upright.")
The year is in its manhood now. See
June 11, 1853 ("In the sorrel-fields, also, what lately was the ruddy, rosy cheek of health, now that the sorrel is ripening and dying, has become the tanned and imbrowned cheek of manhood.");
June 15, 1853 ("The rude health of the sorrel cheek has given place to the blush of clover.")
I see fields a mile distant reddened with sorrel. See note to
June 12, 1859 ("I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Wood Sorrel (Oxalis)
I see the fringed purple orchis, unexpectedly beautiful. See note to
June 20, 1859 ("Great purple fringed orchis") See also
A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Fringed Orchids
Flowers were made to be seen, not overlooked. Their bright colors imply eyes, spectators. See
August 22, 1852 ("Perhaps fruits are colored like the trillium berry and the scarlet thorn to attract birds to them.”);
March 18, 1860 (“There is but one flower in bloom in the town, and this insect knows where to find it. . . .No doubt this flower, too, has learned to expect its winged visitor knocking at its door in the spring.”)
