August 31
Proserpinaca palustris, spear-leaved proserpinaca, mermaid-weed. (This in Hubbard's Grove on my way to Conantum.)
A hornets' (?) nest in a rather tall huckleberry bush, the stems projecting through it, the leaves spreading over it. How these fellows avail themselves of the vegetables ! They kept arriving, the great fellows, but I never saw whence they came, but only heard the buzz just at the entrance. (With whitish abdomens.) At length, after I have stood before the nest five minutes, during which time they had taken no notice of me, two seemed to be consulting at the entrance, and then one made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint and retired. They spoke as plainly as man could have done.
I see that the farmers have begun to top their corn. Examined my old friend the green locust ( ? ), shrilling on an alder leaf. What relation does the fall dandelion bear to the spring dandelion ?
There is a rank scent of tansy now on some roads, disagreeable to many people from being associated in their minds with funerals, where it is sometimes put into the coffin and about the corpse.
I have not observed much St. John's-wort yet.
Galium triflorum, three-flowered cleavers, in Conant's Spring Swamp; also fever-bush there, now budded for next year.
Tobacco-pipe (Monotropa uniflora) in Spring Swamp Path.
I came out of the thick, dark, swampy wood as from night into day. Having forgotten the daylight, I was surprised to see how bright it was. I had light enough, methought, and here was an afternoon sun illumining all the landscape . It was a surprise to me to see how much brighter an ordinary afternoon is than the light which penetrates a thick wood.
One of these drooping clusters of potato balls would be as good a symbol, emblem, of the year's fertility as anything, - better surely than a bunch of grapes. Fruit of the strong soil, containing potash ( ? ).The vintage is come; the olive is ripe.
"I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;
And with forc'd fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year; "
Why not for my coat-of -arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato balls, - in a potato field ?
What right has a New England poet to sing of wine, who never saw a vineyard, who obtains his liquor from the grocer, who would not dare, if he could, tell him what it is composed of. A Yankee singing in praise of wine! It is not sour grapes in this case, it is sweet grapes; the more inaccessible they are the sweeter they are.
It seemed to me that the year had nothing so much to brag of as these potato balls. Do they not concern New-Englanders a thousand times more than all her grapes ? In Moore's new field they grow, cultivated with the bog hoe, manured with ashes and sphagnum. How they take to the virgin soil !
Shannon tells me that he took a piece of bog land of Augustus Hayden, cleared, turned up the stumps and roots and burned it over, making a coat of ashes six inches deep, then planted potatoes. He never put a hoe to it till he went to dig them; then between 8 o'clock A. M. and 5 P. M. he and another man dug and housed seventy - five bushels apiece !!
Cohush now in fruit, ivory-white berries tipped now with black on stout red pedicels, - Actœa alba. Collinsonia Canadensis, horseweed I had discovered this singular flower there new to me, and, having a botany by me, looked it out. What a surprise and disappointment, what an insult and impertinence to my curiosity and expectation, to have given me the name " horse- weed ! "
Cohush Swamp is about twenty rods by three or four. Among rarer plants it contains the basswood, the black ( as well as white ) ash, the fever - bus, the cohush, the collinsonia, not to mention sassafras, poison sumach, ivy, agrimony, Arum triphyllum, ( sweet viburnum ( ? ) in hedges near by ), ground - nut, touch-me- not ( as high as your head ), and Eupatorium purpureum ( eight feet, eight inches high, with a large convex corymb ( hemi-spherical ) of many stories, fourteen inches wide; width of plant from tip of leaf to tip of leaf two feet, diameter of stalk one inch at ground, leaves seven in a whorl ).
Rare plants seem to love certain localities. As if the original Conant had been a botanist and endeavored to form an arboretum. A natural arboretum ? The handsome sweet viburnum berries, now red on one cheek. It was the filiform crowfoot ( Ranunculus filiformis ) that I saw by the riverside the other day and to - day. The season advances apace.
The flowers of the nettle-leaved vervain are now near the ends of the spike, like the blue. Utricularia inflata, whorled bladderwort, floating on the water at same place. Gentiana Saponaria budded. Gerardia flava at Conant's Grove.
Half an hour before sunset I was at Tupelo Cliff, when, looking up from my botanizing ( I had been examining the Ranunculus filiformis, the Sium latifolium ( ?? ), and the obtuse galium on the muddy shore), I saw the seal of evening on the river. There was a quiet beauty in the landscape at that hour which my senses were prepared to appreciate. The sun going down on the west side, that hand being already in shadow for the most part, but his rays lighting up the water and the willows and pads even more than before. His rays then fell at right angles on their stems.
I sitting on the old brown geologic rocks, their feet submerged and covered with weedy moss (utricularia roots? ) Sometimes their tops are submerged. The cardinal-flowers standing by me. The trivialness of the day is past. The greater stillness, the serenity of the air, its coolness and transparency, the mistiness being condensed, are favorable to thought. (The pensive eve.)
The coolness of evening comes to condense the haze of noon and make the air transparent and the outline of objects firm and distinct, and chaste (chaste eve); even as I am made more vigorous by my bath, am more continent of thought. After bathing, even at noonday, a man realizes a morning or evening life.
The evening air is such a bath for both mind and body. When I have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has been all trivial, - as well field and wood as highway, - then at eve the sun goes down westward, and the wind goes down with it, and the dews begin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day.
I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty. Thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to feel their oats, their nutriment, and are not oppressed by the belly's load. It is abstinence from loading the belly anew until the brain and divine faculties have felt their vigor. Not till some hours does my food invigorate my brain, - ascendeth into the brain. We practice at this hour an involuntary abstinence. We are comparatively chaste and temperate as Eve herself; the nutriment is just reaching the brain.
Every sound is music now. The grating of some distant boat which a man is launching on the rocky bottom, though here is no man nor inhabited house, nor even cultivated field, in sight, this is heard with such distinctness that I listen with pleasure as if it was [ sic ] music.
The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting because of their nakedness below. How rich, like what we love to read of South American primitive forest, is the scenery of this river! What luxuriance of weeds, what depth of mud along its sides! These old antehistoric, geologic ante-diluvian rocks, which only primitive wading birds, still lingering among us, are worthy to tread.
The season which we seem to live in anticipation of is arrived. The water, indeed, reflects heaven because my mind does; such is its own serenity, its transparency and stillness. With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses! Such a medicated bath as only nature furnishes. A fish leaps, and the dimple he makes is observed now. How ample and generous was nature! My inheritance is not narrow. Here is no other this evening.
Those resorts which I most love and frequent, numerous and vast as they are, are as it were given up to me, as much as if I were an autocrat or owner of the world, and by my edicts excluded men from my territories. Perchance there is some advantage here not enjoyed in older countries.
There are said to be two thousand inhabitants in Concord, and yet I find such ample space and verge, even miles of walking every day in which I do not meet nor see a human being, and often not very recent traces of them . So much of man as there is in your mind, there will be in your eye . Methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as it is possible, I walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from society of men, but turned loose into the woods, the only man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent as if man and his customs and institutions were not .
The catbird, or the jay, is sure of the whole of your ear now. Each noise is like a stain on pure glass. The rivers now, these great blue subterranean heavens, reflecting the supernal skies and red-tinted cloud.
A fly (or gnat ?) will often buzz round you and persecute you like an imp. How much of imp-like, pestering character they express ! ( I hear a boy driving home his cows . )
What unanimity between the water and the sky! - one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale !
Standing on distant hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be. Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?
We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night. It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars;
- if there were two persons whose pulses beat together,
- if men cared for the κόσμος, or beauty of the world;
- if men were social in a high and rare sense;
- if they associated on high levels;
- if we took in with our tea a draught of the transparent, dew-freighted evening air;
- if, with our bread and butter, we took a slice of the red western sky;
- if the smoking, steaming urn were the vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads.
The air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all those fragrances which during the day have been filling and have been dispersed in the atmosphere. The fine fragrances, perchance, which have floated in the upper atmospheres have settled to these low vales !
I talked of buying Conantum once, but for want of money we did not come to terms. But I have farmed it in my own fashion every year since.
I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants, if by their lives they have identified themselves with them. There may be a few Kalmias. But it must be done very sparingly, or, rather, discriminatingly, and no man's name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers that the flowers themselves may be supposed thus to reciprocate his love.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 31, 1851
One made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint. See August 7, 1854 ("A wasp stung me at one high blueberry bush on the forefinger of my left hand, just above the second joint. It was very venomous;. . . and the finger soon swelled much below the joint, so that I could not completely close the finger,") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. Wasps and Hornets
There is a rank scent of tansy now. See August 9, 1851 ("Tansy now in bloom and the fresh white clethra")
Why not for my coat-of -arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato balls. See July 28, 1860 ("A man shows me in the street a single bunch of potato-balls . . . to some extent emulating a cluster of grapes. The very sight of them supplies my constitution with all needed potash.")
The κόσμος, or beauty of the world. See August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world, — name for the world, — - Kosmos, or beauty"); January 5, 1856 ("Order, κóσμos.")
The pensive eve. See August 31, 1852 ("Evening is pensive. The serenity is far more remarkable to those who are on the water.")
I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of flowers, to plants . . . no man's name be used who has not been such a lover of flowers. See June 13, 1852 ("But Gray should not name it from the Governor of New York. . .If named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. . . .Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.")
