The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.

January 29

We must be very active if we would be clean and live our own life, and not a languishing and scurvy one. 

The trees, which are stationary, are covered with parasites, especially those which have grown slowly. 

The air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces.

Under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle, flourish crops of mildew, algae, and fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, – the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place. 

And the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. Algae take root in the corners of his eyes, and lichens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head, etc., etc., the lowest forms of vegetable life. '

This is the definition of dirt. We fall a prey to others of nature's tenants, who take possession of the unoccupied house. 

With the utmost inward activity we have to wash and comb ourselves beside, to get rid of the adhering seeds. Cleanliness is by activity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on. 

If he cuts pines, the woodchopper's hands are covered with pitch.

The names of plants are for the most part traced to Celtic and Arabian roots. 

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes. His ideas are not far-fetched. IIe derives inspiration from his chagrins and his satisfactions.  His theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives  impetus to what he says. He minds his business. He does not speculate while others drudge for him. 

I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same. 

It still melts. 

I observed this afternoon that the ground where they are digging for some scales near the depot was frozen about nine inches where the snow has lain most and sixteen inches where the road was. 

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields, which deceive me as if it were the ground itself. 

That point where the sun goes down is the cynosure which attracts all eyes at sundown and half an hour before. What do all other parts of the horizon concern us ? Our eyes follow the path of that great luminary. We watch for his rising, and we observe his setting. He is a companion and fellow-traveller we all have. We pity him who has his cheerless dwelling elsewhere, even in the northwest or southwest, off the high road of nature. 

The snow is nearly gone from the railroad causeway. 

Few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody.  Though the wind may blow strong or soft, in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound; but at length, when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the conditions not easy to be detected arrive, it suddenly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing. 

So is it with the lyres of bards, and for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the melody you do not hear.  When the gale is modified, wlen the favorable conditions occur, and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music. 

Of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. It is like the hum of the shaft, or other machinery, of a steamboat, which at length might become music in a divine hand. I feel greatly enriched by this telegraph. 

I have come to see the clay and sand in the Cut. A reddish tinge in the earth, stains. An Indian hue is singularly agreeable, even exciting, to the eye. Here the whole bank is sliding. Even the color of the subsoil excites me, as if I were already getting near to life and vegetation. This clay is faecal in its color also. It runs off at bottom info mere shoals, shallows, vasa, vague sand-bars, like the mammoth leaves, –– makes strands. 

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. 

The snow on the slope of the Cliffs is dotted with black specks, the seeds of the mullein which the wind has shaken out. When I strike the dry stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black like charcoal dust or powder. 

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. 

Day before yesterday, I saw the hunters out with a dozen dogs, but only two pussies, one white and one lithe gray one, did I see, for so many men and dogs, who seem to set all the village astir as if the fox's trail led through it. 

And Stedman Buttrick, with whom I was walking, was excited as if in the heyday of his youth.

Heard C. lecture to-night. It was a bushel of nuts. Perhaps the most original lecture I ever heard. Ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him and take his thought at. the same time. 

You had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. There was no sloping up or down to or from his points. It was all genius, no talent. It required more close attention, more abstraction from surrounding circumstances, than any lecture I have heard. 

For, well as I know C., he more than any man disappoints my expectation. When 1 see him in the desk, hear him, I cannot realize that I ever saw him before. He will be strange, unexpected, to his best acquaintance. I cannot associate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. 

It was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that I doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe that he said. It was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exertion. 

A thick succession of mountain passes and no intermediate slopes and plains. Other lectures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. 

Yet it would be how much more glorious if talent were added to genius, if there [were] a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, and each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap! 

Most of the spectators sat in front of the performer but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling.

H. D. Thoreau Journal, January 29, 1852

The forcible writer does not go far for his themes.  See January 30, 1852 ("It is in vain to write on chosen themes. We must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. ");  February 3, 1852 ("The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.") See also November 12, 1851 ("Write often, write upon a thousand themes"); February 3, 1859 ("The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself . . . It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.");Compare March 18, 1861 ("A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius - a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.")

The green mosses on the rocks are evidently nourished and kept bright by the snows lying on them a part of the year. See February 18, 1852 ("The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs."); March 4, 1852 ("The snow is melting on the rocks; the water trickles down in shining streams; the mosses look bright;"); March 28, 1859 ("These earth colors, methinks, are never so fair as in the spring.. Now the green mosses and lichens contrast with the brown grass, but ere long the surface will be uniformly green."); April 25, 1857 ("The dense, green, rounded beds of mosses in springs and old water-troughs are very handsome now, — intensely cold green cushions.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau., signs of spring: mosses bright green

I begin to see the tops of the grasses and stubble in the fields . . . When I strike the dry [mullein ] stalks, the seeds fall in a shower and color the snow black. See December 31, 1859 ("The mulleins are full of minute brown seeds, which a jar sprinkles over the snow, and [they] look black there; also the primrose, of larger brown seeds, which rattle out in the same manner"); March 24, 1859 ("They [goldfinches] are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels."); see also January 30, 1853 ("The most common and conspicuous green leaf on the ground when the snow is off at this season, as at present, is that of the buttercup. Sorrel is also very common, and johnswort, and the purplish gnaphaliums. There is also the early crowfoot in some places, strawberry, mullein, and thistle leaves, and hawkweeds, etc., etc.")

Perhaps those mother-o'-pearl clouds I described some time ago might be called rainbow flocks. See January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write."); January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852 ("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky."); December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon");  January 22, 1854 ("Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely."); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs."); February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.").

Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire?

January 3, 2022

January 3. 

Oak-apples are a winter fruit. The leaves being gone, they are now conspicuous and shine in the sun. Some trees are quite full of them.
Do they not suggest that all vegetable fruit is but the albumen about young animal life? 

The ground has been bare for some days, and the weather warm.

The river has risen, and now the meadows are frozen so as to bear, a dark, thin, but rather opaque ice, as if covered with steam, -- and I see now travelling, sweeping, coursing over it, in long winrows, fine pellets of snow, like cotton, fine, round, and dry, which I do not detect in the air before they fall.

They lodge against a rail and make a small drift. So once more the skating will be spoiled.

A spirit sweeps the string of the telegraph harp, and strains of music are drawn out endlessly like the wire itself.  We have no need to refer music and poetry to Greece for an origin now. What becomes of the story of a tortoise-shell on the seashore now? The world is young, and music is its infant voice.

I do not despair of such a world where you have only to stretch an ordinary wire from tree to tree to hear such strains drawn from it by New England breezes as make Greece and all antiquity seem poor in melody. Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire? 

Are not inspiration and ecstasy a more rapid vibration of the nerves swept by the in rushing excited spirit, whether zephyral or boreal in its character.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1852

Oak-apples are a winter fruit . . . Do they not suggest that all vegetable fruit is but the albumen about young animal life?  See September 4, 1854 ("Is not Art itself a gall? Nature is stung by God and the seed of man planted in her. The artist changes the direction of Nature and makes her grow according to his idea. If the gall was anticipated when the oak was made, so was the canoe when the birch was made. Genius stings Nature, and she grows according to its idea.")

Fne pellets of snow, like cotton, fine, round, and dry. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified . . . Also there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot."); November 24, 1860 (“ The first spitting of snow. . .consisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind . . . T he air was so filled with these snow pellets that for an hour we could not see a hill half a mile off”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified.

The telegraph harp . . .t o hear such strains drawn from it by New England breezes as make Greece and all antiquity seem poor. September 22, 1851 ("How much the ancients would have made of it! To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude,")

To read that the ancients stretched a wire round the earth, attaching it to the trees of the forest, by which they sent messages by one named Electricity, father of Lightning and Magnetism, swifter far than Mercury, the stern commands of war and news of peace , and that the winds caused this wire to vibrate so that it emitted a harp like and æolian music in all the lands through which it passed, as if to express the satisfaction of the gods in this invention . Yet this is fact, and we have yet attributed the invention to no god.

September 22, 1851. See also September 3, 1851 ("As I went under the new telegraph - wire , I heard it vibrating like a harp high overhead . It was as the sound of a far - off glorious life , a supernal life , which came down to us , and vibrated the lattice - work of this life of ours."); September 12, 1851 ("As I was entering the Deep Cut, the wind, which was conveying a message to me from heaven, dropped it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it passed."); September 23, 1851 ("The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day, in the midst of the rain. I put my ear to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is if you had entered some world - famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ."); October 14, 1851 ("There was but little wind this morning, yet I heard the telegraph harp. It does not require a strong wind to wake its strings . . . A gentle but steady breeze will often call forth its finest strains");  December 29, 1851 ("The artist is at work in the Deep Cut . The telegraph harp sounds . "); January 18, 1852 (" While the snow is falling, the telegraph harp is resounding across the fields. "); March 12, 1852 ("The telegraph harp has spoken to me more distinctly and effectually than any man ever did.")

And what if all of animated nature

Be but organic Harps diversely framed,

That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

The Eolian Harp 

BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 3

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 ©  2009-2023

On Reading Linnæus, "this lawgiver of science, this systematizer, this methodist"

March 12. 

I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany from a few plates of figures at the end of the “Philosophia Botanica," with the names annexed, than a volume of explanations or glossaries could teach.

And, that the alternate pages to the plates may not be left blank, he has given on them very concise and important instruction to students of botany.

This lawgiver of science, this systematizer, this methodist, carries his system into his studies in the field.

On one of these little pages he gives some instruction concerning herbatio, or what the French called herborisations, — we say botanizing.

Into this he introduces law and order and system, and describes with the greatest economy of words what some would have required a small volume to tell, all on a small page; tells what dress you shall wear, what instruments you shall carry, what season and hour you shall observe, - viz. “from the leafing of the trees, Sirius excepted, to the fall of the leaf, twice a week in summer, once in spring, from seven in the morning till seven at night," – when you shall dine and take your rest, etc., in a crowd or dispersed, etc., how far shall go, –two miles and a half at most, – what you shall collect and what kind of observations make, etc. etc.


Railroad to Walden, 3 P. M.


I see the Populus (apparently tremuloides, not grandidentata) at the end of the railroad causeway, showing the down of its ament.

Bigelow makes it flower in April, the grandidentata in May.

I see the sand flowing in the Cut and hear the harp at the same time.

Who shall say that the primitive forces are not still at work? Nature has not lost her pristine vigor, neither has he who sees this.

To see the first dust fly is a pleasant sight. I saw it on the east side of the Deep Cut.

These heaps of sand foliage remind me of the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens, — somewhat linear-laciniate. It cannot make much odds what the sand is, for I have seen it in the soil of our garden. They come out from the interior of the earth like bowels — a rupture in the spring - and bury the snow.  The crust of the snow is completely concealed with the sand for an eighth of a mile.

They also remind me sometimes of masses of rockweed on the rocks.

At any moment the creative stream will be seen flowing in a restricted channel or artery, but it is forming new lobes, and at last, in the ditch, it forms sands, as at the mouths of rivers, in which the outlines of the different lobes are almost lost, are dissipated into mere shaded outlines on the flat floor.

Bent has left the chestnuts about Walden till the sap is well up, that the bark may peel. He has cut the other trees.

I saw the ants crawling about torpidly on the stump of an oak which had been sawed this winter. The choppers think they have seen them a fortnight.

The whistling of the wind, which makes one melancholy, inspires another.

The little grain of wheat, triticum, is the noblest food of man.

The lesser grains of other grasses are the food of passerine birds at present. Their diet is like man's.

The gods can never afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here. They will at once send him packing.

How can you walk on ground when you see through it? 

The telegraph harp has spoken to me more distinctly and effectually than any man ever did.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 12, 1852

I have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany.  See February 17 1852 ("If you would read books on botany, go to the fathers of the science. Read Linnaeus at once . . .His "Philosophia Botanica," . . . is simpler, more easy to understand, and more comprehensive, than any of the hundred manuals to which it has given birth. A few pages of cuts representing the different parts of plants, with the botanical names attached, is worth whole volumes of explanation.");. See also note to March 1,1852 ("Linnæus, speaking of the necessity of precise and adequate terms in any science")


I see the Populus (apparently tremuloides, not grandidentata) at the end of the railroad causeway , showing the down of its ament.Bigelow makes it flower in April.. See March 27, 1859 ("Of our seven indigenous flowers which begin to bloom in March, four, i. e. the two alders, the aspen, and the hazel, are not generally noticed so early, if at all"); April 9, 1856 ("Early aspen catkins have curved downward an inch, and began to shed pollen apparently yesterday") See aslo A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Aspens

The Yankee belongs properly to the northern temperate fauna.

October 14.

Down the railroad before sunrise. A freight-train in the Deep Cut. The sun rising over the woods.

When the vapor from the engine rose above the woods, the level rays of the rising sun fell on it. It presented the same redness, — morning red, — inclining to saffron, which the clouds in the eastern horizon do.

There was but little wind this morning, yet I heard the telegraph harp. It does not require a strong wind to wake its strings; it depends more on its direction and the tension of the wire apparently. A gentle but steady breeze will often call forth its finest strains, when a strong but unsteady gale, blowing at the wrong angle withal, fails to elicit any melodious sound.

In the psychological world there are phenomena analogous to what zoologists call alternate reproduction, in which it requires several generations unlike each other to evolve the perfect animal. Some men's lives are but an aspiration, a yearning toward a higher state, and they are wholly misapprehended, until they are referred to, or traced through, all their metamorphoses.

We cannot pronounce upon a man's intellectual and moral state until we foresee what metamorphosis it is preparing him for.

It is said that “the working bees. are barren females. The attributes of their sex seem to consist only in their solicitude for the welfare of the new generation, of which they are the natural guardians, but not the parents.” (Agassiz and Gould.) This phenomenon is paralleled in man by maiden aunts and bachelor uncles, who perform a similar function.

“The muskrat,” according to Agassiz and Gould, “ is found from the mouth of Mackenzie's River to Florida." It is moreover of a type peculiar to temperate America. He is a native American surely. He neither dies of consumption in New England nor of fever and ague at the South and West. Thoroughly acclimated and naturalized.

“The hyenas, wild-boars, and rhinoceroses of the Cape of Good Hope have no analogues on the American continent.” At the last menagerie I visited they told me that one of the hyenas came from South America! There is something significant and interesting in the fact that the fauna of Europe and that of the United States are very similar, pointing to the fitness of this country for the settlement of Europeans.

They say, “There are . . .  many species of animals whose numbers are daily diminishing, and whose extinction may be foreseen; as the Canada deer (Wapiti), the Ibex of the Alps, the Lämmergeyer, the bison, the beaver, the wild turkey, etc.” With these, of course, is to be associated the Indian.

They say that the house-fly has followed man in his migrations.

One would say that the Yankee belonged properly to the northern temperate fauna, the region of the pines.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 14, 1851

The telegraph harp. See note to January 3, 1852 ("Why was it made that man should be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire?")

The muskrat. . . peculiar to temperate America . . .a native American surely. See December 23, 1858 ("How perfectly at home the musquash is on our river.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

I scare up large flocks of sparrows in the garden.

September 23.

Notwithstanding the fog, the fences this morning are covered with so thick a frost that you can write your name anywhere with your nail.

The partridge and the rabbit, — they still are sure to thrive like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, many bushes spring up which afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever.

The sumach are among the reddest leaves at present.

The telegraph harp sounds strongly to-day, in the midst of the rain. I put my ear to the trees and I hear it working terribly within, and anon it swells into a clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from the wood. It is if you had entered some world - famous cathedral, resounding to some vast organ.

The fibres of all things have their tension, and are strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very ground tremble under my feet as I stand near the post. This wire vibrates with great power, as if it would strain and rend the wood.

What an awful and fateful music it must be to the worms in the wood! No better vermifuge were needed. No danger that worms will attack this wood; such vibrating music would thrill them to death.

I scare up large flocks of sparrows in the garden.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 23, 1851

The partridge and the rabbit, — they still are sure to thrive like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. See  February 14, 1856 ("In all the little valleys in the woods and sprout-lands, and on the southeast sides of hills, the oak leaves which have blown over the crust are gathered in dry and warm-looking beds. . . No doubt they are of service to conceal and warm the rabbit and partridge and other beasts and birds."); March 17, 1860 ("The rabbit and partridge can eat wood; therefore they abound and can stay here all the year."); November 18, 1851 (".Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. . . .You must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them,. . . as the partridge and the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets and at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent."); Walden (" All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath”); December 1, 1856 ("Well named shrub oak. Low, robust, hardy, indigenous. Well known to the striped squirrel and the partridge and rabbit"); December 11, 1854 ("A gray rabbit scuds away over the crust in the swamp on the edge of the Great Meadows beyond Peter’s. A partridge goes off, and, coming up, I see where she struck the snow first with her wing,"); December 11, 1858 ("Already, in hollows in the woods and on the sheltered sides of hills, the fallen leaves are collected in small heaps on the snow-crust, simulating bare ground and helping to conceal the rabbit and partridge, etc"); December 31, 1855 ("I see many partridge-tracks in the light snow, where they have sunk deep amid the shrub oaks; also gray rabbit and deer mice tracks");

.

I scare up large flocks of sparrows in the garden. See August 25, 1859 ("I see, after the rain, when the leaves are rustling and glistening in the cooler breeze and clear air, quite a flock of (apparently) Fringilla socialis in the garden"); September 1, 1854 (" A still, cloudy, misty day, through which has fallen a very little rain this forenoon already. Now I notice a few faint-chipping sparrows, busily picking the seeds of weeds in the garden."); September 17, 1858 ("Methinks, too, that there are more sparrows in flocks now about in garden, etc");September 25, 1859 (" The very crab-grass in our garden is for the most part a light straw-color and withered. . . and hundreds of sparrows (chip-birds ?) find their food amid it. "); October 2, 1858 ("The garden is alive with migrating sparrows these mornings")

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings.

September 22. 

To the Three Friends' Hill over Bear Hill. 

Yesterday and to-day the stronger winds of autumn have begun to blow, and the telegraph harp has sounded loudly.

I heard it especially in the Deep Cut this afternoon, the tone varying with the tension of different parts of the wire. The sound proceeds from near the posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid.

I put my ear to one of the posts, and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music, labored with the strain, as if every fibre was affected and being seasoned or timed, rearranged according to a new and more harmonious law. Every swell and change or inflection of tone pervaded and seemed to proceed from the wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very substance was transmuted.

What a recipe for preserving wood, perchance, — to keep it from rotting, — to fill its pores with music ! How this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices to transmit this music! When no music proceeds from the wire, on applying my ear I hear the hum within the entrails of the wood, — the oracular tree acquiring, accumulating, the prophetic fury.

The resounding wood! how much the ancients would have made of it! To have a harp on so great a scale, girdling the very earth, and played on by the winds of every latitude and longitude, and that harp were, as it were, the manifest blessing of heaven on a work of man'! Shall we not add a tenth Muse to the immortal Nine?

And that the invention thus divinely honored and distinguished — on which the Muse has condescended to smile is this magic medium of communication for mankind!

To read that the ancients stretched a wire round the earth, attaching it to the trees of the forest, by which they sent messages by one named Electricity, father of Lightning and Magnetism, swifter far than Mercury, the stern commands of war and news of peace, and that the winds caused this wire to vibrate so that it emitted a harp-like and æolian music in all the lands through which it passed, as if to express the satisfaction of the gods in this invention. Yet this is fact, and we have yet attributed the invention to no god.

I am astonished to see how brown and sere the groundsel or "fire-weed” on hillside by Heywood's Meadow, which has been touched by frost, already is, — as if it had died long months ago, or a fire had run through it. It is a very tender plant. 

Standing on Bear Hill in Lincoln.

                                                September 22, 2017

The black birches ( I think they are ), now yellow, on the south side of Flint's Pond, on the hillside, look like flames. The chestnut trees are brownish-yellow as well as green. 

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings, through which all things are distinctly seen and the fields look as smooth as velvet.

The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze and the red drooping barberries sparkle amid the leaves.

From the hill on the south side of the pond, the forests have a singularly rounded and bowery look, clothing the hills quite down to the water's edge and leaving no shore; the ponds are like drops of dew amid and partly covering the leaves. So the great globe is luxuriously crowded without margin.

The Utricularia cornuta, or horned utricularia, on the sandy pond-shore, not affected by the frost.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1851

Three Friends Hill. See September 12, 1851 ("To the Three Friends' Hill beyond Flint's Pond. . . I go to Flint's Pond for the sake of the mountain view from the hill beyond, looking over Concord.")

How brown and sere the groundsel or "fire-weed” on hillside by Heywood's Meadow, which has been touched by frost, See August 23, 1856 ("On R. W. E.'s hillside by railroad, burnt over by the engine in the spring, the erechthites has shot up abundantly, very tall and straight, some six or seven feet high."); August 26, 1856 ("Also erechthites as abundant and rank in many places there as if it had been burnt over! So it does not necessarily imply fire."); August 27, 1851 ("Hawkweed groundsel (Senecio hieracifolius) (fireweed)"); August 30, 1859 ("The erechthites down has begun to fly."); September 9, 1852 ("The groundsel down is in the air."); September 20, 1851 ("On Monday of the present week water was frozen in a pail under the pump. . . .All tender herbs are flat in gardens and meadow"); September 20, 1852 ("The groundsel and hieracium down is in the air"); September 21, 1856 ("Was not the fireweed seed sown by the wind last fall, blown into the woods, where there was a lull which caused it to settle? Perhaps it is fitted to escape or resist fire. The wind which the fire creates may, perchance, lift it again out of harm's way."); October 2, 1857 ("The erechthites down (fire-weed) is conspicuous in sprout-lands of late, since its leaves were killed."); October 16, 1859 ("The flowers are at the mercy of the frosts. Places where erechthites grows, more or less bare, in sprout- lands, look quite black and white (black withered leaves and white down) and wintry")

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full of the memory of frosty mornings.. See

 

These bracing fine days

when frosts come to ripen the

year, the days, like fruit.

September 22, 1854

See also September 20, 1851 ("This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, - cool and cloudless, bright days, . . . preceded by frosty mornings." ); October 10, 1857 ("The most brilliant days in the year, ushered in, perhaps, by a frosty morning, as this.") November 11, 1853 ("Bracing cold, and exhilarating sunlight on russet and frosty fields “) December 10, 1853 ("These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze. See September 20, 1851 ("This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, - - cool and cloudless, bright days, filled with the fragrance of ripe grapes, preceded by frosty mornings.")