The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon.

June 3.

I visited this afternoon (June 3d) Goodman's Hill in Sudbury, going through Lincoln over Sherman's Bridge and Round Hill, and returning through the Corner. It probably affords the best view of Concord River meadows of any hill. The horizon is very extensive as it is, and if the top were cleared so that you could get the western view, it would be one of the most extensive seen from any hill in the county. 

The most imposing horizons are those which are seen from tops of hills rising out of a river valley. The prospect even from a low hill has something majestic in it in such a case. The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon. 

There is a good view of Lincoln lying high up in among the hills. You see that it is the highest town hereabouts, and hence its fruit. 

The river at this time looks as large as the Hudson. I think that a river-valley town is much the handsomest and largest-featured, — like Concord and Lancaster, for instance, natural centres. 

Upon the hills of Bolton, again, the height of land between the Concord and Nashua, I have seen how the peach flourishes. 

Nobscot, too, is quite imposing as seen from the west side of Goodman's Hill. On the western side of a continuation of this hill is Wadsworth’s battle field.

Returning, I saw in Sudbury twenty-five nests of the new (cliff?) swallow under the eaves of a barn.

The republican or cliff swallow.
Their nests, built side by side, looked somewhat like large hornets' nests.

 They seemed particularly social and loquacious neighbors, though their voices are rather squeaking. Their nests, built side by side, looked somewhat like large hornets' nests, enough so to prove a sort of connection. Their activity, sociability, and chattiness make them fit pensioners and neighbors of man — summer companions — for the barn-yard.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1850

 The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon. See September 12, 1851 ("It is worth the while to see the mountains in the horizon once a day"); June 25, 1852 ("The earth appears like a vast saucer sloping upward to its sharp mountain rim."); July 27, 1852 ("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!"); August 2, 1852 ("In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth, and be reminded of the invisible towns and communities, for the most part also unremembered, which lie in the further and deeper hollows between me and those hills."); August 5, 1852 (" From Smith's Hill beyond, there is as good a view of the mountains as from any place in our neighbor hood, because you look across the broad valley in which Concord lies first of all.");  March 18, 1858 ("When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim.");March 28, 1858 ("From this hilltop I overlook,. . . this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it,.") See also note to September 27, 1852 ("From Smith's Hill I looked toward the mountain line.")

Twenty-five nests of the new (cliff?) swallow under the eaves of a barn. See April 30, 1856 ("I was surprised by the great number of swallows—white-bellied and barn swallows and perhaps republican — flying round and round, or skimming very low over the meadow. . .There were a thousand or more of swallows, and I think that they had recently arrived together on their migration."); May 4, 1856 (“Among others, I see republican swallows flying over river at Island”); May 11, 1856 ("There are many swallows circling low over the river behind Monroe’s, — bank swallows, barn, republican, chimney, and white-bellied. These are all circling together a foot or two over the water, passing within ten or twelve feet of me in my boat."); May 20, 1858 (“Hundreds of swallows are now skimming close over the river. . .. There are bank, barn, cliff, and chimney swallows, all mingled together.”); May 20, 1858 (“The cliff swallow, then, is here.”); May 21, 1855 (“Is that plump blue-backed, rufous rumped swallow the cliff swallow, flying with barn swallows, etc., over the river?"); May 29, 1859 “The republican swallow at Hosmer's barn just begun to lay.”

This blue mountain outline

August 2. 

Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill looks like this:



the dotted line being the top of the surrounding forest. There is a whitish line along the base of Wachusett more particularly, as if the reflection of bare cliffs there in the sun. Undoubtedly it is the slight vaporous haze in the atmosphere seen edgewise just above the top of the forest, though it is a clear day. It, this line, makes the mountains loom, in fact, a faint whitish line; separating the mountains from their bases and the rest of the globe.

In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth, and be reminded of the invisible towns and communities, for the most part also unremembered, which lie in the further and deeper hollows between me and those hills. Towns of sturdy uplandish fame, where some of the morning and primal vigor still lingers, I trust. Ashburnham, Rindge, Jaffrey, etc., - it is cheering to think that it is with such communities that we survive or perish, and be reminded how many brave and contented lives are lived between me and the horizon.

Yes, the mountains do thus impart, in the mere prospect of them, some of the New Hampshire vigor. These hills extend our plot of earth; they make our native valley or indentation in the earth so much the larger.

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

In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth. See June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon."); June 25, 1852 The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, and the intermediate earth appears . . .like a vast saucer sloping up ward to its sharp mountain rim."); July 27, 1852 ("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!"); March 18, 1858 (" For the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim."); September 27, 1852 ("From our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them." March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.");  October 22, 1857("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ");March 28, 1858 ("From this hilltop I overlook,. . . this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it.");  March 28, 1858 (" On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see..")

I come to get the now empty nests of the wood pewees found June 27th.

August 13. 

This month thus far has been quite rainy. It has rained more or less at least half the days. You have had to consider each afternoon whether you must not take an umbrella. It has about half the time either been dogdayish or mizzling or decided rain. It would rain five minutes and be fair the next five, and so on, alternately, a whole afternoon. The farmers have not been able to get much of their hay. On the whole it has been rather cool. It has been still decidedly summer, with some reminiscences of autumn. The last week has been the heart of the huckleberry season. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

The dullish-blue or lead-colored Viburnum dentatum berries are now seen, not long, overhanging the side of the river, amid cornels and willows and button-bushes. They make a dull impression, yet held close in some lights they are glossy. The umbelled fruits —viburnums and cornels, aralias, etc. — have begun. 

As I am paddling up the north side above the Hemlocks, I am attracted by the singular shadows of the white lily pads on the rich-brown muddy bottom. It is remarkable how light tends to prevail over shadow there. It steals in under the densest curtain of pads and illustrates the bottom. The shadows of these pads, seen (now at 3 P. M.) a little one side, where the water is eighteen inches or two feet deep, are rarely orbicular or entire-edged or resembling the leaf, but are more or less perfect rosettes, generally of an oval form, with five to fifteen or more regularly rounded petals, open half-way to the centre. You cannot commonly refer the shadow to its substance but by touching the leaf with your paddle. 

Light knows a thousand tricks by which it prevails. Light is the rule, shadow the exception. The leaf fails to cast a shadow equal in area to itself. While it is a regular and almost solid disk, the shadow is a rosette or palmate, as if the sun, in its haste [to] illustrate every nook, shone round the shortest corner. Often if you connect the extremities of the petals, you have the general outline and size of the leaf, and the shadow is less than the substance by the amount of the openings. These petals seem to depend for their existence on the some what scalloped, waved, or undulating edge of the pad, and the manner in which the light is reflected from it. Generally the two sharp angles of the pad are almost entirely eroded in the shadow. The shadows, too, have a slight halo about them. 

Such endless and varied play of light and shadow is on the river bottom! It is protean and somewhat weird even. The shadow of the leaf might be mistaken for that of the flower. The sun playing with a lily leaf draws the outline of a lily on the bottom with its shadow. 

The broad-leaved helianthus on bank opposite Assabet Spring is not nearly out, though the H. divaricatus was abundantly out on the 11th. 

I landed to get the wood pewee nest in the Lee Wood. Perhaps those woods might be called Mantatukwet’s, for he says he lived at the foot of Nawshawtuct about fifty years before 1684. 

Hypopytis abundantly out (how long ?), apparently a good while, in that long wood-path on the left side, under the oak wood, before you begin to rise, going from the river end. Very little indeed is yet erect, and that which is not is apparently as forward as the rest. Not generally quite so high as the Monotropa uniflora which grows with it. I see still in their midst the dry upright brown spikes of last year’s seed-vessels. The chimaphila is more of an umbel. 

Where that dense young birch grove, four to eight feet high, was burned over in the spring, — I am pretty sure it was early in May,— I see now a yet more dense green crop of Solidago altissima, three or four feet high and budded to bloom. Where did all the seed come from? I think the burning was too late for any seed to have blown on since. Did it, then, lie in the ground so low as to escape the fire? The seed may have come from plants which grow in the old path along the fence on the west side. 

It is a singular fact, at any rate, that a dense grove of young white birches, covering half a dozen acres, may be burned over in May, so as to kill nearly all, and now, amid the dead brown trees, you see [a] dense green crop of Solidago altissima covering the ground like grass, four feet high. Nature practices a rotation of crops, and always has has some seed ready in the ground. 

Young white maples below Dove Rock are an inch and a half high, and red maples elsewhere about one inch high. 

I come to get the now empty nests of the wood pewees found June 27th. 

In each case, on approaching the spot, I hear the sweet note of a pewee lingering about, and this alone would have guided me within four or five rods. I do not know why they should linger near the empty nest, but perhaps they have built again near there or intend to use the same nest again (?). Their full strain is pe-ah-ee' (perhaps repeated), rising on the last syllable and emphasizing that, then pe’-ee, emphasizing the first and falling on the last, all very sweet and rather plaintive, suggesting innocence and confidence in you. In this case the bird uttered only its last strain, regularly at intervals. 

These two pewee nests are remarkably alike in their position and composition and form, though half a mile apart. They are both placed on a horizontal branch of a young oak (one about fourteen, the other about eighteen, feet from ground) and three to five feet from main trunk, in a young oak wood. Both rest directly on a horizontal fork, and such is their form and composition that they have almost precisely the same color and aspect from below and from above. 

The first is on a dead limb, very much exposed, is three inches in diameter outside to outside, and two inches in diameter within, the rim being about a quarter of an inch thick, and it is now one inch deep within. Its framework is white pine needles, especially in the rim, and a very little fine grass stem, covered on the rim and all without closely with small bits of lichen (cetraria?), slate-colored without and blackish beneath, and some brown caterpillar (?) or cocoon (?) silk with small seed—vessels in it. They are both now thin and partially open at the bottom, so that I am not sure they contain all the original lining. This one has no distinct lining, unless it is a very little green usnea amid the loose pine needles. The lichens of the nest would readily be confounded with the lichens of the limb. Looking down on it, it is a remarkably round and neat nest. 

The second nest is rather more shallow now and half an inch wider without, is lined with much more usnea (the willow down which I saw in it June 27 is gone; perhaps they cast it out in warm weather !), and shows a little of some slender brown catkin (oak ?) beneath, without. 

These nests remind me of what I suppose to be the yellow-throat vireo’s and hummingbird’s. The lining of a nest is not in good condition — perhaps is partly gone — when the birds have done with it. 

The remarkable difference between the two branches of our river, kept up down to the very junction, indicates a different geological region for their channels.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 13, 1858

The dullish-blue or lead-colored Viburnum dentatum berries overhanging the side of the river. See August 27, 1856 ("Then there are the Viburnum dentatum berries, in flattish cymes, dull leadcolored berries, depressed globular, three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, with a mucronation, hard, seedy, dryish, and unpalatable.")

The remarkable difference between the two branches of our river indicates a different geological region for their channels. See July 16, 1859 ("The stream is remarkably different from the [Concord]. It is not half so deep. It is considerably more rapid. The bottom is not muddy but sandy and occasionally stony. Though far shallower, it is less weedy than the other. ... This is owing, perhaps, not only to the greater swiftness of the current, but to the want of mud under the sand. You wonder what makes the difference between this stream and the other. It seems impossible that it should be a geological difference in the beds of the streams so near together. Is it not owing simply to the greater swiftness of this stream?"); July 5, 1852 ("We are favored in having two rivers, flowing into one, whose banks afford different kinds of scenery, the streams being of different characters; one a dark, muddy, dead stream, full of animal and vegetable life, with broad meadows and black dwarf willows and weeds, the other comparatively pebbly and swift, with more abrupt banks and narrower meadows. To the latter I go to see the ripple, and the varied bottom with its stones and sands and shadows; to the former for the influence of its dark water resting on invisible mud, and for its reflections. It is a factory of soil, depositing sediment.")

August 13. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, August 13.

 

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 © 2009-202

A Book of the Seasons: August 2 (midsummer standstill, haymaking, concave earth, pensive moods, seeds carried by birds)

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.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

August 2.

Midsummer standstill.

That fine z-ing of locusts

is an August sound.

August 2, 1859

Sit on the hilltop –

this rock warm with the heat of

the departed sun.

August 2, 1854

Here on this rock are

the seeds of berries in the

droppings of some bird.

August 2, 1854

Sitting on this rock

suddenly my life is a

fathomless ocean.

August 2, 1854

A green bittern comes

noiselessly flapping – sluggish

pulse of the river.

August 2, 1856

I see the seeds of 

berries recently left on 

rocks where birds have perched.

August 2, 1860

To-day Fields sends me

a copy of"Walden" to

be published the 12th

I go up the hill

surrounded by its shadow

soothed by the stillness

on this rock on the

hilltop warm with the heat of

the departed sun

the depths of silence

like a fathomless ocean

my life is afloat.

On this rock in the

droppings of some bird are the

seeds of some berries.

August 2, 1854

In many moods it is cheering to look across hence to that blue rim of the earth . . . These hills extend our plot of earth; they make our native valley or indentation in the earth so much the larger. August 2, 1852

Heavy, long-continued, but warm rain in the night, raising the river already eight or nine inches and disturbing the meadow haymakers. August 2, 1853

July has been to me a trivial month. It began hot and continued drying, then rained some toward the middle, bringing anticipations of the fall, and then was hot again about the 20th. It has been a month of haying, heat.  August 2, 1854

That fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is an August sound. It suggests a certain maturity in the year -- a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer. August 2, 1859

In huckle-berry fields I see the seeds of berries recently left on the rocks where birds have perched. How many of these small fruits they may thus disseminate! August 2, 1860

The waxwork berries are yellowing. August 2, 1853. 

Some waxwork leaves have felt the heat and slight drought. Their green is spotted with yellow, distinct yellow and green; others a very delicate clear yellow; others faded quite white. August 2, 1856

I am not sure but the bunches of the smooth sumach berries are handsomest when but partly turned, the crimson contrasting with the green, the green berries showing a velvety crimson cheek. August 2, 1853

The green fruit of the carrion-flower forms dense, firm, spherical umbels (?) at the end of stems five or six inches long; umbels two inches in diameter, formed, one of them, of eighty-four berries, size of peas, three to six sided, closely wedged together on peduncles three quarters of an inch long. The whole feels hard and solid in the hand. August 2, 1853

Mulgedium out. August 2, 1853

Very common now are the few green emerald leafets of the Bidens Beckii, which will ere long yellow the shallow parts. August 2, 1856

A three-ribbed goldenrod by small apple, by wall at foot east side of Hill Very tall. August 2, 1856

Birds have grown up and flown more or less in small flocks, though I notice a new sparrow's nest and eggs and perhaps a catbird's eggs lately. August 2, 1854

The woodland quire has steadily diminished in volume. August 2, 1854

A few sparrows sing as in the morning and the spring; also a peawai and a chewink. August 2, 1854.

As we rest in our boat under a tree, we hear from time to time the loud snap of a wood pewee’s bill overhead. The bird is incessantly diving to this side and that after an insect and returning to its perch on a dead twig. We hear the sound of its bill when it catches one. August 2, 1860

I see there what I take to be a marsh hawk of this year, hunting by itself. It has not learned to be very shy yet, so that we repeatedly get near it. What a rich brown bird! almost, methinks, with purple reflections. August 2, 1858.

A green bittern comes, noiselessly flapping, with stealthy and inquisitive looking to this side the stream and then that, thirty feet above the water. This antediluvian bird, creature of the night, is a fit emblem of a dead stream like this Musketicook. August 2, 1856

There is a sympathy between its sluggish flight and the sluggish flow of the stream, — its slowly lapsing flight, even like the rills of Musketicook and my own pulse sometimes. August 2, 1856

I noticed meandering down that meadow, which is now quite dry, a very broad and distinct musquash-trail, where they went and came continually when it was wet or under water in the winter or spring. August 2, 1858 

The black willow down is even yet still seen here and there on the water. August 2, 1860.

It is a new era with the flowers when the small purple fringed orchis, as now, is found in shady swamps standing along the brooks. It appears to be alone of its class. Not to be overlooked, it has so much flower, August 2, 1852

Up Assabet. The young red maples have sprung up chiefly on the sandy and muddy shores, especially where there is a bay or eddy. August 2, 1860

Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill looks like this:

the dotted line being the top of the surrounding forest. There is a whitish line along the base of Wachusett more particularly, as if the reflection of bare cliffs there in the sun. Undoubtedly it is the slight vaporous haze in the atmosphere seen edgewise just above the top of the forest, though it is a clear day. It, this line, makes the mountains loom, in fact, a faint whitish line; separating the mountains from their bases and the rest of the globe. August 2, 1852. 

I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk .

I am inclined now for a pensive evening walk .

I am inclined now to go for a pensive evening walk. August 2, 1854

As I go up the hill, surrounded by its shadow, while the sun is setting . . . For the first time for a month, at least, I am reminded that thought is possible. The din of trivialness is silenced. I float over or through the deeps of silence. It is the first silence I have heard for a month. August 2, 1854

Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.

The sun has been set fifteen minutes, and a long cloudy finger, stretched along the northern horizon, is held over the point where it disappeared. August 2, 1854

I see dark shadows formed on the south side of the woods east of the river. After a little while the western sky is suddenly suffused with a pure white light. August 2, 1854 

I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows. August 2, 1854. 

The nighthawk flies low, skimming over the ground now. August 2, 1854. 

The crickets on the causeway make a steady creak. August 2, 1854

A few fireflies in the meadows. I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star. Shooting stars are but fireflies of the firmament. August 2, 1854. 

Meanwhile the moon in her first quarter is burnishing her disk.  August 2, 1854.

Now suddenly the cloudy finger and the few scattered clouds glow with the parting salute of the sun, which has so long sunk below the convex earth. August 2, 1854

I sit on rock on the hilltop, warm with the heat of the departed sun, in my thin summer clothes.  August 2, 1854

My life had been a River Platte, tinkling over its sands but useless for all great navigation, but now it suddenly became a fathomless ocean. It shelved off to unimagined depths. August 2, 1854

Here are the seeds of some berries in the droppings of some bird on the rock. August 2, 1854

Fields to-day sends me a specimen copy of my "Walden." It is to be published on the 12th. August 2, 1854

*****

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking

  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Horizon

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fireflies

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Cricket in August

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Nighthawk

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Chewink (Rufous-sided Towhee)

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Wood-Pewee

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Fringed Orchids

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Catbird nests

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Marsh Hawk (Northern Harrier)

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. The Green Bittern

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

 A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Propogation of the Willow.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. Willows on the Causeway

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Midsummer midlife blues

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,, August Moods

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August Moonlight

January 1, 1852 ("Perhaps the only thing that spoke to me on this walk was the bare, lichen-covered gray rock at the Cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer.”)

March 28, 1858 ("From this hilltop I overlook,. . . this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it."); 

March 28, 1858 (" On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see..")
March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.')

June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon.")

June 16, 1852 ("Do not the stars, too, show their light for love, like the fireflies ?”)  

June 25, 1852 (“What were the firefly's light, if it were not for darkness?”)

June 25, 1852 ("The mountain outline is remarkably distinct, and the intermediate earth appears . . . like a vast saucer sloping up ward to its sharp mountain rim.")

July 14, 1856 (“While drinking at Assabet Spring in woods, noticed a cherry-stone on the bottom. A bird that came to drink must have brought it half a mile. So the tree gets planted!”)

July 24, 1852 (“The smooth sumach berries are red.”)

July 27, 1852 ("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!")

July 30, 1856 ("A green bittern. . .with heavy flapping flight")

July 31, 1856 ("The Solidago gigantea (?), three-ribbed, out a long time at Walden shore by railroad, more perfectly out than any solidago I have seen")

July 31,1856 (“The smooth sumach is pretty generally crimson-berried on the Knoll”)

July 31, 1856 (" As I make my way amid rank weeds still wet with the dew, the air filled with a decaying musty scent and the z-ing of small locusts, I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years. ") 

August 1, 1852 ("Sumach berries now generally red.")

August 1, 1856 (“Unfortunate those who have not got their hay. I see them wading in overflowed meadows and pitching the black and mouldy swaths about in vain that they may dry.")

August 1, 1859 ("The B. Beckii (just beginning to bloom) just shows a few green leafets.")

August 1, 1860 ("You will be surprised, on looking through a large maple swamp which two months ago was red with maple seed falling in showers around, at the very small number of maple seeds to be found there") 

August 3, 1852 ("By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe,")

August 3, 1852 ("The Great Meadows alive with farmers getting their hay. I could count four or five great loads already loaded in different parts.")

August 3, 1859 (" It being remote from public view, some of them work in their shirts or half naked")

August 5, 1854 ("All farmers are anxious to get their meadow-hay as soon as possible for fear the river will rise. ")

August 5, 1852 ("For the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim.")

August 7, 1856 ("Mulgedium, perhaps a fortnight. . . .One mulgedium at Corner Spring is at least ten feet high and hollow all the way. ");

August 8, 1858. ("Saw yesterday a this year’s (?) marsh hawk, female . . .I took it to be a young bird, it came so near and looked so fresh. It is a fine rich-brown, full-breasted bird, with a long tail.”)

August 9, 1854 ("Waxwork yellowing.")

August 18, 1858 (“In the meanwhile, as it was perched on the twig, it was incessantly turning its head about, looking for insects, and suddenly would dart aside or downward a rod or two, and I could hear its bill snap as it caught one. Then it returned to the same or another perch..")

August 19, 1852 ("The small fruits of most plants are now generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.”); 

August 23, 1854 ("I improve the dry weather to examine the middle of Gowing's Swamp. . . . This is marked by the paths of muskrats, which also extend through the green froth of the pool.")

August 23, 1858("Smooth sumach berries all turned crimson.")

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

September 21, 1860 ("I suspect that ... those [seeds] the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds")

September 27, 1852 ("From our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them." )

October 22, 1857("But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? ")

November 1, 1858 ("A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.")

August 2, 2021

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

August 1  <<<<<  August 2  >>>>>   August 3

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  August 2

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 ©  2009-2022

Each new year is a surprise to us.

 
March 18

 7 A.M. – By river. 

Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides. You see them just hopping under the bush or into some other covert, as you go by, turning with a jerk this way and that, or they flit away just above the ground, which they resemble. It is the prettiest strain I have heard yet. 

Melvin is already out in his boat for all day, with his white hound in the prow, bound up the river for musquash, etc., but the river is hardly high enough to drive them out. 

March 18, 2018

P. M. – To Fair Haven Hill via Hubbard’s Bath. 

How much more habitable a few birds make the fields! At the end of winter, when the fields are bare and there is nothing to relieve the monotony of the withered vegetation, our life seems reduced to its lowest terms. But let a bluebird come and warble over them, and what a change! 

• The note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath. It is eminently soft and soothing, and, as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher temperature. It is the accent of the south wind, its vernacular. It is modulated by the south wind. 

• The song sparrow is more sprightly, mingling its notes with the rustling of the brash along the watersides, but it is at the same time more terrene than the bluebird. 

• The first woodpecker comes screaming into the empty house and throws open doors and windows wide, calling out each of them to let the neighbors know of its return. But heard further off it is very suggestive of ineffable associations which cannot be distinctly recalled, – of long-drawn summer hours, – and thus it, also, has the effect of music. I was not aware that the capacity to hear the woodpecker had slumbered within me so long.

• When the blackbird gets to a conqueree he seems to be dreaming of the sprays that are to be and on which he is to perch. 

• The robin does not come singing, but utters a somewhat anxious or inquisitive peep at first. The song sparrow is immediately most at home of any that I have named. 

I see this afternoon as many as a dozen bluebirds on the warm side of a wood. 

At Hubbard's shore, where a strong but warm westerly wind is blowing, the shore is lined for half a rod in width with pulverized ice, or “brash,” driven against it. 

At Potter's sand-hill (Bear Garden), I see, on the southeast side of the blue-curls, very distinct and regular arcs of circles (about a third of a circle), scored deep in the sand by the tops of these weeds, which have been blown about by the wind, and these marks show very surely and plainly how the wind has been blowing and with what force and flakiness. 

The rather warm but strong wind now roars in the wood — as in the maple swamp — with a novel sound. I doubt if the same is ever heard in the winter. It apparently comes at this season, not only to dry the earth but to wake up the trees, as it were, as one would awake a sleeping man with a smart shake. Perchance they need to be thus wrung and twisted, and their sap flows the sooner for it. 

Perfectly dry sand even is something attractive now, and I am tempted to tread on and to touch it, as a curiosity. Skunks’ tracks are everywhere now, on the sand, and the little snow that is left. 

The river is still closed with ice at Cardinal Shore, so Melvin must have stopped here at least; but there is a crescent of “brash ” there, which the waves blown up-stream have made, half a dozen rods wide. It is even blown a rod on to the solid ice. The noise made by this brash undulating and grating upon itself, at a little distance, is very much like the rustling of a winrow of leaves disturbed by the winds. A little farther off it is not to be distinguished from the roar of the wind in the woods. 

Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours? The voice of nature is always encouraging. 

The blackbird — probably grackle this time —wings his way direct above the swamp northward, with a regular tchuck, carrier haste, calling the summer months along, like a hen her chickens. 

When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim. 

It is a spring landscape, and as impossible a fortnight ago as the song of birds. It is a deeper and warmer blue than in winter, methinks. The snow is off the mountains, which seem even to have come again like the birds. 

The undulating river is a bright-blue channel between sharp-edged shores of ice retained by the willows. The wind blows strong but warm from west by north, so that I have to hold my paper tight when I write this, making the copses creak and roar; but the sharp tinkle of a song sparrow is heard through it all. 

But ah! the needles of the pine, how they shine, as I look down over the Holden wood and westward! Every third tree is lit with the most subdued but clear ethereal light, as if it were the most delicate frostwork in a winter morning, reflecting no heat, but only light. And as they rock and wave in the strong wind, even a mile off, the light courses up and down there as over a field of grain; i. e., they are alternately light and dark, like looms above the forest, when the shuttle is thrown between the light woof and the dark web, weaving a light article, – spring goods for Nature to wear. 

At sight of this my spirit is like a lit tree. It runs or flashes over their parallel boughs as when you play with the teeth of a comb. The pine tops wave like squirrels' tails flashing in the air. Not only osiers but pine-needles, methinks, shine in the spring, and arrowheads and railroad rails, etc., etc. Anacreon noticed the same. 

Is it not the higher sun, and cleansed air, and greater animation of nature? There is a warmer red to the leaves of the shrub oak, and to the tail of the hawk circling over them. 

I sit on the Cliff, and look toward Sudbury. I see its meeting-houses and its common, and its fields lie but little beyond my ordinary walk, but I never played on its common nor read the epitaphs in its graveyard, and many strangers to me dwell there. How distant in all important senses may be the town which yet is within sight! We see beyond our ordinary walks and thoughts. With a glass I might perchance read the time on its clock. How circumscribed are our walks, after all! With the utmost industry we cannot expect to know well an area more than six miles square, and yet we pretend to be travellers, to be acquainted with Siberia and Africa! 

Going by the epigaea on Fair Haven Hill, I thought I would follow down the shallow gully through the woods from it, that I might find more or something else. There was an abundance of checkerberry, as if it were a peculiar locality for shrubby evergreens. At first the checkerberry was green, but low down the hill it suddenly became dark-red, like a different plant, as if it had been more subject to frost there, it being more frosty lower down. Where it was most turned, that part of the leaf which was protected by another overlapping it was still pure bright-green, making a pretty contrast when you lifted it. 

Eight or ten rods off I noticed an evergreen shrub with the aspect or habit of growth of the juniper, but, as it was in the woods, I already suspected it to be what it proved, the American yew, already strongly budded to bloom. This is a capital discovery. 

I have thus found the ledum and the taxus this winter and a new locality of the epigaea.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 18, 1858

The note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath . . . It is modulated by the south wind. See March 9, 1852 ("I hear and see bluebirds, come with the warm wind."); March 17, 1858 ("Hear the first bluebird. A remarkably warm and pleasant day with a south or southwest wind . . .  The air is full of bluebirds. I hear them far and near on all sides of the hill, warbling in the tree-tops, though I do not distinctly see them . . . four species of birds have all come in one day, no doubt to almost all parts of the town. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Listening for the Bluebird

The rather warm but strong wind now roars in the wood to wake up the trees,  and their sap flows the sooner for it. See March 9, 1852 (“These March winds, which make the woods roar and fill the world with life and bustle, appear to wake up the trees out of their winter sleep and excite the sap to flow.”)

When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim. See May 17, 1853 ("I was surprised, on turning round, to behold the serene and everlasting beauty of the world.”); May 22, 1854 ("How many times I have been surprised  thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth!”) ; October 7, 1857 ("When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape.”). See also note to June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon.")

The robin does not come singing, but utters a somewhat anxious or inquisitive peep at first. See March 18, 1853 ("He does not sing as yet . . . the robin and blackbird only peep and chuck at first."); March 18, 1859 ("Three days ago, the 15th, we had steady rain with a southerly wind. . . and the peep of the robin was heard through the drizzle and the rain.") See also  February 27, 1857 (" Before I opened the window this cold morning, I heard the peep of a robin, that sound so often heard in cheerless or else rainy weather, so often heard first borne on the cutting March wind or through sleet or rain, as if its coming were premature. "); March 8, 1855 ("I hear the hasty, shuffling, as if frightened, note of a robin from a dense birch wood . . . This sound reminds me of rainy, misty April days in past years."); March 12, 1854 ("I hear my first robin peep distinctly at a distance. No singing yet."); March 17, 1858 ("I hear a faint note far in the wood which reminds me of the robin. Again I hear it; it is he, — an occasional peep.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring, the anxious peep of the early robin

Each new year is a surprise to us. See December 29, 1851 (" What a fine and measureless joy the gods grant us thus, letting us know nothing about the day that is to dawn! This day, yesterday, was as incredible as any other miracle.")

The sharp tinkle of a song sparrow is heard through it all. See March 18, 1857 ("I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two.”)March 18, 1852 ("I hear the song sparrow's simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring.”)

I have thus found the ledum this winter. See February 4, 1858 (“As usual with the finding of new plants, I had a presentiment that I should find the ledum in Concord.”)

Going by the epigaea on Fair Haven Hill, I thought I would follow down the shallow gully through the woods from it, that I might find more or something else. See September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. So, in my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing.")

A new locality of the epigaea. See February 7, 1858 (“I am surprised to find the epigaea on this hill, at the northwest corner of C. Hubbard’s (?) lot.”)

March 18. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, March 18

The snow is off the

mountains, which seem to have come

again like the birds,

their blue scalloped rim

a deeper and warmer blue

than winter, methinks.

A spring landscape as

impossible a fortnight

ago as birdsong.

The note of each bird

remembered like a dream when

we hear it again.

How happens it that

each new year is always

a pleasing surprise?

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Each new year is a surprise to us.

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

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