The aromatic flavor of the checkerberry is also perceived in the

_Gaultheria hispidula_, in _Spiræa ulmaria_ and the root of _Spiræa

lobata_, and in the birches.

He says ginseng, spigelia, snake-root, etc., form considerable articles

of exportation.

The odor of skunk-cabbage is perceived in some North American currants,

as _Ribes rigens_ of Michaux on high mountains.

At one time the Indians about Quebec and Montreal were so taken up

with searching for ginseng that they could not be hired for any other

purpose. It is said that both the Chinese and the Indians named this

plant from its resemblance to the figure of a man.[186]

The Indians use the bark of _Dirca palustris_, or leather-wood,

for their cordage. It was after the long-continued search of many

generations that these qualities were discovered.

Of tobacco (_Nicotiana Tabacum_) B. says, after speaking of its

poisonous qualities: “Yet the first person who had courage and patience

enough to persevere in its use, until habit had overcome his original

disgust, eventually found in it a pleasing sedative, a soother of

care, and a material addition to the pleasures of life. Its use, which

originated among savages, has spread into every civilized country;

it has made its way against the declamations of the learned, and the

prohibitions of civil and religious authority, and it now gives rise

to an extensive branch of agriculture, or of commerce, in every part of

the globe.” Soon after its introduction into Europe, “the rich indulged

in it as a luxury of the highest kind; and the poor gave themselves

up to it, as a solace for the miseries of life.” Several varieties are

cultivated.

In return for many foreign weeds, we have sent abroad, says B., “the

_Erigeron Canadensis_ and the prolific families of _Ambrosia_ and

_Amaranthus_.”

“The Indians were acquainted with the medicinal properties of more than

one species of Euphorbia.”

I noticed the button-bush, May 25th, around an elevated pond or

mud-hole, its leaves just beginning to expand. This slight amount of

green contrasted with its dark, craggly [_sic_], naked-looking stem and

branches—as if subsiding waters had left them bare—looked Dantesque and

infernal. It is not a handsome bush at this season, it is so slow to

put out its leaves and hide its naked and unsightly stems.

The _Andromeda ligustrina_ is late to leave out.

_Malus excelsa_; _amara_; _florida_; _palustris_; _gratissima_;

_ramosa_; _spinosa_; _ferruginea_; _aromatica_; _aurea_; _rubiginosa_;

_odorata_; _tristis_; _officinalis!! herbacea_; _vulgaris_;

_æstivalis_; _autumnalis_; _riparia_; _versicolor_; _communis_;

_farinosa_; _super septa pendens_;[187] _Malus sepium_; _vinum

Novæ-Angliæ_; _succosa_; _sæpe formicis præoccupata_; _vermiculosa

aut verminosa aut a vermibus corrupta vel erosa_; _Malus semper

virens et viridis_; _cholera-morbifera_ or _dysenterifera_; _M.

sylvestripaludosa, excelsa et ramosa superne, difficilis conscendere_,

(_fructus difficillimus stringere, parvus et durus_); _Cortex picis

perforata_ or _perterebata_; _rupestris_; _agrestis_; _arvensis_;

_Assabettia_; Railroad Apple; _Musketaquidensis_; Dew Apple

(_rorifera_); the apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth which grows

_passim et nusquam_, (_Malus cujus fructum ineunte ætate gustavi quæ

passim et nusquam viget_); our own particular apple; _Malus numquam

legata vel stricta_; _cortice muscosâ_; _Malus viæ-ferreæ_; _sylvatica

in sylvis densissimis_.[188]

_May 30. Friday._ There was a Concord man once who had a foxhound named

Burgoyne. He called him Bug_īne_. A good name.[189]

_May 31._ _Pedestrium solatium in apricis locis; nodosa._[190]

V

JUNE, 1851

(ÆT. 33)

_June 3. Tuesday._ Lectured in Worcester last Saturday, and walked to

_As-_ or _Has_nebumskit Hill in Paxton the next day. Said to be the

highest land in Worcester County except Wachusett.

Met Mr. Blake, Brown, Chamberlin, Hinsdale, Miss Butman (?), Wyman,

Conant.

Returned to Boston yesterday. Conversed with John Downes, who is

connected with the Coast Survey, is printing tables for astronomical,

geodesic, and other uses. He tells me that he once saw the common

sucker in numbers piling up stones as big as his fist (like the piles

which I have seen), taking them up or moving them with their mouths.

Dr. Harris suggests that the mountain cranberry which I saw at Ktaadn

was the _Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa_, cow-berry, because it was edible and

not the _Uva-Ursi_, or bear-berry, which we have in Concord.

Saw the _Uvularia perfoliata_, perfoliate bellwort, in Worcester near

the hill; an abundance of mountain laurel on the hills, now budded to

blossom and the fresh lighter growth contrasting with the dark green;

an abundance of very large checkerberries, or partridge-berries, as

Bigelow calls them, on Hasnebumskit. Sugar maples about there. A very

extensive view, but the western view not so much wilder as I expected.

See Barre, about fifteen miles off, and Rutland, etc., etc. Not so much

forest as in our neighborhood; high, swelling hills, but less shade for

the walker. The hills are green, the soil springier; and it is written

that water is more easily obtained on the hill than in the valleys. Saw

a Scotch fir, the pine so valued for tar and naval uses in the north of

Europe.

Mr. Chamberlin told me that there was no corporation in Worcester

except the banks (which I suspect may not be literally true), and

hence their freedom and independence. I think it likely there is a gas

company to light the streets at least.

John Mactaggart finds the ice thickest not in the largest lakes in

Canada, nor in the smallest, where the surrounding forests melt it. He

says that the surveyor of the boundary-line between England and United

States on the Columbia River saw pine trees which would require sixteen

feet in the blade to a cross-cut saw to do anything with them.

I examined to-day a large swamp white oak in Hubbard’s meadow, which

was blown down by the same storm which destroyed the lighthouse.

At five feet from the ground it was nine and three fourths feet

in circumference; the first branch at eleven and a half feet from

ground; and it held its size up to twenty-three feet from the ground.

Its whole height, measured on the ground, was eighty feet, and its

breadth about sixty-six feet. The roots on one side were turned up

with the soil on them, making an object very conspicuous a great

distance off, the highest root being eighteen feet from the ground

and fourteen feet above centre of trunk. The roots, which were small

and thickly interlaced, were from three to nine inches beneath the

surface (in other trees I saw them level with the surface) and thence

extended fifteen to eighteen inches in depth (_i. e._ to this depth

they occupied the ground). They were broken off at about eleven feet

from the centre of the trunk and were there on an average one inch in

diameter, the largest being three inches in diameter. The longest root

was broken off at twenty feet from the centre, and was there three

quarters of an inch in diameter. The tree was rotten within. The lower

side of the soil (what was originally the lower), which clothed the

roots for nine feet from the centre of the tree, was white and clayey

to appearance, and a sparrow was sitting on three eggs within the mass.

Directly under where the massive trunk had stood, and within a foot of

the surface, you could apparently strike in a spade and meet with no

obstruction to a free cultivation. There was no taproot to be seen. The

roots were encircled with dark, nubby rings. The tree, which still had

a portion of its roots in the ground and held to them by a sliver on

the leeward side, was alive and had leaved out, though on many branches

the leaves were shrivelled again. _Quercus bicolor_ of Bigelow, _Q.

Prinus discolor_ Mx. f.

[Illustration]

I observed the grass waving to-day for the first time,—the swift

Camilla on it. It might have been noticed before. You might have seen

it now for a week past on grain-fields.

Clover has blossomed.

I noticed the indigo-weed a week or two ago pushing up like asparagus.

Methinks it must be the small andromeda (?), that dull red mass of

leaves in the swamp, mixed perchance with the rhodora, with its dry

fruitlike appendages, as well as the _Andromeda paniculata_, else

called _ligustrina_, and the clethra. It was the golden senecio

(_Senecio aureus_) which I plucked a week ago in a meadow in Wayland.

The earliest, methinks, of the aster and autumnal-looking yellow

flowers. Its bruised stems enchanted me with their indescribable sweet

odor, like I cannot think what.

The _Phaseolus vulgaris_ includes several kinds of bush beans, of which

those I raised were one.

_June 6. Friday._ Gathered last night the strong, rank,

penetrating-scented angelica.

Under the head of the _Cicuta maculata_, or American hemlock,—“It

is a rule sanctioned by the observations of medical botanists, that

umbelliferous plants, which grow in or about the water, are of a

poisonous nature.”[191] He does not say that the angelica is poisonous,

but I suppose that it is. It has such a rank, offensive, and killing

odor as makes me think of the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron. It

did not leave my hands, which had carried it, long after I had washed

them. A strong, penetrating, lasting, and sickening odor.

Gathered to-night the _Cicuta maculata_, American hemlock, the veins of

the leaflets ending in the notches and the root fasciculated.

Bigelow says, “The leaves of the _Solidago odora_ have a delightfully

fragrant odor, partaking of that of anise and sassafras, but different

from either.”[192]

_June 7._ My practicalness is not to be trusted to the last. To be

sure, I go upon my legs for the most part, but, being hard-pushed and

dogged by a superficial common sense which is bound to near objects

by beaten paths, I am off the handle, as the phrase is,—I begin to be

transcendental and show where my heart is. I am like those guinea-fowl

which Charles Darwin saw at the Cape de Verd Islands. He says, “They

avoided us like partridges on a rainy day in September, running with

their heads cocked up; and if pursued, they readily took to the wing.”

Keep your distance, do not infringe on the interval between us, and I

will pick up lime and lay real terrestrial eggs for you, and let you

know by cackling when I have done it.

When I have been asked to speak at a temperance meeting, my answer has

been, “I am too transcendental to serve you in your way.” They would

fain confine me to the rum-sellers and rum-drinkers, of whom I am not

one, and whom I know little about.

It is a certain faeryland where we live. You may walk out in any

direction over the earth’s surface, lifting your horizon, and

everywhere your path, climbing the convexity of the globe, leads you

between heaven and earth, not away from the light of the sun and stars

and the habitations of men. I wonder that I ever get five miles on

my way, the walk is so crowded with events and phenomena. How many

questions there are which I have not put to the inhabitants!

But how far can you carry _your_ practicalness? How far does your

knowledge really extend? When I have read in deeds only a hundred years

old the words “to enjoy and possess, he and his assigns, _forever_,”

I have seen how short-sighted is the sense which conducts from day to

day. When I read the epitaphs of those who died a century ago, they

seem deader even than they expected. A day seems proportionally a long

part of your “forever and a day.”

There are few so temperate and chaste that they can afford to remind us

even at table that they have a palate and a stomach.

We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the

accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the common sense,

but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest

moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far

greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period

of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are

forgotten. Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval

impassable to the memory.

With reference to the near past, we all occupy the region of common

sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct,

transcendentalists.

We affirm that all things are possible, but only these things have

been to our knowledge. I do not even infer the future _from what I

know of the past_. I am hardly better acquainted with the past than

with the future. What is new to the individual may be familiar to the

experience of his race. It must be rare indeed that the experience

of the individual transcends that of his race. It will be perceived

that there are two kinds of change,—that of the race, and that of the

individual within the limits of the former.

* * * * *

One of those gentle, straight-down rainy days, when the rain begins

by spotting the cultivated fields as if shaken from a pepper-box; a

fishing day, when I see one neighbor after another, having donned his

oil-cloth suit, walking or riding past with a fish-pole, having struck

work,—a day and an employment to make philosophers of them all.

* * * * *

When introduced to high life I cannot help perceiving how it is as a

thing jumped at, and I find that I do not get on in my enjoyment of

the fine arts which adorn it, because my attention is wholly occupied

with the jump, remembering that the greatest genuine leap on record,

due to human muscles alone, is that of certain wandering Arabs who

cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. The first question which I

am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, “Who

boosts you?” Are you one of the ninety-nine who fail or the hundredth,

who succeeds?

_June 8. Sunday._ In F. A. Michaux’s, _i. e._ the younger Michaux’s,

“Voyage à l’ouest des Monts Alléghanys, 1802,” printed at Paris, 1808:—

He says the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what

part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions

would naturally be the point of union (_réunion_, meeting) and the

common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”[193]

The current of the Ohio is so swift in the spring that it is not

necessary to row. Indeed rowing would do more harm than good, since

it would tend to turn the ark out of the current on to some isle or

sand-bar, where it would be entangled amid floating trees. This has

determined the form of the bateaux, which are not the best calculated

for swiftness but to obey the current. They are from fifteen to fifty

feet long by ten to twelve and fifteen, with square ends, and roof of

boards like a house at one end. The sides are about four and a half

feet above the water. “I was alone on the shore of the Monongahela,

when I perceived, for the first time, in the distance, five or six of

these bateaux which were descending this river. I could not conceive

what those great square boxes were, which, abandoned to the current,

presented alternately their ends, their sides, and even (or also (?),

_et même_) their angles. As they came nearer, I heard a confused noise

but without distinguishing anything, on account of the elevation of the

sides. It was only on ascending the bank of the river that I perceived,

in these bateaux, many families carrying with them their horses, cows,

poultry, dismounted carts (_charrettes_), plows, harnesses, beds,

agricultural implements, in short all that constitute the movables of a

household (_ménage_) and the carrying on (_exploitation_) of a farm.”

But he was obliged to paddle his log canoe “_sans cesse_” because of

the sluggishness of the current of the Ohio in April, 1802.

A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his State

was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees

which were burnt, and sometimes people took land to clear on condition

that they should have what potash they could make.

After travelling more than three thousand miles in North America, he

says that no part is to be compared for the “_force végétative des

forêts_” to the region of the Ohio between Wheeling and Marietta.

Thirty-six miles above the last place he measured a plane tree

on the bank of the Ohio which, at four feet from the ground, was

forty-seven in circumference. It is true it was “_renflé d’une manière

prodigieuse_.” Tulip and plane trees, his father had said, attained the

greatest diameter of North American trees.

Ginseng was then the only “territorial” production of Kentucky which

would pay the expense of transportation _by land_ to Philadelphia. They

collected it from spring to the first frosts. Even hunters carried

for this purpose, beside their guns, a bag and a little “_pioche_.”

From twenty-five to thirty “_milliers pesant_” were then transported

annually, and this commerce was on the increase. Some transported it

themselves from Kentucky to China, _i. e._ without selling it [to]

the merchants of the seaboard. Traders in Kentucky gave twenty to

twenty-four “sous” the pound for it.

They habituated their wild hogs to return to the house from time to

time by distributing corn for them once or twice a week. So I read that

in Buenos Ayres they collect the horses into the corral twice a week to

keep them tame in a degree.

* * * * *

Gathered the first strawberries to-day.

Observed on Fair Haven a tall pitch pine, such as some call yellow

pine,—very smooth, yellowish, and destitute of branches to a great

height. The outer and darker-colored bark appeared to have scaled

off, leaving a fresh and smooth surface. At the ground, all round the

tree, I saw what appeared to be the edges of the old surface scales,

extending to two inches more in thickness. The bark was divided into

large, smooth plates, one to two feet long and four to six inches wide.

I noticed that the cellular portion of the bark of the canoe birch

log from which I stripped the epidermis a week or two ago was turned

a complete brick-red color very striking to behold and reminding

me of the red man and all strong, natural things,—the color of our

blood somewhat. Under the epidermis it was still a sort of buff. The

different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times,

fresh or stale, are extremely agreeable to my eye.

I found the white-pine-top full of staminate blossom-buds not yet fully

grown or expanded, with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit, but

I could find no pistillate blossom.

The fugacious-petalled cistus, and the pink, and the lupines of various

tints are seen together.

Our outside garments, which are often thin and fanciful and merely for

show, are our epidermis, hanging loose and fantastic like that of the

yellow birch, which may be cast off without harm, stripped off here and

there without fatal injury; sometimes called cuticle and false skin.

The vital principle wholly wanting in it; partakes not of the life of

the plant. Our thicker and more essential garments are our cellular

integument. When this is removed, the tree is said to be girdled and

dies. Our shirt is the cortex, liber, or true bark, beneath which

is found the alburnum or sap-wood, while the heart in old stocks is

commonly rotten or has disappeared. As if we grew like trees, and were

of the exogenous kind.

_June 9._ James Wood, Senior, told me to-day that Asa (?) Melvin’s

father told him that he had seen alewives caught (many of them) in the

meadow which we were crossing, on the west of Bateman’s Pond, where now

there is no stream, and though it is wet you can walk everywhere; also

one shad. He thinks that a great part of the meadow once belonged to

the pond.

Gathered the _Linnæa borealis_.

_June 11. Wednesday._ Last night a beautiful summer night, not too

warm, moon not quite full, after two or three rainy days. Walked to

Fair Haven by railroad, returning by Potter’s pasture and Sudbury

road. I feared at first that there would be too much white light,

like the pale remains of daylight, and not a yellow, gloomy, dreamier

light; that it would be like a candlelight by day; but when I got

away from the town and deeper into the night, it was better. I hear

whip-poor-wills, and see a few fireflies in the meadow.

I saw by the shadows cast by the inequalities of the clayey sand-bank

in the Deep Cut that it was necessary to see objects by moonlight

as well as sunlight, to get a complete notion of them. This bank had

looked much more flat by day, when the light was stronger, but now the

heavy shadows revealed its prominences. The prominences are light, made

more remarkable by the dark shadows which they cast.

When I rose out of the Deep Cut into the old pigeon-place field, I rose

into a warmer stratum of air, it being lighter. It told of the day, of

sunny noontide hours,—an air in which work had been done, which men had

breathed. It still remembered the sunny banks,—of the laborer wiping

his brow, of the bee humming amid flowers, the hum of insects. Here is

a puff of warmer air which has taken its station on the hills; which

has come up from the sultry plains of noon.[194]

I hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air

now at nine o’clock P. M., and occasionally—what I do not remember to

have heard so late—their booming note. It sounds more as if under a

cope than by day. The sound is not so fugacious, going off to be lost

amid the spheres, but is echoed hollowly to earth, making the low roof

of heaven vibrate. Such a sound is more confused and dissipated by day.

The whip-poor-will suggests how wide asunder [are] the woods and the

town. Its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street,

and then it is thought to be of ill omen. Only the dwellers on the

outskirts of the village hear it occasionally. It sometimes comes into

their yards. But go into the woods in a warm night at this season, and

it is the prevailing sound. I hear now five or six at once. It is no

more of ill omen therefore here than the night and the moonlight are.

It is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods.

New beings have usurped the air we breathe, rounding Nature, filling

her crevices with sound. To sleep where you may hear the whip-poor-will

in your dreams!

I hear from this upland, from which I see Wachusett by day, a wagon

crossing one of the bridges. I have no doubt that in some places

to-night I should be sure to hear every carriage which crossed a bridge

over the river within the limits of Concord, for in such an hour and

atmosphere the sense of hearing is wonderfully assisted and asserts

a new dignity, and [we] become the Hearalls of the story. The late

traveller cannot drive his horse across the distant bridge, but this

still and resonant atmosphere tells the tale to my ear. Circumstances

are very favorable to the transmission of such a sound. In the first

place, planks so placed and struck like a bell swung near the earth

emit a very resonant and penetrating sound; add that the bell is, in

this instance, hung over water, and that the night air, not only on

account of its stillness, but perhaps on account of its density, is

more favorable to the transmission of sound. If the whole town were a

raised planked floor, what a din there would be!

I hear some whip-poor-wills on hills, others in thick wooded vales,

which ring hollow and cavernous, like an apartment or cellar, with

their note. As when I hear the working of some artisan from within an

apartment.

I now descend round the corner of the grain-field, through the pitch

pine wood into a lower field, more inclosed by woods, and find myself

in a colder, damp and misty atmosphere, with much dew on the grass. I

seem to be nearer to the origin of things. There is something creative

and primal in the cool mist. This dewy mist does not fail to suggest

music to me, unaccountably; fertility, the origin of things. An

atmosphere which has forgotten the sun, where the ancient principle of

moisture prevails. It is laden with the condensed fragrance of plants

and, as it were, distilled in dews.

The woodland paths are never seen to such advantage as in a moonlight

night, so embowered, still opening before you almost against

expectation as you walk; you are so completely in the woods, and yet

your feet meet no obstacles. It is as if it were not a path, but an

open, winding passage through the bushes, which your feet find.

Now I go by the spring, and when I have risen to the same level as

before, find myself in the warm stratum again.

The woods are about as destitute of inhabitants at night as the

streets. In both there will be some night-walkers. There are but few

wild creatures to seek their prey. The greater part of its inhabitants

have retired to rest.

Ah, that life that I have known! How hard it is to remember what is

most memorable! We remember how we itched, not how our hearts beat.

I can sometimes recall to mind the quality, the immortality, of my

youthful life, but in memory is the only relation to it.

The very cows have now left their pastures and are driven home to their

yards. I meet no creature in the fields.

I hear the night-warbler[195] breaking out as in his dreams, made so

from the first for some mysterious reason.

Our spiritual side takes a more distinct form, like our shadow which we

see accompanying us.

I do not know but I feel less vigor at night; my legs will not

carry me so far; as if the night were less favorable to muscular

exertion,—weakened us, somewhat as darkness turns plants pale. But

perhaps my experience is to be referred to being already exhausted by

the day, and I have never tried the experiment fairly. Yet sometimes

after a hard day’s work I have found myself unexpectedly vigorous. It

was so hot summer before last that the Irish laborers on the railroad

worked by night instead of day for a while, several of them having

been killed by the heat and cold water. I do not know but they did as

much work as ever by day. Yet methinks Nature would not smile on such

labors.

Only the Hunter’s and Harvest moons are famous, but I think that each

full moon deserves to be and has its own character well marked. One

might be called the Midsummer-Night Moon.

The wind and water are still awake. At night you are sure to hear

what wind there is stirring. The wind blows, the river flows, without

resting. There lies Fair Haven Lake, undistinguishable from fallen sky.

The pines seem forever foreign, at least to the civilized man,—not only

their aspect but their scent, and their turpentine.

So still and moderate is the night! No scream is heard, whether of fear

or joy. No great comedy nor tragedy is being enacted. The chirping of

crickets is the most universal, if not the loudest, sound. There is no

French Revolution in Nature, no excess. She is warmer or colder by a

degree or two.

By night no flowers, at least no variety of colors. The pinks are no

longer pink; they only shine faintly, reflecting more light. Instead of

flowers underfoot, stars overhead.

My shadow has the distinctness of a second person, a certain black

companion bordering on the imp, and I ask, “Who is this?” which I see

dodging behind me as I am about to sit down on a rock.

No one, to my knowledge, has observed the minute differences in the

seasons. Hardly two nights are alike. The rocks do not feel warm

to-night, for the air is warmest; nor does the sand particularly. A

book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own

season and out-of-doors, or in its own locality wherever it may be.

When you get into the road, though far from the town, and feel the sand

under your feet, it is as if you had reached your own gravel walk. You

no longer hear the whip-poor-will, nor regard your shadow, for here you

expect a fellow-traveller. You catch yourself walking merely. The road

leads your steps and thoughts alike to the town. You see only the path,

and your thoughts wander from the objects which are presented to your

senses. You are no longer in place. It is like conformity,—walking in

the ways of men.

In Charles Darwin’s “Voyage of a Naturalist round the World,” commenced

in 1831:—

He gave to Ehrenberg some of an impalpably fine dust which filled the

air at sea near the Cape de Verd Islands, and he found it to consist in

great part of “infusoria with siliceous shields, and of the siliceous

tissue of plants;” found in this sixty-seven different organic forms.

The infusoria with two exceptions inhabitants of fresh water. Vessels

have even run on shore owing to the obscurity. Is seen a thousand miles

from Africa. Darwin found particles of stone above a thousandth of an

inch square.

Speaking of St. Paul’s Rocks, Lat. 58´ N., Long. 29° 15´ W., “Not

a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this islet; yet it is

inhabited by several insects and spiders. The following list completes,

I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a fly (Olfersia) living on the booby,

and a tick which must have come here as a parasite on the birds; a

small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a beetle

(Quedius), and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly numerous

spiders, which I suppose prey on these small attendants and scavengers

of the waterfowl. The often-repeated description of the stately palm

and other noble tropical plants, then birds, and lastly man, taking

possession of the coral islets as soon as formed, in the Pacific,

is probably not quite correct; I fear it destroys the poetry of this

story, that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects and spiders

should be the first inhabitants of newly-formed oceanic land.”

At Bahia or San Salvador, Brazil, took shelter under a tree “so thick

that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain,” but

not so there.

Of a partridge near the mouth of the Plata, “A man on horseback,

by riding round and round in a circle, or rather in a spire, so as

to approach closer each time, may knock on the head as many as he

pleases.” Refers to Hearne’s Journey, page 383, for “In Arctic North

America the Indians catch the Varying Hare by walking spirally round

and round it, when on its form: the middle of the day is reckoned the

best time, when the sun is high, and the shadow of the hunter not very

long.”

In the same place, “General Rosas is also a perfect horseman—an

accomplishment of no small consequence in a country where an assembled

army elected its general by the following trial: A troop of unbroken

horses being driven into a corral, were let out through a gateway,

above which was a cross-bar: it was agreed whoever should drop from

the bar on one of these wild animals, as it rushed out, and should be

able, without saddle or bridle, not only to ride it, but also to bring

it back to the door of the corral, should be their general. The person

who succeeded was accordingly elected, and doubtless made a general fit

for such an army. This extraordinary feat has also been performed by

Rosas.”

Speaks of the Gaucho sharpening his knife on the back of the armadillo

before he kills him.

Alcide d’Orbigny, from 1825 to 1833 in South America, now (1846)

publishing the results on a scale which places him second to Humboldt

among South American travellers.

Hail in Buenos Ayres as large as small apples; killed thirteen deer,

beside ostriches, which last also it blinded, etc., etc. Dr. Malcomson

told him of hail in India, in 1831, which “much injured the cattle.”

Stones flat, one ten inches in circumference; passed through windows,

making round holes.

A difference in the country about Montevideo and somewhere else

attributed to the manuring and grazing of the cattle. Refers to Atwater

as saying that the same thing is observed in the prairies of North

America, “where coarse grass, between five and six feet high, when

grazed by cattle, changes into common pasture land.” (_Vide_ Atwater’s

words in Silliman’s _North American Journal_, vol. i, p. 117.)

I would like to read Azara’s Voyage.

Speaks[196] of the fennel and the cardoon (_Cynara cardunculus_),

introduced from Europe, now very common in those parts of South

America. The latter occurs now on both sides the Cordilleras across

the continent. In Banda Oriental alone “very many (probably several

hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants,

and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where

these great beds occur, nothing else can now live.... I doubt whether

any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant

over the aborigines.”

Horses first landed at the La Plata in 1535. Now these, with cattle

and sheep, have altered the whole aspect of the country,—vegetation,

etc. “The wild pig in some parts probably replaces the peccari; packs

of wild dogs may be heard howling on the wooded banks of the less

frequented streams; and the common cat, altered into a large and fierce

animal, inhabits rocky hills.”

At sea, eye being six feet above level, horizon is two and four fifths

miles distant. “In like manner, the more level the plain, the more

nearly does the horizon approach within these narrow limits; and this,

in my opinion, entirely destroys that grandeur which one would have

imagined that a vast level plain would have possessed.”

Darwin found a tooth of a _native horse_ contemporary with the

mastodon, on the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, though he says there is good

evidence against any horse living in America at the time of Columbus.

He speaks of their remains being common in North America. Owen has

found Darwin’s tooth similar to one Lyell brought from the United

States, but unlike any other, fossil or living, and named this American

horse _Equus curvidens_, from a slight but peculiar curvature in it.

The great table-land of southern Mexico makes the division between

North and South America with reference to the migration of animals.

Quotes Captain Owen’s “Surveying Voyage” for saying that, at the town

of Benguela on the west coast of Africa in a time of great drought,

a number of elephants entered in a body to possess themselves of

the wells. After a desperate conflict and the loss of one man, the

inhabitants—three thousand—drove them off. During a great drought in

India, says Dr. Malcomson, “a hare drank out of a vessel held by the

adjutant of the regiment.”

The guanacos (wild llama) and other animals of this genus have the

habit of dropping their dung from day to day in the same heap. The

Peruvian Indians use it for fuel, and are thus aided in collecting it.

Rowing up a stream which takes its rise in a mountain, you meet at

last with pebbles which have been washed down from it, when many miles

distant. I love to think of this kind of introduction to it.

The only quadruped native to the Falkland Islands is a large wolf-like

fox. As far as he is aware, “there is no other instance in any part of

the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent,

possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself.”

In the Falkland Isles, where other fuel is scarce, they frequently cook

their beef with the bones from which the meat has been scraped. Also

they have “a green little bush about the size of common heath, which

has the useful property of burning while fresh and green.”

Saw a cormorant play with its fishy prey as a cat with a mouse,—eight

times let it go and dive after it again.

Seminal propagation produces a more original individual than that by

buds, layers, and grafts.

Some inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego having got some putrid whale’s

blubber in time of famine, “an old man cut off thin slices and

muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to

the famished party, who during this time preserved a profound silence.”

This was the only evidence of any religious worship among them. It

suggests that even the animals may have something divine in them and

akin to revelation,—some inspirations allying them to man as to God.

“Nor is it easy to teach them our superiority except by striking a

fatal blow. Like wild beasts, they do not appear to compare numbers;

for each individual, if attacked, instead of retiring, will endeavor

to dash your brains out with a stone, as certainly as a tiger under

similar circumstances would tear you.”

“We were well clothed, and though sitting close to the fire, were

far from too warm; yet these naked savages, though further off, were

observed, to our great surprise, to be streaming with perspiration at

undergoing such a roasting.”[197]

Ehrenberg examined some of the white paint with which the Fuegians

daub themselves, and found it to be composed of infusoria, including

fourteen polygastrica, and four phytolitharia, inhabitants of fresh

water, all old and known forms!!

Again of the Fuegians: “Simple circumstances—such as the beauty

of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in

washing ourselves—excited their admiration far more than any grand or

complicated object, such as our ship. Bougainville has well remarked

concerning these people, that they treat the ‘chef-d’œuvres de

l’industrie humaine, comme ils traitent les loix de la nature es ses

phénomènes.’”

He was informed of a tribe of foot Indians now changing into horse

Indians apparently in Patagonia.

“With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus,

the natives [_i. e._ of Tierra del Fuego][198] eat no vegetable food

besides this fungus” (_Cyttaria Darwinii_). The “only country ... where

a cryptogamic plant affords a staple article of food.”

No reptiles in Tierra del Fuego nor in Falkland Islands.

Describes a species of kelp there,—_Macrocystis pyrifera_. “I know few

things more surprising than to see this plant growing and flourishing

amidst those great breakers of the Western Ocean, which no mass of

rock, let it be ever so hard, can long resist.... A few [stems][199]

taken together are sufficiently strong to support the weight of

the large loose stones to which, in the inland channels, they grow

attached; and yet some of these stones were so heavy that, when drawn

to the surface, they could scarcely be lifted into a boat by one

person.” Captain Cook thought that some of it grew to the length of

three hundred and sixty feet. “The beds of this sea-weed, even when

not of great breadth,” says D., “make excellent natural floating

breakwaters. It is quite curious to see, in an exposed harbor, how

soon the waves from the open sea, as they travel through the straggling

stems, sink in height, and pass into smooth water.”

Number of living creatures of all orders whose existence seems to

depend on the kelp; a volume might be written on them. If a forest were

destroyed anywhere, so many species would not perish as if this weed

were, and with the fish would go many birds and larger marine animals,

and hence the Fuegian himself perchance.

Tree ferns in Van Diemen’s Land (lat. 45°) six feet in circumference.

Missionaries encountered icebergs in Patagonia in latitude

corresponding to the Lake of Geneva, in a season corresponding to June

in Europe. In Europe, the most southern glacier which comes down to

the sea is on coast of Norway, latitude 67°,—20°, or 1230 [geographical

miles] nearer the pole.

Erratic boulders not observed in the intertropical parts of the world;

due to icebergs or glaciers.

Under soil perpetually frozen in North America in 56° at three feet; in

Siberia in 62° at twelve to fifteen feet.

In an excursion from Valparaiso to the base of the Andes: “We unsaddled

our horses near the spring, and prepared to pass the night. The evening

was fine, and the atmosphere so clear that the masts of the vessels

at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than twenty-six

geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly as little

black streaks.” Anson had been surprised at the distance at which his

vessels were discovered from the coast without knowing the reason,—the

great height of the land and the transparency of the air.

Floating islands from four to six feet thick in Lake Tagua-tagua in

central Chile; blown about.

_June 12._ Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain

you might hear.[200]

There would be this advantage in travelling in your own country, even

in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to

understand what you saw you would make fewer travellers’ mistakes.

Is not he hospitable who entertains thoughts?

_June 13._ Walked to Walden last night (moon not quite full) by

railroad and upland wood-path, returning by Wayland road. Last full

moon the elms had not leaved out,—cast no heavy shadows,—and their

outlines were less striking and rich in the streets at night.

I noticed night before night before last from Fair Haven how valuable

was some water by moonlight, like the river and Fair Haven Pond, though

far away, reflecting the light with a faint glimmering sheen, as in the

spring of the year. The water shines with an inward light like a heaven

on earth. The silent depth and serenity and majesty of water! Strange

that men should distinguish gold and diamonds, when these precious

elements are so common. I saw a distant river by moonlight, making no

noise, yet flowing, as by day, still to the sea, like melted silver

reflecting the moonlight. Far away it lay encircling the earth. How far

away it may look in the night, and even from a low hill how miles away

down in the valley! As far off as paradise and the delectable country!

There is a certain glory attends on water by night. By it the heavens

are related to the earth, undistinguishable from a sky beneath you.

And I forgot to say that after I reached the road by Potter’s bars,—or

further, by Potter’s Brook,—I saw the moon suddenly reflected full from

a pool. A puddle from which you may see the moon reflected, and the

earth dissolved under your feet. The magical moon with attendant stars

suddenly looking up with mild lustre from a window in the dark earth.

I observed also the same night a halo about my shadow in the moonlight,

which I referred to the accidentally lighter color of the surrounding

surface; I transferred my shadow to the darkest patches of grass,

and saw the halo there equally. It serves to make the outlines of the

shadow more distinct.

But now for last night. A few fireflies in the meadow. Do they shine,

though invisibly, by day? Is their candle lighted by day? It is not

nightfall till the whip-poor-wills begin to sing.

As I entered the Deep Cut, I was affected by beholding the first faint

reflection of genuine and unmixed moonlight on the eastern sand-bank

while the horizon, yet red with day, was tingeing the western side.

What an interval between those two lights! The light of the moon,—in

what age of the world does that fall upon the earth? The moonlight was

as the earliest and dewy morning light, and the daylight tinge reminded

me much more of the night. There were the old and new dynasties

opposed, contrasted, and an interval between, which time could not

span. Then is night, when the daylight yields to the nightlight. It

suggested an interval, a distance not recognized in history. Nations

have flourished in that light.

When I had climbed the sand-bank on the left, I felt the warmer current

or stratum of air on my cheek, like a blast from a furnace.

The white stems of the pines, which reflected the weak light, standing

thick and close together while their lower branches were gone, reminded

me that the pines are only larger grasses which rise to a chaffy head,

and we the insects that crawl between them. They are particularly

grass-like.

How long do the gales retain the heat of the sun? I find them retreated

high up the sides of hills, especially on open fields or cleared

places. Does, perchance, any of this pregnant air survive the dews of

night? Can any of it be found remembering the sun of yesterday even in

the morning hours. Does, perchance, some puff, some blast, survive the

night on elevated clearings surrounded by the forest?

The bullfrog belongs to summer. The different frogs mark the

seasons pretty well,—the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog,[201] and

the bullfrog. I believe that all may be heard at last occasionally

together.

I heard partridges drumming to-night as late as 9 o’clock. What

singularly space penetrating and filling sound! Why am I never nearer

to its source?

We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our

pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely

enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break

upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds

us, and the sound of the surf come back to us. Might not a bellows

assist us to breathe? That our breathing should create a wind in a

calm day! We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the

flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath

ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.

The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its

own kind which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if

it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need to

be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life?[202]

The tree-toad’s, too, is a summer sound.

I hear, just as the night sets in, faint notes from time to time from

some sparrow (?) falling asleep,—a vesper hymn,—and later, in the

woods, the chuckling, rattling sound of some unseen bird on the near

trees. The nighthawk booms wide awake.

By moonlight we see not distinctly even the surface of the earth, but

our daylight experience supplies us with confidence.

As I approached the pond down Hubbard’s Path, after coming out of

the woods into a warmer air, I saw the shimmering of the moon on its

surface, and, in the near, now flooded cove, the water-bugs, darting,

circling about, made streaks or curves of light. The moon’s inverted

pyramid of shimmering light commenced about twenty rods off, like so

much micaceous sand. But I was startled to see midway in the dark water

a bright flamelike, more than phosphorescent light crowning the crests

of the wavelets, which at first I mistook for fireflies, and thought

even of cucullos.[203] It had the appearance of a pure, smokeless

flame a half-dozen inches long, issuing from the water and bending

flickeringly along its surface. I thought of St. Elmo’s lights and the

like. But, coming near to the shore of the pond itself, these flames

increased, and I saw that even this was so many broken reflections of

the moon’s disk, though one would have said they were of an intenser

light than the moon herself; from contrast with the surrounding water

they were. Standing up close to the shore and nearer the rippled

surface, I saw the reflections of the moon sliding down the watery

concave like so many lustrous burnished coins poured from a bag with

inexhaustible lavishness, and the lambent flames on the surface were

much multiplied, seeming to slide along a few inches with each wave

before they were extinguished; and I saw how farther and farther off

they gradually merged in the general sheen, which, in fact, was made

up of a myriad little mirrors reflecting the disk of the moon with

equal brightness to an eye rightly placed. The pyramid or sheaf of

light which we see springing from near where we stand only, in fact,

is the outline of that portion of the shimmering surface which an eye

takes in. To myriad eyes suitably placed, the whole surface of the pond

would be seen to shimmer, or rather it would be seen, as the waves

turned up their mirrors, to be covered with those bright flame-like

reflections of the moon’s disk, like a myriad candles everywhere

issuing from the waves; _i. e._ if there were as many eyes as angles

presented by the waves, the whole surface would appear as bright as

the moon; and these reflections are dispersed in all directions into

the atmosphere, flooding it with light. No wonder that water reveals

itself so far by night; even further in many states of the atmosphere

than by day. I thought at first it [was] some unusual phosphorescence.

In some positions these flames were star-like points, brighter than the

brightest stars. Suddenly a flame would show itself in a near and dark

space, precisely like some inflammable gas on the surface,—as if an

inflammable gas made its way up from the bottom.

I heard my old musical, simple-noted owl. The sound of the _dreaming_

frogs[204] prevails over the others. Occasionally a bullfrog near me

made an obscene noise, a sound like an eructation, near me. I think

they must be imbodied eructations. They suggest flatulency.

The pond is higher than ever, so as to hinder fishermen, and I could

hardly get to the true shore here on account of the bushes. I pushed

out in a boat a little and heard the chopping of the waves under its

bow. And on the bottom I saw the moving reflections of the shining

waves, faint streaks of light revealing the shadows of the waves or the

opaqueness of the water.

As I climbed the hill again toward my old bean-field, I listened to

the ancient, familiar, immortal, dear cricket sound under all others,

hearing at first some distinct chirps; but when these ceased I was

aware of the general earth-song, which my hearing had not heard, amid

which these were only taller flowers in a bed, and I wondered if behind

or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal. Why

do we not hear when this begins in the spring? and when it ceases in

the fall? Or is it too gradual?

After I have got into the road I have no thought to record all the way

home,—the walk is comparatively barren. The leafy elm sprays seem to

droop more by night (??).

_June 14. Saturday._ Full moon last night. Set out on a walk to

Conantum at 7 P. M. A serene evening, the sun going down behind clouds,

a few white or slightly shaded piles of clouds floating in the eastern

sky, but a broad, clear, mellow cope left for the moon to rise into.

An evening for poets to describe. Met a man driving home his cow from

pasture and stopping to chat with his neighbor; then a boy, who had

set down his pail in the road to stone a bird most perseveringly, whom

I heard afterward behind me telling his pail to be quiet in a tone of

assumed anger, because it squeaked under his arm. As I proceed along

the back road I hear the lark still singing in the meadow, and the

bobolink, and the gold robin on the elms, and the swallows twittering

about the barns. A small bird chasing a crow high in the air, who is

going home at night. All nature is in an expectant attitude. Before

Goodwin’s house, at the opening of the Sudbury road, the swallows

are diving at a tortoise-shell cat, who curvets and frisks rather

awkwardly, as if she did not know whether to be scared or not. And

now, having proceeded a little way down this road, the sun having

buried himself in the low cloud in the west and hung out his crimson

curtains,[205] I hear, while sitting by the wall, the sound of the

stake-driver at a distance,—like that made by a man pumping in a

neighboring farmyard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before

his door on a frosty morning,[206] and I can imagine like driving a

stake in a meadow. The pumper. I immediately went in search of the

bird, but, after going a third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer,

and the two parts of the sound did not appear to proceed from the same

place. What is the peculiarity of these sounds which penetrate so far

on the keynote of nature? At last I got near to the brook in the meadow

behind Hubbard’s wood, but I could not tell if [it] were further or

nearer than that. When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it

ceased, and I heard it no more. I suppose that I scared it. As before

I was further off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought.

It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud

a sound by merely sucking in or throwing out water with pump-like

lungs.[207] As yet no moon, but downy piles of cloud scattered here and

there in the expectant sky.

Saw a blue flag blossom in the meadow while waiting for the

stake-driver.

It was a sound as of gulping water.

Where my path crosses the brook in the meadow there is a singularly

sweet scent in the heavy air bathing the brakes, where the brakes

grow,—the fragrance of the earth, as if the dew were a distillation

of the fragrant essences of nature. When I reach the road, the farmer

going home from town invites me to ride in his high-set wagon, not

thinking why I walk, nor can I shortly explain. He remarks on the

coolness of the weather. The angelica is budded, a handsome luxuriant

plant. And now my senses are captivated again by a sweet fragrance as

I enter the embowered willow causeway, and I know not if it be from

a particular plant or all together,—sweet-scented vernal grass or

sweet-briar. Now the sun is fairly gone, I hear the dreaming frog,[208]

and the whip-poor-will from some _darker_ wood,—it is not far from

eight,—and the cuckoo. The song sparrows sing quite briskly among the

willows, as if it were spring again, and the blackbird’s harsher note

resounds over the meadows, and the veery’s comes up from the wood.

Fishes are dimpling the surface of the river, seizing the insects which

alight. A solitary fisherman in his boat inhabits the scene. As I rose

the hill beyond the bridge, I found myself in a cool, fragrant, dewy,

up-country, mountain morning air, a new region. (When I had issued from

the willows on to the bridge, it was like coming out of night into

twilight, the river reflected so much light.) The moon was now seen

rising over Fair Haven and at the same time reflected in the river,

pale and white like a silvery cloud, barred with a cloud, not promising

how it will shine anon. Now I meet an acquaintance coming from a remote

field in his hay-rigging, with a jag of wood; who reins up to show me

how large a woodchuck he has killed, which he found eating his clover.

But now he must drive on, for behind comes a boy taking up the whole

road with a huge roller drawn by a horse, which goes lumbering and

bouncing along, getting out of the way of night,—while the sun has gone

the other way,—and making such a noise as if it had the contents of

a tinker’s shop in its bowels, and rolls the whole road smooth like a

newly sown grain-field.

In Conant’s orchard I hear the faint cricket-like song of a sparrow

saying its vespers, as if it were a link between the cricket and the

bird. The robin sings now, though the moon shines silverly, and the

veery jingles its trill. I hear the fresh and refreshing sound of

falling water, as I have heard it in New Hampshire. It is a sound we do

not commonly hear. I see that the whiteweed is in blossom, which, as I

had not walked by day for some time, I had not seen before.

How moderate, deliberate, is Nature! How gradually the shades of night

gather and deepen, giving man ample leisure to bid farewell to-day,

conclude his day’s affairs, and prepare for slumber! The twilight seems

out of proportion to the length of the day. Perchance it saves our

eyes. Now for some hours the farmers have been getting home.

Since the alarm about mad dogs a couple of years ago there are

comparatively few left to bark at the traveller and bay the moon. All

nature is abandoned to me.

You feel yourself—your body, your legs,—more at night, for there

is less beside to be distinctly known, and hence perhaps you think

yourself more tired than you are. I see indistinctly oxen asleep in

the fields, silent in majestic slumber, like the sphinx,—statuesque,

Egyptian, reclining. What solid rest! How their heads are supported!

A sparrow or a cricket makes more noise. From Conant’s summit I hear

as many as fifteen whip-poor-wills—or whip-or-I-wills—at once, the

succeeding cluck sounding strangely foreign, like a hewer at work

elsewhere.

The moon is accumulating yellow light and triumphing over the clouds,

but still the west is suffused here and there with a slight red tinge,

marking the path of the day. Though inexperienced ones might call it

night, it is not yet. Dark, heavy clouds lie along the western horizon,

exhibiting the forms of animals and men, while the moon is behind

a cloud. Why do we detect these forms so readily?—whales or giants

reclining, busts of heroes, Michael-Angelic. There is the gallery of

statuary, the picture gallery of man,—not a board upon an Italian’s

head, but these dark figures along the horizon,—the board some Titan

carries on his head. What firm and heavy outlines for such soft and

light material!

How sweet and encouraging it is to hear the sound of some artificial

music from the midst of woods or from the top of a hill at night, borne

on the breeze from some distant farmhouse,—the human voice or a flute!

That is a civilization one can endure, worth having. I could go about

the world listening for the strains of music. Men use this gift but

sparingly, methinks. What should we think of a bird which had the gift

of song but used it only once in a dozen years, like the tree which

blossoms only once in a century?

Now the dorbug comes humming by, the first I have heard this year. In

three months it will be the Harvest Moon. I cannot easily believe it.

Why not call this the Traveller’s Moon? It would be as true to call

the last (the May) the Planter’s Moon as it is to call September’s the

Harvest Moon, for the farmers use one about as little as the other.

Perhaps this is the Whip-poor-will’s Moon. The bullfrog now, which I

have not heard before, this evening. It is nearly nine. They are much

less common and their note more intermittent than that of the dreamers.

I scared up a bird on a _low_ bush, perchance on its nest. It is rare

that you start them at night from such places.

Peabody says that the nighthawk retires to rest about the time the

whip-poor-will begins its song. The whip-poor-will begins now at

7.30. I hear the nighthawk after 9 o’clock. He says it flies low in

the evening, but it also flies high, as it must needs do to make the

booming sound.

I hear the lowing of cows occasionally, and the barking of dogs.

The pond by moonlight, which may make the object in a walk, suggests

little to be said. Where there was only one firefly in a dozen rods, I

hastily ran to one which had crawled up to the top of a grass-head and

exhibited its light, and instantly another sailed in to it, showing

its light also; but my presence made them extinguish their lights.

The latter retreated, and the former crawled slowly down the stem.

It appeared to me that the first was a female who thus revealed her

place to the male, who was also making known his neighborhood as he

hovered about, both showing their lights that they might come together.

It was like a mistress who had climbed to the turrets of her castle

and exhibited there a blazing taper for a signal, while her lover

had displayed his light on the plain. If perchance she might have any

lovers abroad.

Not much before 10 o’clock does the moonlight night begin. When man is

asleep and day fairly forgotten, then is the beauty of moonlight seen

over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding.[209] Then let

me walk in a diversified country, of hill and dale, with heavy woods

one side, and copses and scattered trees and bushes enough to give me

shadows. Returning, a mist is on the river. The river is taken into the

womb of Nature again.

Now is the clover month, but haying is not yet begun.

* * * * *

Evening.—Went to Nawshawtuct by North Branch.

Overtaken by a slight shower. The same increased fragrance from the

ground—sweet-fern, etc.—as in the night, and for the like reason

probably. The houstonias still blossom freshly, as I believe they

continue to do all summer. The fever-root in blossom; pictured in

Bigelow’s “Medical Botany.” _Triosteum perfoliatum_, near the top of

Hill, under the wall, looks somewhat like a milkweed. The _Viburnum

dentatum_, very regularly toothed, just ready to blossom; sometimes

called arrow-wood.

Nature seems not [to] have designed that man should be much abroad by

night, and in the moon proportioned the light fitly. By the faintness

and rareness of the light compared with that of the sun, she expresses

her intention with regard to him.

_June 15. Sunday._ Darwin still:—

Finds runaway sailors on the Chonos Archipelago, who he thought “had

kept a very good reckoning of time,” having lost only four days in

fifteen months.

Near same place, on the islands of the archipelago, he found wild

potato, the tallest four feet high, tubers generally small but one two

inches in diameter; “resembled in every respect, and had the same smell

as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, and were watery

and insipid, without any bitter taste.”

Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, “I was assured that,

after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro,

a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles, across a hilly and

wooded country.”

Subsidence and elevation of the west coast of South America and of the

Cordilleras. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist,

that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level

of the crust of this earth.”

Would like to see Sir Francis Head’s travels in South America,—Pampas

perhaps.[210] Also Chambers’ “Sea Levels.” Also travels of Spix and Von

Martius.

It is said that hydrophobia was first known in South America in 1803.

At the Galapagos, the tortoises going to any place travel night and day

and so get there sooner than would be expected,—about eight miles in

two or three days. He rode on their backs.

The productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, from five to six hundred

miles from America, are still of the American type. “It was most

striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells,

new insects, new plants, and yet, by innumerable trifling details of

structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds,

to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or the hot, dry deserts of

Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.” What is most singular,

not only are the plants, etc., to a great extent peculiar to these

islands, but each for the most part has its own kinds, though they are

within sight of each other.

Birds so tame that they can be killed with a stick. _I_ would suggest

that, from having dealt so long with the inoffensive and slow-moulded

tortoise, they have not yet acquired an instinctive fear of man, who is

a new-comer. Methinks tortoises, lizards, etc., for wild creatures are

remarkable for the nearness to which man approaches them and handles

them, as logs,—cold-blooded, lumpish forms of life,—only taking care

not to step into their mouths. An alligator has been known to have come

out of the mud like a mud volcano where was now the floor of a native’s

hut.

“The common dock is ... widely disseminated, [in New Zealand][211] and

will, I fear, forever remain a proof of the rascality of an Englishman,

who sold the seeds for those of the tobacco plant.”

The New-Hollanders a little higher in the scale of civilization than

the Fuegians.

Puzzled by a “well rounded fragment of greenstone, rather larger than

a man’s head,” which a captain had found on a small coral circle or

atoll near Keeling Island, “where every other particle of matter is

calcareous,” about six hundred miles from Sumatra. D. agrees with

Kotzebue (_vide_ Kotzebue) who states that (Darwin’s words) “the

inhabitants of the Radack Archipelago, a group of lagoon-islands in the

midst of the Pacific, obtained stones for sharpening their instruments

by searching the roots of trees which are cast upon the beach,” and

“laws have been established that such stones belong to the chief, and

a punishment is inflicted on any one who attempts to steal them.” Let

geologists look out. “Some natives carried by Kotzebue to Kamtschatka

collected stones to take back to their country.”

Found no bottom at 7200 feet, and 2200 yards from shore of Keeling

Island, a coral isle.

His theory of the formation of coral isles by the subsidence of the

land appears probable. He concludes that “the great continents are,

for the most part, rising areas; and ... the central parts of the great

oceans are sinking areas.”

Not a _private_ person on the island of Ascension; the inhabitants are

paid and victualled by the British government. Springs, cisterns, etc.,

are managed by the same. “Indeed, the whole island may be compared to

a huge ship kept in first-rate order.”

_Vide_ “Circumnavigation of Globe up to Cook.”

_Vide_ “Voyages Round the World since Cook.”

* * * * *

The author of the article on Orchids in the _Eclectic_ says that “a

single plant produced three different flowers of genera previously

supposed to be quite distinct.”

Saw the first wild rose to-day on the west side of the railroad

causeway. The whiteweed has suddenly appeared, and the clover gives

whole fields a rich and florid appearance,—the rich red and the

sweet-scented white. The fields are blushing with the red species as

the western sky at evening. The blue-eyed grass, well named, looks up

to heaven. And the yarrow, with its persistent dry stalks and heads,

is now ready to blossom again. The dry stems and heads of last year’s

tansy stand high above the new green leaves.

I sit in the shade of the pines to hear a wood thrush at noon. The

ground smells of dry leaves; the heat is oppressive. The bird begins

on a low strain, _i. e._ it first delivers a strain on a lower key,

then a moment after another a little higher, then another still varied

from the others,—no two successive strains alike, but either ascending

or descending. He confines himself to his few notes, in which he is

unrivalled, as if his kind had learned this and no more anciently.

I perceive, as formerly, a white froth dripping from the pitch pines,

just at the base of the new shoots. It has no taste. The pollywogs in

the pond are now full-tailed. The hickory leaves are blackened by a

recent frost, which reminds me that this is near their northern limit.

It is remarkable the rapidity with which the grass grows. The 25th of

May I walked to the hills in Wayland, and when I returned across lots

do not remember that I had much occasion to think of the grass, or to

go round any fields to avoid treading on it; but just a week afterward,

at Worcester, it was high and waving in the fields, and I was to

some extent confined to the road; and the same was the case here.

Apparently in one month you get from fields which you can cross without

hesitation, to haying time. It has grown you hardly know when, be the

weather what it may, sunshine or storm. I start up a solitary woodcock

in the shade, in some copse; goes off with a startled, rattling,

hurried note.

After walking by night several times I now walk by day, but I am not

aware of any crowning advantage in it. I see small objects better, but

it does not enlighten me any. The day is more trivial.

What a careful gardener Nature is! She does not let the sun come out

suddenly with all his intensity after rain and cloudy weather, but

graduates the change to suit the tenderness of plants.

I see the tall crowfoot now in the meadows (_Ranunculus acris_), with

a smooth stem. I do not notice the _bulbosus_, which was so common a

fortnight ago. The rose-colored flowers of the _Kalmia angustifolia_,

lambkill, just opened and opening. The _Convallaria bifolia_ growing

stale in the woods. The _Hieracium venosum_, veiny-leaved hawkweed,

with its yellow blossoms in the woodland path. The _Hypoxis erecta_,

yellow Bethlehem-star, where there is a thick, wiry grass in open

paths; should be called yellow-eyed grass, methinks. The _Pyrola

asarifolia_, with its pagoda-like stem of flowers, _i. e_. broad-leaved

wintergreen. The _Trientalis Americana_, like last, in the woods, with

its star-like white flower and pointed whorled leaves. The prunella too

is in blossom, and the rather delicate _Thesium umbellatum_, a white

flower. The Solomon’s-seal, with a greenish drooping raceme of flowers

at the top, I do not identify.

I notice to-day the same remarkable bushy growth on the fir (in

Wheildon’s garden) that I have noticed on the pines and cedars. The

leaves are not so thickly set and are much stiffer.

I find that I postpone all actual intercourse with my friends to

a certain real intercourse which takes place commonly when we are

actually at a distance from one another.

_June 22. Sunday._ Is the shrub with yellow blossoms which I found last

week near the Lincoln road while surveying for E. Hosmer and thought to

be _Xylosteum ciliatum_, or fly honeysuckle, the same with the yellow

diervilla which I find in Laurel Glen to-day?

The birch is the surveyor’s tree. It makes the best stakes to look

at through the sights of a compass, except when there is snow on the

ground. Their white bark was not made in vain. In surveying wood-lots

I have frequent occasion to say this is what they were made for.

I see that Dugan has trimmed off and peeled the limbs of the willows on

the Turnpike to sell at the Acton powder-mill. I believe they get eight

dollars a cord for this wood.

I. Hapgood of Acton got me last Friday to compare the level of

his cellar-bottom with his garden, for, as he says, when Robbins &

Wetherbee keep the water of Nashoba Brook back so as to flood his

garden, it comes into his cellar. I found that part of the garden five

inches lower than the cellar-bottom. Men are affected in various ways

by the actions of others. If a man far away builds a dam, I have water

in my cellar. He said that the water was sometimes a foot deep in the

garden.

We are enabled to criticise others only when we are different from, and

in a given particular superior to, them ourselves. By our aloofness

from men and their affairs we are enabled to overlook and criticise

them. There are but few men who stand on the hills by the roadside.

I am sane only when I have risen above my common sense, when I do

not take the foolish view of things which is commonly taken, when

I do not live for the low ends for which men commonly live. Wisdom

is not common. To what purpose have I senses, if I am thus absorbed

in affairs? My pulse must beat with Nature. After a hard day’s work

without a thought, turning my very brain into a mere tool, only in

the quiet of evening do I so far recover my senses as to hear the

cricket, which in fact has been chirping all day. In my better hours I

am conscious of the influx of a serene and unquestionable wisdom which

partly unfits, and if I yielded to it more rememberingly would wholly

unfit me, for what is called the active business of life, for that

furnishes nothing on which the eye of reason can rest. What is that

other kind of life to which I am thus continually allured? which alone

I love? Is it a life for this world? Can a man feed and clothe himself

gloriously who keeps only the truth steadily before him? who calls in

no evil to his aid? Are there duties which necessarily interfere with

the serene perception of truth? Are our serene moments mere foretastes

of heaven,—joys gratuitously vouchsafed to us as a consolation,—or

simply a transient realization of what might be the whole tenor of our

lives?

To be calm, to be serene! There is the calmness of the lake when there

is not a breath of wind; there is the calmness of a stagnant ditch.

So is it with us. Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily,

as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some

unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like

a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are

revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by us and is reflected in our

deeps. Such clarity! obtained by such pure means! by simple living, by

honesty of purpose. We live and rejoice. I awoke into a music which no

one about me heard. Whom shall I thank for it? The luxury of wisdom!

the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things? I

feel my Maker blessing me. To the sane man the world is a musical

instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure.

As I walk the railroad causeway, I notice that the fields and meadows

have acquired various tinges as the season advances, the sun gradually

using all his paints. There is the rosaceous evening red tinge of red

clover,—like an evening sky gone down upon the grass,—the whiteweed

tinge, the white clover tinge, which reminds me how sweet it smells.

The tall buttercup stars the meadow on another side, telling of the

wealth of dairies. The blue-eyed grass, so beautiful near at hand,

imparts a kind of slate or clay blue tinge to the meads.

It is hot noon. The white pines are covered with froth at the base

of the new shoots, as I noticed the pitch pines were a week ago; as

if they perspired. I am threading an open pitch and white pine wood,

easily traversed, where the pine-needles redden all the ground, which

is as smooth as a carpet. Still the blackberries love to creep over

this floor, for it is not many years since this was a blackberry-field.

And I hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood thrushes

whetting their steel-like notes. Such keen singers! It takes a fiery

heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper

their strains! Always they are either rising or falling to a new

strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again!

saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one

another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush

discharges his song. It is delivered like a bolas, or a piece of

jingling steel.

The domestic ox has his horns tipped with brass. This and his shoes

are the badges of servitude which he wears; as if he would soon get to

jacket and trousers. I am singularly affected when I look over a herd

of reclining oxen in their pasture, and find that every one has these

brazen balls on his horns. They are partly humanized so. It is not pure

brute; there is art added. Where are these balls sold? Who is their

maker? The bull has a ring in his nose.

The _Lysimachia quadrifolia_ exhibits its small yellow blossoms now in

the wood-path. Butter-and-eggs has blossomed. The _Uvularia vulgaris_,

or bladderwort, a yellow pea-like flower, has blossomed in stagnant

pools.

_June 23._ It is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and the booming

of nighthawks flying over high open fields in the woods. They fly like

butterflies, not to avoid birds of prey but, apparently, to secure

their own insect prey. There is a particular part of the railroad just

below the shanty where they may be heard and seen in greatest numbers.

But often you must look a long while before you can detect the mote in

the sky from which the note proceeds.

The common cinquefoil (_Potentilla simplex_) greets me with its

simple and unobtrusive yellow flower in the grass. The _P. argentea_,

hoary cinquefoil, also is now in blossom. _P. sarmentosa_, running

cinquefoil, we had common enough in the spring.

_June 26. Thursday._ The slight reddish-topped grass (red-top?) now

gives a reddish tinge to some fields, like sorrel.

Visited a menagerie this afternoon. I am always surprised to see the

same spots and stripes on wild beasts from Africa and Asia and also

from South America,—on the Brazilian tiger and the African leopard,—and

their general similarity. All these wild animals—lions, tigers,

chetas, leopards, etc.—have one hue,—tawny and commonly spotted or

striped,—what you may call pard-color, a color and marking which I had

not associated with America. These are wild beasts. What constitutes

the difference between a wild beast and a tame one? How much more human

the one than the other! Growling, scratching, roaring, with whatever

beauty and gracefulness, still untamable, this royal Bengal tiger or

this leopard. They have the character and the importance of another

order of men. The majestic lion, the king of beasts,—he must retain his

title.

I was struck by the gem-like, changeable, greenish reflections from

the eyes of the grizzly bear, so glassy that you never saw the surface

of the eye. They [were] quite demonic. Its claws, though extremely

large and long, look weak and made for digging or pawing the earth and

leaves. It is unavoidable, the idea of transmigration; not merely a

fancy of the poets, but an instinct of the race.

_June 29._ There is a great deal of white clover this year. In many

fields where there has been no clover seed sown for many years at

least, it is more abundant than the red, and the heads are nearly as

large. Also pastures which are close cropped, and where I think there

was little or no clover last year, are spotted white with a humbler

growth. And everywhere, by roadsides, garden borders, etc., even

where the sward is trodden hard, the small white heads on short stems

are sprinkled everywhere. As this is the season for the swarming of

bees, and this clover is very attractive to them, it is probably the

more difficult to secure them; at any rate it is the more important

to secure their services now that they can make honey so fast. It is

an interesting inquiry why this year is so favorable to the growth of

clover!

I am interested to observe how old-country methods of farming resources

are introduced among us. The Irish laborer, for instance, seeing that

his employer is contemplating some agricultural enterprise, as ditching

or fencing, suggests some old-country mode with [which] he has been

familiar from a boy, which is often found to be cheaper as well as more

ornamental than the common; and Patrick is allowed to accomplish the

object his own way, and for once exhibits some skill and has not to

be shown, but, working with a will as well as with pride, does better

than ever in the old country. Even the Irishman exhibits what might be

mistaken for a Yankee knack, exercising a merely inbred skill derived

from the long teachings and practice of his ancestors.

I saw an Irishman building a bank of sod where his employer had

contemplated building a bank wall, piling up very neatly and solidly

with his spade and a line the sods taken from the rear, and coping the

face at a very small angle from the perpendicular, intermingling the

sods with bushes as they came to hand, which would grow and strengthen

the whole. It was much more agreeable to the eye, as well as less

expensive, than stone would have been, and he thought that it would be

equally effective as a fence and no less durable. But it is true only

experience will show when the same practice may be followed in this

climate and in Ireland,—whether our atmosphere is not too dry to admit

of it. At any rate it was wise in the farmer thus to avail himself of

any peculiar experience which his hired laborer possessed. That was

what he _should_ buy.

Also I noticed the other day where one who raises seeds, when his

ropes and poles failed, had used ropes twisted of straw to support

his plants,—a resource probably suggested and supplied by his foreign

laborers. It is only remarkable that so few improvements or resources

are or are to be adopted from the Old World.

I look down on rays of prunella by the roadsides now. The panicled or

privet andromeda with its fruit-like white flowers. Swamp-pink I see

for the first time this season.

The tree-primrose (scabish)[212] (_Œnother biennais_), a rather coarse

yellow flower with a long tubular calyx, naturalized extensively in

Europe. The clasping bellflower (_Campanula perfoliata_, from the

heart-shaped leaves clasping the stalk), an interesting flower.

The _Convolvulus sepium_, large bindweed, make a fresh morning

impression as of dews and purity. The adder’s-tongue arethusa, a

delicate pink flower.

How different is day from day! Yesterday the air was filled with a

thick fog-like haze, so that the sun did not once shine with ardor,

but everything was so tempered under this thin veil that it was a

luxury merely to be outdoors,—you were less out for it. The shadows of

the apple trees even early in the afternoon were remarkably distinct.

The landscape wore a classical smoothness. Every object was as in [a]

picture with a glass over it. I saw some hills on this side the river,

looking from Conantum, on which, the grass being of a yellow tinge,

though the sun did not shine out on them, they had the appearance

of being shone upon peculiarly. It was merely an unusual yellow tint

of the grass. The mere surface of water was an object for the eye to

linger on.

The panicled cornel, a low shrub, in blossom by wall-sides now.

I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its _hypæthral_

character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which

are open to the heavens above, _under the ether_. I thought that it had

little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have

been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors.

It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used

any phrases implying that I lived in a house or led a _domestic_ life.

I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of

the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypæthral or

unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to

all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.

The potatoes are beginning to blossom.

Riding to survey a wood-lot yesterday, I observed that a dog

accompanied the wagon. Having tied the horse at the last house and

entered the woods, I saw no more of the dog while there; but when

riding back to the village, I saw the dog again running by the wagon,

and in answer to my inquiry was told that the horse and wagon were

hired and that the dog always accompanied the horse. I queried whether

it might happen that a dog would accompany the wagon if a strange horse

were put into it; whether he would ever attach himself to an inanimate

object. Methinks the driver, though a stranger, as it were added

intellect to the mere animality of the horse, and the dog, not making

very nice distinctions, yielded respect to the horse and equipage as if

it were human. If the horse were to trot off alone without a wagon or

driver, I think it doubtful if the dog would follow; if with the wagon,

then the chances of his following would be increased; but if with a

driver, though a stranger, I have found by experience that he would

follow.

At a distance in the meadow I hear still, at long intervals, the

hurried commencement of the bobolink’s strain, the bird just dashing

into song, which is as suddenly checked, as it were, by the warder

of the seasons, and the strain is left incomplete forever. Like human

beings they are inspired to sing only for a short season.[213]

That little roadside pea-like-blossomed blue flower[214] is interesting

to me. The mulleins are just blossoming.

The voice of the crickets, heard at noon from deep in the grass, allies

day to night. It is unaffected by sun and moon. It is a midnight sound

heard at noon, a midday sound heard at midnight.

I observed some mulleins growing on the western slope of the sandy

railroad embankment, in as warm a place as can easily be found, where

the heat was reflected from the sand oppressively at 3 o’clock P. M.

this hot day; yet the green and living leaves felt rather cool than

otherwise to the hand, but the dead ones at the root were quite warm.

The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest

exposure, as if it kept a cellar below, from which cooling liquors were

drawn up.

Yarrow is now in full bloom, and elder, and a small many-headed white

daisy like a small whiteweed. The epilobium, too, is out.

The night-warbler sings the same strain at noon. The song sparrow still

occasionally reminds me of spring.

I observe that the high water in the ponds, which have been rising

for a year, has killed most of the pitch pines and alders which it had

planted and merely watered at its edge during the years of dryness. But

now it comes to undo its own work.

How awful is the least unquestionable meanness, when we cannot deny

that we have been guilty of it. There seem to be no bounds to our

unworthiness.

_June 30._ Haying has commenced. I see the farmers in distant fields

cocking their hay now at six o’clock. The day has been so oppressively

warm that some workmen have lain by at noon, and the haymakers are

mowing now in the early twilight.

The blue flag (_Iris versicolor_) enlivens the meadow. The lark sings

at sundown off in the meadow. It is a note which belongs to a New

England summer evening. Though so late, I hear the summer hum of a bee

in the grass, as I am on my way to the river behind Hubbard’s to bathe.

After hoeing in a dusty garden all this warm afternoon,—so warm that

the baker says he never knew the like and expects to find his horses

dead in the stable when he gets home,—it is very grateful to wend one’s

way at evening to some pure and cool stream and bathe therein.

The cranberry is now in blossom. Their fresh shoots have run a foot or

two over the surface.

I have noticed an abundance of poison sumach this season. It is now in

blossom. In some instances it has the size and form of a healthy peach

tree.

The cuckoo is faintly heard from a neighboring grove. Now that it

is beginning to be dark, as I am crossing a pasture I hear a happy,

cricket-like, shrill little lay from a sparrow, either in the grass

or else on that distant tree, as if it were the vibrations of a

watch-spring; its vespers. The tree-primrose, which was so abundant in

one field last Saturday, is now all gone. The cattle on Bear Garden

Hill, seen through the twilight, look monstrously large. I find

abounding in the meadows the adder’s-tongue arethusa and occasionally

with it the _Cymbidium tuberosum_ of the same tint. The obtuse galium

is a delicate vine-like plant with a minute white blossom in the same

places. The St. John’s-wort has blossomed. The (_Œnothera pumila_, or

dwarf tree-primrose, a neat yellow flower, abounds in the meadows;

which the careless would mistake at a distance for buttercups. The

white buds of the clethra (alder-leaved) rise above their recent

shoots. The narrow-leaved cotton-grass spots the meadow with white,

seeming like loose down, its stems are so slight. The carrot growing

wild which I observed by the railroad is now blossoming, with its

dishing blossom. I found by the railroad, a quarter of a mile from

the road, some common garden catch-fly, the pink flower, growing

wild. Angelica is now in blossom, with its large umbels. Swamp rose,

fugacious-petalled. The prinos, or winterberry, budded, with white

clustered berry-like flower-buds, is a pretty contrast to itself in

the winter,—wax-like. While bathing I plucked the common floating

plant like a small yellow lily, the yellow water ranunculus (_R.

multifidus_). What I suppose is the _Aster miser_, small-flowered

aster, like a small many-headed whiteweed, has now for a week been in

bloom; a humble weed, but one of the earliest of the asters.[215] The

umbelled thesium, a simple white flower, on the edge of the woods.

_Erysimum officinale_, hedge mustard, with its yellow flowers.

I first observed about ten days ago that the fresh shoots of the fir

balsam (_Abies balsamifera_), found under the tree wilted, or plucked

and kept in the pocket or in the house a few days, emit the fragrance

of strawberries, only it is somewhat more aromatic and spicy. It was to

me a very remarkable fragrance to be emitted by a pine. A very rich,

delicious, aromatic, spicy fragrance, which if the fresh and living

shoots emitted, they would be still more to be sought after.

Saw a brood of young partridges yesterday, a little larger than robins.

VI

JULY, 1851

(ÆT. 33-34)

_July 2._ It is a fresh, cool summer morning. From the road at N.

Barrett’s, on my way to P. Blood’s at 8.30 A. M., the Great Meadows

have a slight bluish misty tinge in part; elsewhere a sort of hoary

sheen like a fine downiness, inconceivably fine and silvery far

away,—the light reflected from the grass blades, a sea of grass hoary

with light, the counterpart of the frost in spring. As yet no mower

has profaned it; scarcely a footstep since the waters left it. Miles of

waving grass adorning the surface of the earth.

Last night, a sultry night which compelled to leave all windows open,

I heard two travellers talking aloud, was roused out of my sleep by

their loud, day-like, and somewhat unearthly discourse at perchance

one o’clock. From the country, whiling away the night with loud

discourse. I heard the words “Theodore Parker” and “Wendell Phillips”

loudly spoken, and so did half a dozen of my neighbors, who also were

awakened. Such is fame. It affected [me] like Dante talking of the men

of this world in the infernal regions. If the travellers had called my

own name I should equally have thought it an unearthly personage which

it would take me some hours into daylight to realize. O traveller,

haven’t you got any further than that? My genius hinted before I fairly

awoke, “Improve your time.” What is the night that a traveller’s voice

should sound so hollow in it? that a man speaking aloud in the night,

speaking in regions under the earth, should utter the words “Theodore

Parker”?

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such.

His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward

——; it is the history of every one of us. I am interested in those that

travel in the night.

It takes but little distance to make the hills and even the meadows

look blue to-day. That principle which gives the air an azure color is

more abundant.

To-day the milkweed is blossoming. Some of the raspberries are ripe,

the most innocent and simple of fruits, the purest and most ethereal.

Cherries are ripe. Strawberries in the gardens have passed their prime.

Many large trees, especially elms, about a house are a surer indication

of old family distinction and worth than any evidence of wealth. Any

evidence of care bestowed on these trees secures the traveller’s

respect as for a nobler husbandry than the raising of corn and

potatoes.

I passed a regular country dooryard this forenoon, the unpainted

one-story house, long and low with projecting stoop, a deep grass-plot

unfenced for yard, hens and chickens scratching amid the chip dirt

about the door,—this last the main feature, relics of wood-piles, sites

of the wooden towers.

The nightshade has bloomed and the prinos, or winterberry.

_July 5._ The vetch-like flower by the Marlborough road, the _Tephrosia

Virginica_, is in blossom, with mixed red and yellowish blossoms.

Also the white fine-flowered Jersey tea (_Ceanothus Americana_), and,

by the side of wood-paths, the humble cow-wheat (_Apocynum_, etc.).

The blue flower by the roadside, slender but pretty spike, is the

pale lobelia (_L. pallida_). The reddish blossoms of the umbelled

wintergreen (_Pyrola umbellata_) are now in perfection and are

exceedingly beautiful. Also the white sweet-scented flowers of the _P.

rotundifolia_.

It is a remarkably cool, clear, breezy atmosphere to-day. One would

say there were fewer flowers just now than there have been and are to

be; _i. e._ we do not look so much for the blossoming of new flowers.

The earliest small fruits are just beginning to be ripe,—the raspberry,

thimble-berry, blueberry, etc. We have no longer the blossoms of those

which must ripen their fruits in early autumn.

I am interested in those fields in the woods where the potato is

cultivated, growing in the light, dry, sandy soil, free from weeds; now

in blossom, the slight vine not crowded in the hill. I think they do

not promise many potatoes, though mealy and wholesome like nuts. Many

fields have now received their last hoeing, and the farmers’ work seems

to be soon over with them. What a pleasant interview he must have had

with them! What a liberal education with these professors! Better than

a university. It is pleasing to consider man’s cultivating this plant

thus assiduously, without reference to any crop it may yield him, as if

he were to cultivate johnswort in like manner. What influences does he

receive from this long intercourse.

The flowers of the umbelled pyrola, or common wintergreen, are

really very handsome now, dangling red from their little umbels like

jewelry,—especially the unexpanded buds with their red calyx-leaves

against the white globe of petals.

There is a handsome wood-path on the east side of White Pond. The

shadows of the pine stems and branches falling across the path, which

is perfectly red with pine-needles, make a very handsome carpet. Here

is a small road running north and south along the edge of the wood,

which would be a good place to walk by moonlight.

The calamint grows by the lane beyond Seven-Star Lane; now in blossom.

As we come over Hubbard’s Bridge between 5 and 6 P. M., the sun

getting low, a cool wind blowing up the valley, we sit awhile on the

rails which are destined for the new railing. The light on the Indian

hill is very soft and glorious, giving the idea of the most wonderful

fertility. The most barren hills are gilded like waving grain-fields.

What a paradise to sail by! The cliffs and woods up the stream are

nearer and have more shadow and actuality about them. This retired

bridge is a favorite spot with me. I have witnessed many a fair sunset

from it.

_July 6. Sunday._ I walked by night last moon, and saw its disk

reflected in Walden Pond, the broken disk, now here, now there, a

pure and memorable flame unearthly bright, like a cucullo[216] of a

water-bug. Ah! but that first faint tinge of moonlight on the gap!

(seen some time ago),[217]—a silvery light from the east before day had

departed in the west. What an immeasurable interval there is between

the first tinge of moonlight which we detect, lighting with mysterious,

silvery, poetic light the western slopes, like a paler grass, and the

last wave of daylight on the eastern slopes! It is wonderful how our

senses ever span so vast an interval, how from being aware of the one

we become aware of the other. And now the night wind blows,—from where?

What gave it birth? It suggests an interval equal to that between

the most distant periods recorded in history. The silver age is not

more distant from the golden than moonlight is from sunlight. I am

looking into the west, where the red clouds still indicate the course

of departing day. I turn and see the silent, spiritual, contemplative

moonlight shedding the softest imaginable light on the western slopes

of the hills, as if, after a thousand years of polishing, their

surfaces were just beginning to be bright,—a pale whitish lustre.

Already the crickets chirp to the moon a different strain, and the

night wind rustles the leaves of the wood. A different dynasty has

commenced. Yet moonlight, like daylight, is more valuable for what

it suggests than for what it actually is. It is a long past season of

which I dream. And the reason is perchance because it is a more sacred

and glorious season, to which I instantly refer all glorious actions in

past time. Let a nobler landscape present itself, let a purer air blow,

and I locate all the worthies of the world. Ah, there is the mysterious

light which for some hours has illustrated Asia and the scene of

Alexander’s victories, now at length, after two or three hours spent

in surmounting the billows of the Atlantic, come to shine on America.

There, on that illustrated sand-bank, was revealed an antiquity beside

which Nineveh is young. Such a light as sufficed for the earliest ages.

From what star has it arrived on this planet? Yet even at midday I

see the full moon shining in the sky. What if, in some vales, only its

light is reflected? What if there are some spirits which walk in its

light alone still? who separate the moonlight from the sunlight, and

are shined on by the former only? I passed from dynasty to dynasty,

from one age of the world to another age of the world, from Jove

perchance back to Saturn. What river of Lethe was there to run between?

I bade farewell to that light setting in the west and turned to salute

the new light rising in the east.

There is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least

dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn

you. Methinks I enjoy that advantage to an unusual extent. There is

many a coarsely well-meaning fellow, who knows only the skin of me, who

addresses me familiarly by my Christian name. I get the whole good of

him and lose nothing myself. There is “Sam,” the jailer,—whom I never

call Sam, however,—who exclaimed last evening: “Thoreau, are you going

up the street pretty soon? Well, just take a couple of these handbills

along and drop one in at Hoar’s piazza and one at Holbrook’s, and

I’ll do as much for you another time.” I am not above being used, aye

abused, sometimes.

The red clover heads are now turned black. They no longer impart that

rosaceous tinge to the meadows and fertile fields. It is but a short

time that their rich bloom lasts. The white is black or withering

also. Whiteweed still looks white in the fields. Blue-eyed grass is

now rarely seen. The grass in the fields and meadows is not so fresh

and fair as it was a fortnight ago. It is dryer and riper and ready for

the mowers. Now June is past. June is the month for grass and flowers.

Now grass is turning to hay, and flowers to fruits. Already I gather

ripe blueberries on the hills. The red-topped grass is in its prime,

tingeing the fields with red.

It is a free, flowing wind, with wet clouds in the sky, though the

sun shines. The distant hills look unusually near in this atmosphere.

Acton meeting-houses seen to stand on the side of some hills, Nagog or

Nashoba, beyond, as never before. Nobscot looks like a high pasture in

the sunlight not far off. From time to time I hear a few drops of rain

falling on the leaves, but none is felt and the sun does not cease to

shine. All serious showers go round me and get out of my way.

The clasping harebell is certainly a pretty flower, and so is the

tephrosia. The poke has blossomed and the indigo-weed.

_July 7._ The intimations of the night are divine, methinks. Men

might meet in the morning and report the news of the night,—what

divine suggestions have been made to them. I find that I carry with

me into the day often some such hint derived from the gods,—such

impulses to purity, to heroism, to literary effort even, as are never

day-born.[218]

One of those mornings which usher in no day, but rather an endless

morning, a protracted auroral season, for clouds prolong the twilight

the livelong day.

And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of the flowers,

so is there in the singing of the birds. The golden robin is rarely

heard, and the bobolink, etc.

I rejoice when in a dream I have loved virtue and nobleness.

Where is Grecian history? It is when in the morning I recall the

intimations of the night.

* * * * *

The moon is now more than half full. When I come through the village

at 10 o’clock this cold night, cold as in May, the heavy shadows of

the elms covering the ground with their rich tracery impress me as

if men had got so much more than they had bargained for, not only

trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their

shadows. At night they lie along the earth. They tower, they arch,

they droop over the streets like chandeliers of darkness. In my walk

the other afternoon, I saw the sun shining into the depths of a thick

pine wood, checkering the ground like moonlight and illuminating the

lichen-covered bark of a large white pine, from which it was reflected

through the surrounding thicket as from another sun. This was so deep

in the woods that you would have said no sun could penetrate thither.

I have been to-night with Anthony Wright to look through Perez Blood’s

telescope a second time. A dozen of Blood’s neighbors were swept along

in the stream of our curiosity. One who lived half a mile this side

said that Blood had been down that way within a day or two with his

terrestrial, or day, glass, looking into the eastern horizon [at]

the hills of Billerica, Burlington, and Woburn. I was amused to see

what sort of respect this man with a telescope had obtained from his

neighbors, something akin to that which savages award to civilized men,

though in this case the interval between the parties was very slight.

Mr. Blood, with his skull-cap on, his short figure, his north European

figure, made me think of Tycho Brahe. He did not invite us into his

house this cool evening,—men nor women,—nor did he ever before to my

knowledge. I am still contented to see the stars with my naked eye. Mr.

Wright asked him what his instrument cost. He answered, “Well, that

is something I don’t like to tell.” (Stuttering or hesitating in his

speech a little as usual.) “It is a very proper question, however.”

“Yes,” said I, “and you think that you have given a very proper

answer.”

Returning, my companion, Wright, the sexton, told me how dusty he

found it digging a grave that afternoon,—for one who had been a pupil

of mine. For two feet, he said, notwithstanding the rain, he found the

soil as dry as ashes.

With a certain wariness, but not without a slight shudder at the

danger oftentimes, I perceive how near I had come to admitting into

my mind the details of some trivial affair, as a case at court; and

I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds

with such rubbish,—to permit idle rumors, tales, incidents, even of an

insignificant kind, to intrude upon what should be the sacred ground of

the thoughts. Shall the temple of our thought be a public arena where

the most trivial affairs of the market and the gossip of the tea-table

is discussed,—a dusty, noisy, trivial place? Or shall it be a quarter

of heaven itself, a place consecrated to the service of the gods, a

hypæthral temple? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts

which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my mind with

the most insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate.

Such is, for the most part, the news,—in newspapers and conversation.

It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect. Think

of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into

the mind, to stalk profanely through its very _sanctum sanctorum_

for an hour, aye, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of your

mind’s inmost apartment, as if for a moment the dust of the street

had occupied you, aye, the very street itself, with all its travel,

passed through your very mind of minds, your thoughts’ shrine, with

all its filth and bustle! Would it not be an intellectual suicide? By

all manner of boards and traps, threatening the extreme penalty of the

divine law, excluding trespassers from these grounds, it behooves us

to preserve the purity and sanctity of the mind.[219] It is so hard

to forget what it is worse than useless to remember. If I am to be a

channel or thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain springs,

and not the town sewers,—the Parnassian streams. There is inspiration,

the divine gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from

the courts of heaven; there is the profane and stale revelation of the

bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both

communications. Only the character of the individual determines to

which source chiefly it shall be open and to which closed. I believe

that the mind can be profaned by the habit of attending to trivial

things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. They

shall be dusty as stones in the street. Our very minds shall be paved

and macadamized, as it were, their foundation broken into fragments

for the wheels of travel to roll over. If we have thus desecrated

ourselves, the remedy will be, by circumspection and wariness, by our

aspiration and devotion, to consecrate ourselves, to make a fane of the

mind. I think that we should treat our minds as innocent and ingenuous

children whose guardians we are,—be careful what objects and what

subjects we thrust on their attention. Even the facts of science may

dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each

morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living

truth. Every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and

tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii,

evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning

which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them![220]

Routine, conventionality, manners, etc., etc.,—how insensibly an undue

attention to these dissipates and impoverishes the mind, robs it of its

simplicity and strength, emasculates it!

Knowledge does not come to us by details but by _lieferungs_ from the

gods. What else is it to wash and purify ourselves? Conventionalities

are as bad as impurities.[221] Only thought which is expressed by

the mind in repose—as it were, lying on its back and contemplating

the heavens—is adequately and fully expressed. What are sidelong,

transient, passing half-views? The writer expressing his thought must

be as well seated as the astronomer contemplating the heavens; he must

not occupy a constrained position. The facts, the experience, we are

well poised upon! which secures our whole attention!

The senses of children are unprofaned. Their whole body is one sense;

they take a physical pleasure in riding on a rail, they love to

teeter. So does the unviolated, the unsophisticated mind derive an

inexpressible pleasure from the simplest exercise of thoughts.

I can express adequately only the thought which I _love_ to express.

All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy

concentrated in that. Be ever so little distracted, your thoughts

so little confused, your engagements so few, your attention so free,

your existence so mundane, that in all places and in all hours you can

hear the sound of crickets in those seasons when they are to be heard.

It is a mark of serenity and health of mind when a person hears this

sound much,—in streets of cities as well as in fields. Some ears never

hear this sound; are called deaf. Is it not because they have so long

attended to other sounds?

_July 8. Tuesday._ Walked along the Clamshell bank after sundown. A

cloudy sky. The heads of the grass in the pasture behind Dennis’s have

a reddish cast, but another grass, with a lighter-colored stem and

leaves, on the higher parts of the field gives a yellowish tinge to

those parts, as if they reflected a misty sunlight. Even much later in

the night these light spots were distinguishable. I am struck by the

cool, juicy, pickled-cucumber green of the potato-fields now. How lusty

these vines look! The pasture naturally exhibits at this season no such

living green as the cultivated fields. I perceive that flower of the

lowlands now, with a peculiar leaf and conspicuous white umbels.[222]

[Illustration]

Here are mulleins covering a field (the Clamshell field) where three

years [ago] were none noticeable, but a smooth uninterrupted pasture

sod. Two years ago it was plowed for the first time for many years,

and millet and corn and potatoes planted, and now _where the millet

grew_ these mulleins have sprung up. Who can write the history of

these fields? The millet does not perpetuate itself, but the few seeds

of the mullein, which perchance were brought here with it, are still

multiplying the race.

The thick heads of the yellow dock warn me of the lapse of time.

Here are some rich rye-fields waving over all the land, their heads

nodding in the evening breeze with an apparently alternating motion;

_i. e._ they do not all bend at once by ranks, but separately, and

hence this agreeable alternation. How rich a sight this cereal fruit,

now yellow for the cradle,—_flavus_! It is an impenetrable phalanx.

I walk for half a mile beside these Macedonians, looking in vain for

an opening. There is no Arnold Winkelried to gather these spear-heads

upon his breast and make an opening for me. This is food for man.

The earth labors not in vain; it is bearing its burden. The yellow,

waving, rustling rye extends far up and over the hills on either side,

a kind of pinafore to nature, leaving only a narrow and dark passage

at the bottom of a deep ravine. How rankly it has grown! How it hastes

to maturity! I discover that there is such a goddess as Ceres. These

long grain-fields which you must respect,—must go round,—occupying

the ground like an army. The small trees and shrubs seen dimly in

its midst are overwhelmed by the grain as by an inundation. They are

seen only as indistinct forms of bushes and green leaves mixed with

the yellow stalks. There are certain crops which give me the idea

of bounty, of the _Alma Natura_.[223] They are the grains. Potatoes

do not so fill the lap of earth. This rye excludes everything else

and takes possession of the soil. The farmer says, “Next year I will

raise a crop of rye;” and he proceeds to clear away the brush, and

either plows it, or, if it is too uneven or stony, burns and harrows

it only, and scatters the seed with faith. And all winter the earth

keeps his secret,—unless it did leak out somewhat in the fall,—and in

the spring this early green on the hillsides betrays him. When I see

this luxuriant crop spreading far and wide in spite of rock and bushes

and unevenness of ground, I cannot help thinking that it must have

been unexpected by the farmer himself, and regarded by him as a lucky

accident for which to thank fortune. This, to reward a transient faith,

the gods had given. As if he must have forgotten that he did it, until

he saw the waving grain inviting his sickle.

_July 9._ When I got out of the cars at Porter’s, Cambridge, this

morning, I was pleased to see the handsome blue flowers of the succory

or endive (_Cichorium Intybus_), which reminded me that within the hour

I had been whirled into a new botanical region. They must be extremely

rare, if they occur at all, in Concord. This weed is handsomer than

most garden flowers. Saw there also the _Cucubalus Behen_, or bladder

campion, also the autumnal dandelion (_Apargia autumnalis_).

Visited the Observatory. Bond said they were cataloguing the stars

at Washington (?), or trying to. They do not at Cambridge; of no

use with their force. Have not force enough now to make mag[netic]

obs[ervations]. When I asked if an observer with the small telescope

could find employment, he said, Oh yes, there was employment enough for

observation with the naked eye, observing the changes in the brilliancy

of stars, etc., etc., if they could only get some good observers. One

is glad to hear that the naked eye still retains some importance in the

estimation of astronomers.

Coming out of town,—willingly as usual,—when I saw that reach of

Charles River just above the depot, the fair, still water this cloudy

evening suggesting the way to eternal peace and beauty, whence it

flows, the placid, lake-like fresh water, so unlike the salt brine,

affected me not a little. I was reminded of the way in which Wordsworth

so coldly speaks of some natural visions or scenes “giving him

pleasure.” This is perhaps the first vision of elysium on this route

from Boston. And just then I saw an encampment of Penobscots, their

wigwams appearing above the railroad fence, they, too, looking up the

river as they sat on the ground, and enjoying the scene. What can be

more impressive than to look up a noble river just at evening,—one,

perchance, which you have never explored,—and behold its placid waters,

reflecting the woods and sky, lapsing inaudibly toward the ocean; to

behold as a lake, but know it as a river, tempting the beholder to

explore it and his own destiny at once? Haunt of waterfowl. This was

above the factories,—all that I saw. That water could never have flowed

under a factory. How _then_ could it have reflected the sky?

_July 10._ A gorgeous sunset after rain, with horizontal bars of

clouds, red sashes to the western window, barry clouds hanging like

a curtain over the window of the west, damask. First there is a

low arch of the storm clouds in the west, under which is seen the

clearer, fairer, serener sky and more distant sunset clouds, and under

all, on the horizon’s edge, heavier, massive dark clouds, not to be

distinguished from the mountains. How many times I have seen this kind

of sunset,—the most gorgeous sight in nature! From the hill behind

Minott’s I see the birds flying against this red sky, the sun having

set; one looks like a bat. Now between two stupendous mountains of the

low stratum under the evening red, clothed in slightly rosaceous amber

light, through a magnificent gorge, far, far away, as perchance may

occur in pictures of the Spanish coast viewed from the Mediterranean,

I see a city, the eternal city of the west, the phantom city, in whose

streets no traveller has trod, over whose pavements the horses of the

sun have already hurried, some Salamanca of the imagination. But it

lasts only for a moment, for now the changing light has wrought such

changes in it that I see the resemblance no longer.

A softer amber sky than in any picture. The swallows are improving

this short day, twittering as they fly, and the huckleberry-bird[224]

repeats his jingling strain, and the song sparrow, more honest than

most.

I am always struck by the centrality of the observer’s position. He

always stands fronting the middle of the arch, and does not suspect at

first that a thousand observers on a thousand hills behold the sunset

sky from equally favorable positions.

And now I turn and observe the dark masses of the trees in the east,

not green but black. While the sun was setting in the west, the trees

were rising in the east.

I perceive that the low stratum of dark clouds under the red sky all

dips one way, and to a remarkable degree presents the appearance of the

butt ends of cannons slanted toward the sky, thus:—

[Illustration]

Such uniformity on a large scale is unexpected and pleasant to detect,

evincing the simplicity of the laws of their formation. Uniformity in

the shapes of clouds of a single stratum is always to be detected, the

same wind shaping clouds of the like consistency and in like positions.

No doubt an experienced observer could discover the states of the upper

atmosphere by studying the forms and characters of the clouds. I traced

the distinct form of the cannon in seven instances, stretching over the

whole length of the cloud, many a mile in the horizon.

And the nighthawk dashes past in the twilight with mottled (?) wing,

within a rod of me.