The moon has not yet quite filled her horns. I perceive why we so often

remark a dark cloud in the west at and after sunset. It is because

it is almost directly between us and the sun, and hence we see the

dark side, and moreover it is much darker than it otherwise would be,

because of the little light reflected from the earth at that hour. The

same cloud at midday and overhead might not attract attention. There

is a pure amber sky beneath the present bank, thus framed off from the

rest of the heavens, which, with the outlines of small dead elms seen

against it,—I hardly know if far or near,—make picture enough. Men

will travel far to see less interesting sights than this. Turning away

from the sun, we get this enchanting view, as when a man looks at the

landscape with inverted head. Under shadow of the dark cloud which I

have described, the cricket begins his strain, his ubiquitous strain.

Is there a fall cricket distinct from the species we hear in spring and

summer? I smell the corn-field over the brook a dozen rods off, and it

reminds me of the green-corn feasts of the Indians. The evening train

comes rolling in, but none of the passengers jumping out in such haste

attend to the beautiful, fresh picture which Nature has unrolled in the

west and surmounted with that dark frame. The circular platter of the

carrot’s blossom is now perfect.

Might not this be called the Invalid’s Moon, on account of the warmth

of the nights? The principal employment of the farmers now seems to be

getting their meadow-hay and cradling some oats, etc.

The light from the western sky is stronger still than that of the moon,

and when I hold up my hand, the west side is lighted while the side

toward the moon is comparatively dark. But now that I have put this

dark wood (Hubbard’s) between me and the west, I see the moonlight

plainly on my paper; I am even startled by it. One star, too,—is it

Venus?—I see in the west. Starlight! that would be a good way to mark

the hour, if we were precise. Hubbard’s Brook. How much the beauty of

the moon is enhanced by being seen shining between two trees, or even

by the neighborhood of clouds! I hear the clock striking eight faintly.

I smell the late shorn meadows.

One will lose no music by not attending the oratorios and operas. The

really inspiring melodies are cheap and universal, and are as audible

to the poor man’s son as to the rich man’s. Listening to the harmonies

of the universe is not allied to dissipation. My neighbors have gone

to the vestry to hear “Ned Kendal,” the bugler, to-night, but I am

come forth to the hills to hear my bugler in the horizon. I can forego

the seeming advantages of cities without misgiving. No heavenly strain

is lost to the ear that is fitted to hear it, for want of money or

opportunity. I am convinced that for instrumental music all Vienna

cannot serve me more than the Italian boy who seeks my door with his

organ.

And now I strike the road at the causeway. It is hard, and I hear

the sound of my steps, a sound which should never be heard, for it

draws down my thoughts. It is more like the treadmill exercise. The

fireflies are not so numerous as they have been. There is no dew

as yet. The planks and railing of Hubbard’s Bridge are removed. I

walk over on the string-pieces, resting in the middle until the moon

comes out of a cloud, that I may see my path, for between the next

piers the string-pieces also are removed and there is only a rather

narrow plank, let down three or four feet. I essay to cross it, but

it springs a little and I mistrust myself, whether I shall not plunge

into the river. Some demonic genius seems to be warning me. Attempt

not the passage; you will surely be drowned. It is very real that I am

thus affected. Yet I am fully aware of the absurdity of minding such

suggestions. I put out my foot, but I am checked, as if that power had

laid a hand on my breast and chilled me back. Nevertheless, I cross,

stooping at first, and gain the other side. (I make the most of it on

account of the admonition, but it was nothing to remark on. I returned

the same way two hours later and made nothing of it.) It is easy to see

how, by yielding to such feelings as this, men would reëstablish all

the superstitions of antiquity. It is best that reason should govern

us, and not these blind intimations, in which we exalt our fears into

a genius.

On Conantum I sit awhile in the shade of the woods and look out on the

moonlit fields. White rocks are more remarkable than by day.[277]

The air is warmer than the rocks now. It is perfectly warm and I am

tempted to stay out all night and observe each phenomenon of the night

until day dawns. But if I should do so, I should not wonder if the town

were raised to hunt me up. I could lie out here on this pinnacle rock

all night without cold. To lie here on your back with nothing between

your eye and the stars,—nothing but space,—they your nearest neighbors

on that side, be they strange or be they tame, be they other worlds

or merely ornaments to this, who could ever go to sleep under these

circumstances? Sitting on the door-step of Conant house at 9 o’clock, I

hear a pear drop. How few of all the apples that fall do we hear fall!

I hear a horse _sneeze_ (?) from time to time in his pasture. He sees

me and knows me to be a man, though I do not see him. I hear the nine

o’clock bell ringing in Bedford. An unexpectedly musical sound that

of a bell in the horizon always is. Pleasantly sounds the voice of

one village to another. It is sweet as it is rare. Since I sat here a

bright star has gone behind the stem of a tree, proving that my machine

is moving,—proving it better for me than a rotating pendulum. I hear a

solitary whip-poor-will, and a bullfrog on the river,—fewer sounds than

in spring. The gray cliffs across the river are plain to be seen.

And now the star appears on the other side of the tree, and I must go.

Still no dew up here. I see three scythes hanging on an apple tree.

There is the wild apple tree where hangs the forgotten scythe,[278]—the

rock where the shoe was left. The woods and the separate trees cast

longer shadows than by day, for the moon goes lower in her course

at this season. Some dew at last in the meadow. As I recross the

string-pieces of the bridge, I see the water-bugs swimming briskly in

the moonlight. I scent the Roman wormwood in the potato-fields.

_Aug. 9. Saturday._ Tansy now in bloom and the fresh white clethra.

Among the pines and birches I hear the invisible locust. As I am going

to the pond to bathe, I see a black cloud in the northern horizon and

hear the muttering of thunder, and make haste. Before I have bathed

and dressed, the gusts which precede the tempest are heard roaring in

the woods, and the first black, gusty clouds have reached my zenith.

Hastening toward town, I meet the rain at the edge of the wood, and

take refuge under the thickest leaves, where not a drop reaches me,

and, at the end of half an hour, the renewed singing of the birds alone

advertises me that the rain has ceased, and it is only the dripping

from the leaves which I hear in the woods. It was a splendid sunset

that day, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people went to

their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings

and the sky, and it was equally glorious in whatever quarter you

looked; a sort of fulgor as of stereotyped lightning filled the air.

Of which this is my solution. We were in the westernmost edge of the

shower at the moment the sun was setting, and its rays shone through

the cloud and the falling rain. We were, in fact, in a rainbow and it

was here its arch rested on the earth. At a little distance we should

have seen all the colors.

The _Œnothera biennis_ along the railroad now. Do the cars disperse

seeds? The _Trichostema dichotomum_ is quite beautiful now in the cool

of the morning. The epilobium in the woods still. Now the earliest

apples begin to be ripe, but none are so good to eat as some to

smell. Some knurly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its

fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona.[279]

_Aug. 12. Tuesday._ 1.30 A. M.—Full moon. Arose and went to the river

and bathed, stepping very carefully not to disturb the household,

and still carefully in the street not to disturb the neighbors. I did

not walk naturally and freely till I had got over the wall. Then to

Hubbard’s Bridge at 2 A. M. There was a whip-poor-will in the road

just beyond Goodwin’s, which flew up and lighted on the fence and kept

alighting on the fence within a rod of me and circling round me with

a slight squeak as if inquisitive about me. I do not remember what I

observed or thought in coming hither.

The traveller’s whole employment is to calculate what cloud will

obscure the moon and what she will triumph over. In the after-midnight

hours the traveller’s sole companion is the moon. All his thoughts

are centred in her. She is waging continual war with the clouds in his

behalf. What cloud will enter the lists with her next, this employs his

thoughts; and when she enters on a clear field of great extent in the

heavens, and shines unobstructedly, he is glad. And when she has fought

her way through all the squadrons of her foes, and rides majestic in a

clear sky, he cheerfully and confidently pursues his way, and rejoices

in his heart. But if he sees that she has many new clouds to contend

with, he pursues his way moodily, as one disappointed and aggrieved; he

resents it as an injury to himself. It is his employment to watch the

moon, the companion and guide of his journey, wading through clouds,

and calculate what one is destined to shut out her cheering light. He

traces her course, now almost completely obscured, through the ranks

of her foes, and calculates where she will issue from them.[280] He

is disappointed and saddened when he sees that she has many clouds to

contend with.

Sitting on the sleepers of Hubbard’s Bridge, which is being repaired,

now, 3 o’clock A. M., I hear a cock crow. How admirably adapted to the

dawn is that sound! as if made by the first rays of light rending the

darkness, the creaking of the sun’s axle heard already over the eastern

hills.

Though man’s life is trivial and handselled, Nature is holy and heroic.

With what infinite faith and promise and moderation begins each new

day! It is only a little after 3 o’clock, and already there is evidence

of morning in the sky.

He rejoices when the moon comes forth from the squadrons of the

clouds unscathed and there are no more any obstructions in her path,

and the cricket also seems to express joy in his song. It does not

concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to

the traveller, whether the moon shines bright and unobstructed or is

obscured by clouds. It is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the

earth when the moon commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have

often been a traveller by night.[281]

The traveller also resents it if the wind rises and rustles the leaves

or ripples the water and increases the coolness at such an hour.

A solitary horse in his pasture was scared by the sudden sight of me,

an apparition to him, standing still in the moonlight, and moved about,

inspecting with alarm, but I spoke and he heard the sound of my voice;

he was at once reassured and expressed his pleasure by wagging his

stump of a tail, though still half a dozen rods off. How wholesome the

taste of huckleberries, when now by moonlight I feel for them amid the

bushes!

And now the first signs of morning attract the traveller’s attention,

and he cannot help rejoicing, and the moon begins gradually to fade

from his recollection. The wind rises and rustles the copses. The sand

is cool on the surface but warm two or three inches beneath, and the

rocks are quite warm to the hand, so that he sits on them or leans

against them for warmth, though indeed it is not cold elsewhere.[282]

As I walk along the side of Fair Haven Hill, I see a ripple on the

river, and now the moon has gone behind a large and black mass of

clouds, and I realize that I may not see her again in her glory this

night, that perchance ere she rises from this obscurity, the sun

will have risen, and she will appear but as a cloud herself, and

sink unnoticed into the west (being a little after full (a day?)).

As yet no sounds of awakening men; only the more frequent crowing

of cocks, still standing on their perches in the barns. The milkmen

are the earliest risers,—though I see no lanthorns carried to their

barns in the distance,—preparing to carry the milk of cows in their

tin cans for men’s breakfasts, even for those who dwell in distant

cities. In the twilight now, by the light of the stars alone, the moon

being concealed, they are pressing the bounteous streams from full

udders into their milk-pails, and the sound of the streaming milk is

all that breaks the sacred stillness of the dawn; distributing their

milk to such as have no cows. I perceive no mosquitoes now. Are they

vespertinal, like the singing of the whip-poor-will? I see the light

of the obscured moon reflected from the river brightly. With what mild

emphasis Nature marks the spot!—so bright and serene a sheen that does

not more contrast with the night.

4 A. M.—It adds a charm, a dignity, a glory, to the earth to see the

light of the moon reflected from her streams. There are but us three,

the moon, the earth which wears this jewel (the moon’s reflection) in

her crown, and myself. Now there has come round the Cliff (on which I

sit), which faces the west, all unobserved and mingled with the dusky

sky of night, a lighter and more ethereal living blue, whispering of

the sun still far, far away, behind the horizon. From the summit of our

atmosphere, perchance, he may already be seen by soaring spirits that

inhabit those thin upper regions, and they communicate the glorious

intelligence to us lower ones. The real _divine_, the heavenly, blue,

the Jove-containing air, it is, I see through this dusky lower stratum.

The sun gilding the summits of the air. The broad artery of light flows

over all the sky. Yet not without sadness and compassion I reflect that

I shall not see the moon again in her glory. (Not far from four, still

in the night, I heard a nighthawk squeak and _boom_, high in the air,

as I sat on the Cliff. What is said about this being less of a night

bird than the whip-poor-will is perhaps to be questioned. For neither

do I remember to have heard the whip-poor-will _sing_ at 12 o’clock,

though I met one sitting and flying between two and three this morning.

I believe that both may be heard at midnight, though very rarely.)

Now at _very earliest_ dawn the nighthawk booms and the whip-poor-will

sings. Returning down the hill by the path to where the woods [are] cut

off, I see the signs of the day, the morning red. There is the lurid

morning star, soon to be blotted out by a cloud.

There is an early redness in the east which I was not prepared for,

changing to amber or saffron, with clouds beneath in the horizon and

also above this clear streak.

The birds utter a few languid and yawning notes, as if they had not

left their perches, so sensible to light to wake so soon,—a faint

peeping sound from I know not what kind, a slight, innocent, half-awake

sound, like the sounds which a quiet housewife makes in the earliest

dawn. Nature preserves her innocence like a beautiful child. I hear

a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise, as in the heat of the

day. And the pewee and the catbird and the vireo, red-eyed? I do not

hear—or do not mind, perchance—the crickets now. Now whip-poor-wills

commence to sing in earnest, considerably _after_ the wood thrush. The

wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter

his pine woods. (So you may hear the wood thrush and whip-poor-will

at the same time.) Now go by two whip-poor-wills, in haste seeking

some coverts from the eye of day. And the bats are flying about on the

edge of the wood, improving the last moments of their day in catching

insects. The moon appears at length, not yet as a cloud, but with a

frozen light, ominous of her fate. The early cars sound like a wind in

the woods. The chewinks make a business now of waking each other up

with their low _yorrick_ in the neighboring low copse. The sun would

have shown before but for the cloud. Now, on his rising, not the clear

sky, but the cheeks of the clouds high and wide, are tinged with red,

which, like the sky before, turns gradually to saffron and then to the

white light of day.

The nettle-leaved vervain (_Verbena urticifolia_) by roadside at

Emerson’s. What we have called hemp answers best to _Urtica dioica_,

large stinging nettle? Now the great sunflower’s golden disk is seen.

The days for some time have been sensibly shorter; there is time for

music in the evening.

I see polygonums in blossom by roadside, white and red.

A eupatorium from Hubbard’s Bridge causeway answers to _E. purpureum_,

except in these doubtful points, that the former has four leaves

in a whorl, is unequally serrate, the stem is _nearly_ filled with

a thin pith, the corymb is not merely terminal, florets eight and

nine. Differs from _verticillatum_ in the stem being not solid, and I

perceive no difference between calyx and corolla in color, if I know

what the two are. It may be one of the intermediate varieties referred

to.

_Aug. 15. Friday._ _Hypericum Canadense_, Canadian St. John’s-wort,

distinguished by its red capsules. The petals shine under the

microscope, as if they had a golden dew on them.

_Cnicus pumilus_, pasture thistle. How many insects a single one

attracts! While you sit by it, bee after bee will visit it, and busy

himself probing for honey and loading himself with pollen, regardless

of your overshadowing presence. He sees its purple flower from afar,

and that use there is in its color.

_Oxalis stricta_, upright wood-sorrel, the little yellow ternate-leaved

flower in pastures and corn-fields.

_Sagittaria sagittifolia_, or arrowhead. It has very little root that

I can find to eat.

_Campanula crinoides_, var. 2nd, slender bellflower, vine-like like a

galium, by brook-side in Depot Field.

Impatiens, noli-me-tangere, or touch-me-not, with its dangling yellow

pitchers or horns of plenty, which I have seen for a month by damp

causeway thickets, but the whole plant was so tender and drooped so

soon I could not get it home.

May I love and revere myself above all the gods that men have ever

invented. May I never let the vestal fire go out in my recesses.

_Aug. 16._ _Agrimonia Eupatoria_, small-flowered (yellow) plant with

hispid fruit, two or three feet high, Turnpike, at Tuttle’s peat

meadow. Hemp (_Cannabis sativa_), said by Gray to have been introduced;

not named by Bigelow. Is it not a native?

It is true man can and does live by preying on other animals, but this

is a miserable way of sustaining himself, and he will be regarded

as a benefactor of his race, along with Prometheus and Christ, who

shall teach men to live on a more innocent and wholesome diet. Is it

not already acknowledged to be a reproach that man is a carnivorous

animal?[283]

_Aug. 17._ For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that

was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the

west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the

sun at that hour. The coolness concentrated your thought, however.

As I could not command a sunny window, I went abroad on the morning

of the 15th and lay in the sun in the fields in my thin coat, though

it was rather cool even there. I feel as if this coolness would do me

good. If it only makes my life more pensive! Why should pensiveness be

akin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not

avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It

saves my life from being trivial. My life flows with a deeper current,

no longer as a shallow and brawling stream, parched and shrunken by

the summer heats. This coolness comes to condense the dews and clear

the atmosphere. The stillness seems more deep and significant. Each

sound seems to come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature, as if

nature had acquired some character and mind. The cricket, the gurgling

stream, the rushing wind amid the trees, all speak to me soberly yet

encouragingly of the steady onward progress of the universe. My heart

leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose

life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover

my spirits, my spirituality, through my hearing. I see a goldfinch

go twittering through the still, louring day, and am reminded of the

peeping flocks which will soon herald the thoughtful season. Ah! if I

could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life!

that in the trivial season, when small fruits are ripe, my fruits might

be ripe also! that I could match nature always with my moods! that

in each season when some part of nature especially flourishes, then a

corresponding part of me may not fail to flourish! Ah, I would walk,

I would sit and sleep, with natural piety! What if I could pray aloud

or to myself as I went along by the brooksides a cheerful prayer like

the birds! For joy I could embrace the earth; I shall delight to be

buried in it. And then to think of those I love among men, who will

know that I love them though I tell them not! I sometimes feel as if I

were rewarded merely for expecting better hours. I did not despair of

worthier moods, and now I have occasion to be grateful for the flood

of life that is flowing over me. I am not so poor: I can smell the

ripening apples; the very rills are deep; the autumnal flowers, the

_Trichostema dichotomum_,—not only its bright blue flower above the

sand, but its strong wormwood scent which belongs to the season,—feed

my spirit, endear the earth to me, make me value myself and rejoice;

the quivering of pigeons’ wings reminds me of the tough fibre of the

air which they rend. I thank you, God. I do not deserve anything, I am

unworthy of the least regard; and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure

and worthless, and yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays

are prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I cannot

thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to those human friends

I have. It seems to me that I am more rewarded for my expectations

than for anything I do or can do. Ah, I would not tread on a cricket

in whose song is such a revelation, so soothing and cheering to my

ear! Oh, keep my senses pure! And why should I speak to my friends?

for how rarely is it that I am I; and are they, then, they? We will

meet, then, far away. The seeds of the summer are getting dry and

falling from a thousand nodding heads. If I did not know you through

thick and thin, how should I know you at all? Ah, the very brooks seem

fuller of reflections than they were! Ah, such provoking sibylline

sentences they are! The shallowest is all at once unfathomable. How

can that depth be fathomed where a man may see himself reflected? The

rill I stopped to drink at I drink in more than I expected. I satisfy

and still provoke the thirst of thirsts. Nut Meadow Brook where it

crosses the road beyond Jenny Dugan’s that was. I do not drink in vain.

I mark that brook as if I had swallowed a water snake that would live

in my stomach. I have swallowed something worth the while. The day

is not what it was before I stooped to drink. Ah, I shall hear from

that draught! It is not in vain that I have drunk. I have drunk an

arrowhead. It flows from where all fountains rise.

How many ova have I swallowed? Who knows what will be hatched within

me? There were some seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water,

which are expanding in me. The man must not drink of the running

streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature

reborn in him,—to suckle monsters. The snake in my stomach lifts his

head to my mouth at the sound of running water. When was it that I

swallowed a snake? I have got rid of the snake in my stomach. I drank

of stagnant waters once. That accounts for it. I caught him by the

throat and drew him out, and had a well day after all. Is there not

such a thing as getting rid of the snake which you have swallowed when

young, when thoughtless you stooped and drank at stagnant waters, which

has worried you in your waking hours and in your sleep ever since,

and appropriated the life that was yours? Will he not ascend into your

mouth at the sound of running water? Then catch him boldly by the head

and draw him out, though you may think his tail be curled about your

vitals.

The farmers are just finishing their meadow-haying. (To-day is Sunday.)

Those who have early potatoes may be digging them, or doing any other

job which the haying has obliged them to postpone. For six weeks or

more this has been the farmer’s work, to shave the surface of the

fields and meadows clean. This is done all over the country. The

razor is passed over these parts of nature’s face the country over. A

thirteenth labor which methinks would have broken the back of Hercules,

would have given him a memorable sweat, accomplished with what sweating

of scythes and early and late! I chance [to] know one young man who

has lost his life in this season’s campaign, by overdoing. In haying

time some men take double wages, and they are engaged long before in

the spring. To shave all the fields and meadows of New England clean!

If men did this but once, and not every year, we should never hear the

last of that labor; it would be more famous in each farmer’s case than

Buonaparte’s road over the Simplon. It has no other bulletin but the

truthful “Farmer’s Almanac.” Ask them where scythe-snaths are made and

sold, and rifles too, if it is not a real labor. In its very weapons

and its passes it has the semblance of war. Mexico was won with less

exertion and less true valor than are required to do one season’s

haying in New England. The former work was done by those who played

truant and ran away from the latter. Those Mexicans were mown down

more easily than the summer’s crop of grass in many a farmer’s fields.

Is there not some work in New England men? This haying is no work for

marines, nor for deserters; nor for United States troops, so called,

nor for West Point cadets. It would wilt them, and they would desert.

Have they not deserted? and run off to West Point? Every field is a

battle-field to the mower,—a pitched battle too,—and whole winrows

of dead have covered it in the course of the season. Early and late

the farmer has gone forth with his formidable scythe, weapon of time,

Time’s weapon, and fought the ground inch by inch. It is the summer’s

enterprise. And if we were a more poetic people, horns would be blown

to celebrate its completion. There might be a Haymakers’ Day. New

England’s peaceful battles. At Bunker Hill there were some who stood at

the rail-fence and behind the winrows of new-mown hay.[284] They have

not yet quitted the field. They stand there still; they alone have not

retreated.

The _Polygala sanguinea_, caducous polygala, in damp ground, with red

or purple heads. The dandelion still blossoms, and the lupine still,

belated.

I have been to Tarbell’s Swamp by the Second Division this afternoon,

and to the Marlborough road.

It has promised rain all day; cloudy and still and rather cool; from

time to time a few drops gently spitting, but no shower. The landscape

wears a sober autumnal look. I hear a drop or two on my hat. I wear a

thick coat. The birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet. The

swallows skim low over the pastures, twittering as they fly near me

with forked tail, dashing near me as if I scared up insects for them.

I see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump.

Tarbell’s Swamp is mainly composed of low and even but dense beds

of _Andromeda calyculata_, or dwarf andromeda, which bears the early

flower in the spring. Here and there, mingled with it, is the water (?)

andromeda; also pitch pines, birches, hardhack, and the common alder

(_Alnus serrulata_), and, in separate and lower beds, the cranberry;

and probably the _Rhodora Canadensis_ might be found.

The lead-colored berries of the _Viburnum dentatum_ now. Cow-wheat

and indigo-weed still in bloom by the dry wood-path-side, and Norway

cinquefoil. I detected a wild apple on the Marlborough road by its

fragrance, in the thick woods; small stems, four inches in diameter,

falling over or leaning like rays on every side; a clean white fruit,

the ripest yellowish, a pleasant acid. The fruit covered the ground. It

is unusual to meet with an early apple thus wild in the thickest woods.

It seemed admirable to me. One of the noblest of fruits. With green

specks under the skin.

_Prenanthes alba_, white-flowering prenanthes, with its strange halbert

and variously shaped leaves; neottia; and hypericum.

I hear the rain (11 P. M.) distilling upon the ground, wetting the

grass and leaves. The melons needed it. Their leaves were curled and

their fruit stinted.

I am less somnolent for the cool season. I wake to a perennial day.

The hayer’s work is done, but I hear no boasting, no firing of guns

nor ringing of bells. He celebrates it by going about the work he had

postponed “till after haying”! If all this steadiness and valor were

spent upon some still worthier enterprise!!

All men’s employments, all trades and professions, in some of their

aspects are attractive. Hence the boy I knew, having sucked cider at

a minister’s cider-mill, resolved to be a minister and make cider,

not thinking, boy as he was, how little fun there was in being a

minister, willing to purchase that pleasure at any price. When I saw

the carpenters the other day repairing Hubbard’s Bridge, their bench on

the new planking they had laid over the water in the sun and air, with

no railing yet to obstruct the view, I was almost ready to resolve that

I would be a carpenter and work on bridges, to secure a pleasant place

to work. One of the men had a fish-line cast round a sleeper, which he

looked at from time to time.

John Potter told me that those root fences on the Corner road were at

least sixty or seventy years old.[285] I see a solitary goldfinch now

and then.

_Hieracium Marianum_ or _scabrum_; _H. Kalmii_ or _Canadense_;

Marlborough road. _Leontodon autumnale_ passim.

_Aug. 18._ It plainly makes men sad to think. Hence _pensiveness_ is

akin to sadness.

Some dogs, I have noticed, have a propensity to worry cows. They go off

by themselves to distant pastures, and ever and anon, like four-legged

devils, they worry the cows,—literally full of the devil. They are so

full of the devil they know not what to do. I come to interfere between

the cows and their tormentors. Ah, I grieve to see the devils escape

so easily by their swift limbs, imps of mischief! They are the dog

state of those boys who pull down hand-bills in the streets. Their next

migration perchance will be into such dogs as these, ignoble fate! The

dog, whose office it should be to guard the herd, turned its tormentor.

Some courageous cow endeavoring in vain to toss the nimble devil.

Those soldiers in the Champ de Mars[286] at Montreal convinced me that

I had arrived in a foreign country under a different government, where

many are under the control of one. Such perfect drill could never be

in a republic. Yet it had the effect on us as when the keeper shows his

animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws. The royal

something or other.[287] I have no doubt that soldiers well drilled, as

a class, are peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. The

men were dressed above their condition; had the bearing of gentlemen

without a corresponding intellectual culture.[288]

The Irish was a familiar element, but the Scotch a novel one. The

St. Andrew’s Church was prominent, and sometimes I was reminded of

Edinburgh,—indeed, much more than of London.

Warburton remarked, soon after landing at Quebec, that everything

was cheap in that country but men. My thought, when observing how

the wooden pavements were sawed by hand in the streets, instead of by

machinery, because labor was cheap, how cheap men are here![289]

It is evident that a private man is not worth so much in Canada as

in the United States, and if that is the bulk of a man’s property,

_i. e._ the being private and peculiar, he had better stay here. An

Englishman, methinks, not to speak of other nations, habitually regards

himself merely as a constituent part of the English nation; he holds

a recognized place as such; he is a member of the royal regiment of

Englishmen. And he is proud of his nation. But an American cares very

little about such, and greater freedom and independence are possible

to him. He is nearer to the primitive condition of man. Government lets

him alone, and he lets government alone.[290]

I often thought of the Tories and refugees who settled in Canada at

[the time of] the Revolution. These English were to a considerable

extent their descendants.

Quebec began to be fortified in a more regular manner in 1690.

The most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them;

they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair,—ruins kept

in repair from the day they were built, though they were completed

yesterday,—because they are not in a true sense the work of this

age. I couple them with the dismantled Spanish forts to be found in

so many parts of the world. They carry me back to the Middle Ages,

and the siege of Jerusalem, and St. Jean d’Acre, and the days of the

Bucaniers. Such works are not consistent with the development of the

intellect. Huge stone structures of all kinds, both by their creation

and their influence, rather oppress the intellect than set it free.

A little thought will dismantle them as fast as they are built. They

are a bungling contrivance. It is an institution as rotten as the

church. The sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is

spectral. There is not sufficient reason for his existence. My friend

there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, does he think

that he needs that argument in conversing with me? Of what use this

fortification, to look at it from the soldier’s point of view? General

Wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of Quebec without

experiencing any hindrance from its fortifications. How often do we

have to read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the

old, and so the fort was evacuated![291]

How impossible it is to give that soldier a good education, without

first making him virtually a deserter.[292]

It is as if I were to come to a country village surrounded with

palisadoes in the old Indian style,—interesting as a relic of antiquity

and barbarism. A fortified town is a man cased in the heavy armor of

antiquity, and a horse-load of broadswords and small-arms slung to him,

endeavoring to go about his business.

The idea seemed to be that some time the inhabitants of Canada might

wish to govern themselves, and this was to hinder. But the inhabitants

of California succeed well without any such establishment.[293] There

would be the same sense in a man’s wearing a breastplate all his days

for fear somebody should fire a bullet at his vitals. The English in

Canada seem to be everywhere prepared and preparing for war. In the

United States they are prepared for anything; they may even be the

aggressors. This is a ruin kept in a remarkably good repair. There are

some eight hundred or a thousand men there to exhibit it. One regiment

goes bare-legged to increase the attraction. If you wish to study the

muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to Quebec.[294]

_Aug. 19._ _Clematis Virginiana_; calamint; _Lycopus Europeus_, water

horehound.

This is a world where there are flowers. Now, at 5 A. M., the fog,

which in the west looks like a wreath of hard-rolled cotton-batting,

is rapidly dispersing. The echo of the railroad whistle is heard

the horizon round; the gravel train is starting out. The farmers are

cradling oats in some places. For some days past I have noticed a _red_

maple or two about the pond, though we have had no frost. The grass is

very wet with dew this morning.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has

departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those

monkeys which cling by their tails,—aye, whose tails contract about

the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended

beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use

to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but

merely, as it were, a prehensile tail. Their intellect possesses merely

the quality of a prehensile tail. The tail itself contracts around the

dead limb even after they themselves are dead, and not till sensible

corruption takes place do they fall. The black howling monkey, or

caraya. According to Azara, it is extremely difficult to get at them,

for “when mortally wounded they coil the tail round a branch, and hang

by it with the head downwards for days after death, and until, in fact,

decomposition begins to take effect.” The commenting naturalist says,

“A singular peculiarity of this organ is to contract at its extremity

of its own accord as soon as it is extended to its full length.” I

relinquish argument, I wait for decomposition to take place, for the

subject is dead; as I value the hide for the museum. They say, “Though

you’ve got my soul, you sha’n’t have my carcass.”

* * * * *

P. M.—To Marlborough Road _via_ Clamshell Hill, Jenny Dugan’s, Round

Pond, Canoe Birch Road (Deacon Dakin’s), and White Pond.

How many things concur to keep a man at home, to prevent his yielding

to his inclination to wander! If I would extend my walk a hundred

miles, I must carry a tent on my back for shelter at night or in the

rain, or at least I must carry a thick coat to be prepared for a change

in the weather. So that it requires some resolution, as well as energy

and foresight, to undertake the simplest journey. Man does not travel

as easily as the birds migrate. He is not everywhere at home, like

flies. When I think how many things I can conveniently carry, I am

wont to think it most convenient to stay at home. My home, then, to a

certain extent is the place where I keep my thick coat and my tent and

some books which I cannot carry; where, next, I can depend upon meeting

some friends; and where, finally, I, even I, have established myself in

business. But this last in my case is the least important qualification

of a home.

The poet must be continually watching the moods of his mind, as the

astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens. What might we not

expect from a long life faithfully spent in this wise? The humblest

observer would see some stars shoot. A faithful description as by a

disinterested person of the thoughts which visited a certain mind

in threescore years and ten, as when one reports the number and

character of the vehicles which pass a particular point. As travellers

go round the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so

faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his

own life,—catalogue stars, those thoughts whose orbits are as rarely

calculated as comets. It matters not whether they visit my mind or

yours,—whether the meteor falls in my field or in yours,—only that it

come from heaven. (I am not concerned to express that kind of truth

which Nature has expressed. Who knows but I may suggest some things to

her? Time was when she was indebted to such suggestions from another

quarter, as her present advancement shows. I deal with the truths

that recommend themselves to me,—please me,—not those merely which any

system has voted to accept.) A meteorological journal of the mind. You

shall observe what occurs in your latitude, I in mine.

Some institutions—most institutions, indeed—have had a divine origin.

But of most that we see prevailing in society nothing but the form,

the shell, is left; the life is extinct, and there is nothing divine

in them. Then the reformer arises inspired to reinstitute life, and

whatever he does or causes to be done is a reëstablishment of that same

or a similar divineness. But some, who never knew the significance

of these instincts, are, by a sort of false instinct, found clinging

to the shells. Those who have no knowledge of the divine appoint

themselves defenders of the divine, as champions of the church, etc. I

have been astonished to observe how long some audiences can endure to

hear a man speak on a subject which he knows nothing about, as religion

for instance, when one who has no ear for music might with the same

propriety take up the time of a musical assembly with putting through

his opinions on music. This young man who is the main pillar of some

divine institution,—does he know what he has undertaken? If the saints

were to come again on earth, would they be likely to stay at his house?

would they meet with his approbation even? _Ne sutor ultra crepidam._

They who merely have a talent for affairs are forward to express their

opinions. A Roman soldier sits there to decide upon the righteousness

of Christ. The world does not long endure such blunders, though they

are made every day. The weak-brained and pusillanimous farmers would

fain abide by the institutions of their fathers. Their argument is

they have not long to live, and for that little space let them not be

disturbed in their slumbers; blessed are the peacemakers; let this cup

pass from me, etc.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to

live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts

begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end

and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand

rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and

fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draught below, as the

owners of meadows on Concord River say of the Billerica Dam. Only while

we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists

with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.

The grass in the high pastures is almost as dry as hay. The seasons

do not cease a moment to revolve, and therefore Nature rests no longer

at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the

right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it. How much of the

year is spring and fall! how little can be called summer! The grass

is no sooner grown than it begins to wither. How much Nature herself

suffers from drought! It seems quite as much as she can do to produce

these crops.

The most inattentive walker can see how the science of geology took its

rise. The inland hills and promontories betray the action of water on

their rounded sides as plainly as if the work were completed yesterday.

He sees it with but half an eye as he walks, and forgets his thought

again. Also the level plains and more recent meadows and marine shells

found on the tops of hills. The geologist painfully and elaborately

follows out these suggestions, and hence his fine-spun theories.

The goldfinch, though solitary, is now one of the commonest birds in

the air.

What if a man were earnestly and wisely to set about recollecting and

preserving the thoughts which he has had! How many perchance are now

irrecoverable! Calling in his neighbors to aid him.

I do not like to hear the name of particular States given to birds

and flowers which are found in all equally,—as Maryland yellow-throat,

etc., etc. The _Canadenses_ and _Virginicas_ may be suffered to pass

for the most part, for there is historical as well as natural reason at

least for them. Canada is the peculiar country of some and the northern

limit of many more plants. And Virginia, which was originally the name

for all the Atlantic shore, has some right to stand for the South.

The fruit of the sweet-gale by Nut Meadow Brook is of a yellowish green

now and has not yet its greasy feel.

The little red-streaked and dotted excrescences on the shrub oaks I

find as yet no name for.

Now for the pretty red capsules or pods of the _Hypericum Canadense_.

White goldenrod is budded along the Marlborough road.

Chickadees and jays never fail. The cricket’s is a note which does not

attract you to itself. It is not easy to find one.

I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming

more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as

heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope.

I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some

parts, and say, “I know.” The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry

fields near pine woods.

Gathered our first watermelon to-day. By the Marlborough road I notice

the richly veined leaves of the _Neottia pubescens_, or veined neottia,

rattlesnake-plantain. I like this last name very well, though it might

not be easy to convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. We want

some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. Such

work as men imitate in their embroidery, unaccountably agreeable to

the eye, as if it answered its end only when it met the eye of man; a

reticulated leaf, visible only on one side; little things which make

one pause in the woods, take captive the eye.

Here is a bees’ or wasps’ nest in the sandy, mouldering bank by the

roadside, four inches in diameter, as if made of scales of striped

brown paper. It is singular if indeed man first made paper and then

discovered its resemblance to the work of the wasps, and did not derive

the hint from them.

Canoe birches by road to Dakin’s. Cuticle stripped off; inner bark dead

and scaling off; new (inner) bark formed.

The Solomon’s-seals are fruited now, with finely red-dotted berries.

There was one original name well given, _Buster_ Kendal.[295] The

fragrance of the clethra fills the air by watersides. In the hollows

where in winter is a pond, the grass is short, thick, and green still,

and here and there are tufts pulled up as if by the mouth of cows.

Small rough sunflower by side of road between canoe birch and White

Pond,—_Helianthus divaricatus_.

_Lespedeza capitata_, shrubby lespedeza, White Pond road and

Marlborough road.

_L. polystachya_, hairy lespedeza, Corner road beyond Hubbard’s Bridge.

_Aug. 20._ 2 P. M.—To Lee’s Bridge _via_ Hubbard’s Wood, Potter’s

field, Conantum, returning by Abel Minott’s house, Clematis Brook,

Baker’s pine plain, and railroad.

I hear a cricket in the Depot Field, walk a rod or two, and find the

note proceeds from near a rock. Partly under a rock, between it and the

roots of the grass, he lies concealed,—for I pull away the withered

grass with my hands,—uttering his night-like creak, with a vibratory

motion of his wings, and flattering himself that it is night, because

he has shut out the day. He was a black fellow nearly an inch long,

with two long, slender feelers. They plainly avoid the light and hide

their heads in the grass. At any rate they regard this as the evening

of the year. They are remarkably secret and unobserved, considering

how much noise they make. Every milkman has heard them all his life; it

is the sound that fills his ears as he drives along. But what one has

ever got off his cart to go in search of one? I see smaller ones moving

stealthily about, whose note I do not know. Who ever distinguished

their various notes, which fill the crevices in each other’s song? It

would be a curious ear, indeed, that distinguished the species of the

crickets which it heard, and traced even the earth-song home, each part

to its particular performer. I am afraid to be so knowing. They are shy

as birds, these little bodies. Those nearest me continually cease their

song as I walk, so that the singers are always a rod distant, and I

cannot easily detect one. It is difficult, moreover, to judge correctly

whence the sound proceeds. Perhaps this wariness is necessary to save

them from insectivorous birds, which would otherwise speedily find out

so loud a singer. They are somewhat protected by the universalness

of the sound, each one’s song being merged and lost in the general

concert, as if it were the creaking of earth’s axle. They are very

numerous in oats and other grain, which conceals them and yet affords

a clear passage. I never knew any drought or sickness so to prevail as

to quench the song of the crickets; it fails not in its season, night

or day.

The _Lobelia inflata_, Indian-tobacco, meets me at every turn. At first

I suspect some new bluish flower in the grass, but stooping see the

inflated pods. Tasting one such herb convinces me that there are such

things as drugs which may either kill or cure.[296]

The _Rhexia Virginica_ is a showy flower at present.

How copious and precise the botanical language to describe the leaves,

as well as the other parts of a plant! Botany is worth studying if

only for the precision of its terms,—to learn the value of words and

of system. It is wonderful how much pains has been taken to describe

a flower’s leaf, compared for instance with the care that is taken in

describing a psychological fact. Suppose as much ingenuity (perhaps it

would be needless) in making a language to express the sentiments! We

are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf in the field,

or at least to distinguish it from each other, but not to describe a

human character. With equally wonderful indistinctness and confusion

we describe men. The precision and copiousness of botanical language

applied to the description of moral qualities!

The neottia, or ladies’-tresses, behind Garfield’s house. The golden

robin is now a rare bird to see. Here are the small, lively-tasting

blackberries, so small they are not commonly eaten. The grasshoppers

seem no drier than the grass. In Lee’s field are two kinds of plantain.

Is the common one found there?

The willow reach by Lee’s Bridge has been stripped for powder.

None escapes. This morning, hearing a cart, I looked out and saw

George Dugan going by with a horse-load of his willow toward Acton

powder-mills, which I had seen in piles by the turnpike. Every

traveller has just as particular an errand which I might likewise

chance to be privy to.

Now that I am at the extremity of my walk, I see a threatening cloud

blowing up from the south, which however, methinks, will not compel me

to make haste.

_Apios tuberosa_, or _Glycine Apios_, ground-nut. The prenanthes now

takes the place of the lactucas, which are gone to seed.

In the dry ditch, near Abel Minott’s house that was, I see

cardinal-flowers, with their red artillery, reminding me of

soldiers,—red men, war, and bloodshed. Some are four and a half feet

high. Thy sins shall be as scarlet. Is it my sins that I see? It shows

how far a little color can go; for the flower is not large, yet it

makes itself seen from afar, and so answers the purpose for which it

was colored completely. It is remarkable for its intensely brilliant

scarlet color. You are slow to concede to it a high rank among flowers,

but ever and anon, as you turn your eyes away, it dazzles you and you

pluck it. _Scutellaria lateriflora_, side-flowering skullcap, here.

This brook deserves to be called Clematis Brook (though that name is

too often applied), for the clematis is very abundant, running over the

alders and other bushes on its brink. Where the brook issues from the

pond, the nightshade grows profusely, spreading five or six feet each

way, with its red berries now ripe. It grows, too, at the upper end of

the pond. But if it is the button-bush that grows in the now low water,

it should rather be called the Button-Bush Pond. Now the tall rush is

in its prime on the shore here, and the clematis abounds by this pond

also.

I came out by the leafy-columned elm under Mt. Misery, where the trees

stood up one above another, higher and higher, immeasurably far to my

imagination, as on the side of a New Hampshire mountain.

On the pitch pine plain, at first the pines are far apart, with a

wiry grass between, and goldenrod and hardhack and St. John’s-wort and

blackberry vines, each tree merely keeping down the grass for a space

about itself, meditating to make a forest floor; and here and there

younger pines are springing up. Further in, you come to moss-covered

patches, dry, deep white moss, or almost bare mould, half covered with

pine needles. Thus begins the future forest floor.

The sites of the shanties that once stood by the railroad in Lincoln

when the Irish built it, the still remaining hollow square mounds of

earth which formed their embankments, are to me instead of barrows and

druidical monuments and other ruins. It is a sufficient antiquity to

me since they were built, their material being earth. Now the Canada

thistle and the mullein crown their tops. I see the stones which made

their simple chimneys still left one upon another at one end, which

were surmounted with barrels to eke them out; and clean boiled beef

bones and old shoes are strewn about. Otherwise it is a clean ruin, and

nothing is left but a mound, as in the graveyard.

_Sium lineare_, a kind of water-parsnip, whose blossom resembles the

_Cicuta maculata_. The flowers of the blue vervain have now nearly

reached the summit of their spikes.

A traveller who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the

oldest inhabitant has not observed.

_Aug. 21._ To a great extent the feudal system still prevails there

(in Canada), and I saw that I should be a bad citizen, that any man who

thought for himself and was only reasonably independent would naturally

be a rebel. You could not read or hear of their laws without seeing

that it was a legislating for a few and not for all. That certainly

is the best government where the inhabitants are least often reminded

of the government. (Where a man cannot be a poet even without danger

of being made poet-laureate! Where he cannot be healthily neglected,

and grow up a man, and not an Englishman merely!) Where it is the most

natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand

you, to let you alone. Oh, what a government were there, my countrymen!

It is a government, that English one,—and most other European

ones,—that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you would naturally forget

them, that cannot let you go alone, having learned to walk. It appears

to me that a true Englishman can only speculate within bounds; he has

to pay his respects to so many things that before he knows it he has

paid all he is worth. The principal respect in which our government is

more tolerable is in the fact that there is so much less of government

with us. In the States it is only once in a dog’s age that a man need

remember his government, but here he is reminded of it every day.

Government parades itself before you. It is in no sense the servant but

the master.[297]

What a faculty must that be which can paint the most barren landscape

and humblest life in glorious colors! It is pure and invigorated senses

reacting on a sound and strong imagination. Is not that the poet’s

case? The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize nor

are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes

the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination. When we were

dead and dry as the highway, some sense which has been healthily fed

will put us in relation with Nature, in sympathy with her; some grains

of fertilizing pollen, floating in the air, fall on us, and suddenly

the sky is all one rainbow, is full of music and fragrance and flavor.

The man of intellect only, the prosaic man, is a barren, staminiferous

flower; the poet is a fertile and perfect flower. Men are such

confirmed arithmeticians and slaves of business that I cannot easily

find a blank-book that has not a red line or a blue one for the dollars

and cents, or some such purpose.[298]

As is a man’s intellectual character, is not such his physical after

all? Can you not infer from knowing the intellectual characters of two

which is most tenacious of life, which would die the hardest and will

live the longest, which is the toughest, which has most brute strength,

which the most passive endurance? Methinks I could to some extent infer

these things.

* * * * *

1 P. M.—Round Flint’s Pond _via_ railroad, my old field, Goose Pond,

Wharf Rock, Cedar Hill, Smith’s, and so back.

Bigelow, speaking of the spikes of the blue vervain (_Verbena

hastata_), says, “The flowering commences at their base and is long

in reaching their summit.” I perceive that only one circle of buds,

about half a dozen, blossoms at a time,—and there are about thirty

circles in the space of three inches,—while the next circle of buds

above at the same time shows the blue. Thus this triumphant blossoming

circle travels upward, driving the remaining buds off into space.[299]

I think it was the 16th of July when I first noticed them (on another

plant), and now they are all within about half an inch of the top of

the spikes. Yet the blossoms have got no nearer the top on long [_sic_]

spikes, which had many buds, than on short ones only an inch long.

Perhaps the blossoming commenced enough earlier on the long ones to

make up for the difference in length. It is very pleasant to measure

the progress of the season by this and similar clocks. So you get,

not the absolute time, but the true time of the season.[300] But I

can measure the progress of the seasons only by observing a particular

plant, for I notice that they are by no means equally advanced.

The prevailing conspicuous flowers at present are: The early

goldenrods, tansy, the life-everlastings, flea-bane (though not for its

flower), yarrow (rather dry), hardhack and meadow-sweet (both getting

dry, also mayweed), _Eupatorium purpureum_, scabish, clethra (really

a fine, sweet-scented, and this year particularly fair and fresh,

flower, some unexpanded buds at top tinged with red), Rhexia Virginica,

thoroughwort, _Polygala sanguinea_, prunella, and dog’s-bane (getting

stale), etc., etc. Touch-me-not (less observed), Canada snapdragon

by roadside (not conspicuous). The purple gerardia now, horsemint, or

_Mentha borealis_, _Veronica scutellata_ (marsh speedwell), _Ranunculus

acris_ (tall crowfoot) still. Mowing to some extent improves the

landscape to the eye of the walker. The aftermath, so fresh and green,

begins now to recall the spring to my mind. In some fields fresh

clover heads appear. This is certainly better than fields of lodged

and withered grass. I find ground-nuts by the railroad causeway three

quarters of an inch long by a third of an inch. The epilobium still.

Cow-wheat (_Melampyrum Americanum_) still flourishes as much if not

more than ever, and, shrubby-looking, helps cover the ground where the

wood has recently been cut off, like huckleberry bushes.

There is some advantage, intellectually and spiritually, in taking wide

views with the bodily eye and not pursuing an occupation which holds

the body prone. There is some advantage, perhaps, in attending to the

general features of the landscape over studying the particular plants

and animals which inhabit it. A man may walk abroad and no more see the

sky than if he walked under a shed. The poet is more in the air than

the naturalist, though they may walk side by side. Granted that you

are out-of-doors; but what if the outer door _is_ open, if the inner

door is shut! You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor

inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a

single expansion, a single inspiration of air.

Any anomaly in vegetation makes Nature seem more real and present in

her working, as the various red and yellow excrescences on young oaks.

I am affected as if it were a different Nature that produced them. As

if a poet were born who had designs in his head.[301]

It is remarkable that animals are often obviously, manifestly, related

to the plants which they feed upon or live among,—as caterpillars,

butterflies, tree-toads, partridges, chewinks,—and this afternoon I

noticed a yellow spider on a goldenrod; as if every condition might

have its expression in some form of animated being.[302]

Spear-leaved goldenrod in path to northeast of Flint’s Pond. _Hieracium

paniculatum_, a very delicate and slender hawkweed. I have now found

all the hawkweeds. Singular these genera of plants, plants manifestly

related yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a natural

_history_ in a new sense.[303]

At Wharf Rock found water lobelia in blossom. I saw some smilax vines

in the swamp, which were connected with trees ten feet above the ground

whereon they grew and four or five feet above the surrounding bushes.

This slender vine, which cannot stand erect, how did it establish that

connection? Have the trees and shrubs by which it once climbed been

cut down? Or perchance do the young and flexible shoots blow up in

high winds and fix themselves?[304] On Cedar Hill, south side pond, I

still hear the locust, though it has been so much colder for the last

week. It is quite hazy in the west, though comparatively clear in other

directions. The barberry bushes, with their drooping wreaths of fruit

now turning red, bushed up with some other shrub or tree.

_Aug. 22._ I found last winter that it was expected by my townsmen

that I would give some account of Canada because I had _visited_

it, and because many of them had, and so felt interested in the

subject,—visited it as the bullet visits the wall at which it is fired,

and from which it rebounds as quickly, and flattened (somewhat damaged,

perchance)! Yes, a certain man contracted to take fifteen hundred live

Yankees through Canada, at a certain rate and within a certain time.

It did not matter to him what the commodity was, if only it would pack

well and were delivered to him according to agreement at the right

place and time and rightly ticketed, so much in bulk, wet or dry,

on deck or in the hold, at the option of the carrier how to stow the

cargo and not always right side up. In the meanwhile, it was understood

that the freight was not to be willfully and intentionally debarred

from seeing the country if it had eyes. It was understood that there

would be a country to be seen on either side, though that was a secret

advantage which the contractors seemed not to be aware of. I fear that

I have not got much to say, not having seen much, for the very rapidity

of the motion had a tendency to keep my eyelids closed. What I _got_ by

going to Canada was a cold, and not till I get a fever, which I never

had, shall I know how to appreciate it.[305]

It is the fault of some excellent writers—De Quincey’s first

impressions on seeing London suggest it to me—that they express

themselves with too great fullness and detail. They give the most

faithful, natural, and lifelike account of their sensations, mental

and physical, but they lack moderation and sententiousness. They do

not affect us by an ineffectual earnestness and a reserve of meaning,

like a stutterer; they say all they mean. Their sentences are not

concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say,

which have an atmosphere about them, which do not merely report an old,

but make a new, impression; sentences which suggest as many things and

are as durable as a Roman aqueduct; to frame these, that is the art of

writing. Sentences which are expensive, towards which so many volumes,

so much life, went; which lie like boulders on the page, up and down or

across; which contain the seed of other sentences, not mere repetition,

but creation; which a man might sell his grounds and castles to build.

If De Quincey had suggested each of his pages in a sentence and passed

on, it would have been far more excellent writing. His style is nowhere

kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you

could swallow like a diamond, without digesting.[306]

_Aug. 23. Saturday._ To Walden to bathe at 5.30 A. M. Traces of the

heavy rains in the night. The sand and gravel are beaten hard by them.

Three or four showers in succession. But the grass is not so wet as

after an ordinary dew. The _Verbena hastata_ at the pond has reached

the top of its spike, a little in advance of what I noticed yesterday;

only one or two flowers are adhering. At the commencement of my walk I

saw no traces of fog, but after detected fogs over particular meadows

and high up some brooks’ valleys, and far in the Deep Cut the wood fog.

First muskmelon this morning.

I rarely pass the shanty in the woods, where human beings are lodged,

literally, no better than pigs in a sty,—little children, a grown

man and his wife, and an aged grandmother living this squalid life,

squatting on the ground,—but I wonder if it can be indeed true that

little Julia Riordan calls this place home, comes here to rest at night

and for her daily food,—in whom ladies and gentlemen in the village

take an interest. Of what significance are charity and almshouses?

That there they live unmolested! in one sense so many degrees below the

almshouse! beneath charity! It is admirable,—Nature against almshouses.

A certain wealth of nature, not poverty, it suggests. Not to identify

health and contentment, aye, and independence, with the possession of

this world’s goods! It is not wise to waste compassion on them.

As I go through the Deep Cut, I hear one or two early humblebees, come

out on the damp sandy bank, whose low hum sounds like distant horns

from far in the horizon over the woods. It was long before I detected

the bees that made it, so far away and musical it sounded, like the

shepherds in some distant eastern vale greeting the king of day.[307]

The farmers now carry—those who have got them—their early potatoes and

onions to market, starting away early in the morning or at midnight. I

see them returning in the afternoon with the empty barrels.

Perchance the copious rain of last night will trouble those who had not

been so provident as to get their hay from the Great Meadows, where it

is often lost.

* * * * *

P. M.—Walk to Annursnack and back over stone bridge.

I sometimes reproach myself because I do not find anything attractive

in certain mere trivial employments of men,—that I skip men so

commonly, and their affairs,—the professions and the trades,—do not

elevate them at least in my thought and get some material for poetry

out of them directly. I will not avoid, then, to go by where these men

are repairing the stone bridge,—see if I cannot see poetry in that,

if that will not yield me a reflection. It is narrow to be confined

to woods and fields and grand aspects of nature only. The greatest

and wisest will still be related to men. Why not see men standing in

the sun and casting a shadow, even as trees? May not some light be

reflected from them as from the stems of trees? I will try to enjoy

them as animals, at least. They are perhaps better animals than men.

Do not neglect to speak of men’s low life and affairs with sympathy,

though you ever so speak as to suggest a contrast between them and the

ideal and divine. You may be excused if you are always pathetic, but do

not refuse to recognize.

Resolve to read no book, to take no walk, to undertake no enterprise,

but such as you can endure to give an account of to yourself. Live thus

deliberately for the most part.

When I stopped to gather some blueberries by the roadside this

afternoon, I heard the shrilling of a cricket or a grasshopper close to

me, quite clear, almost like a bell, a stridulous sound, a clear ring,

incessant, not intermittent, like the song of the black fellow I caught

the other day, and not suggesting the night, but belonging to day. It

was long before I could find him, though all the while within a foot or

two. I did not know whether to search amid the grass and stones or amid

the leaves. At last, by accident I saw him, he shrilling all the while

under an alder leaf two feet from the ground,—a slender green fellow

with long feelers and transparent wings. When he shrilled, his wings,

which opened on each other in the form of a heart perpendicularly to

his body like the wings of fairies, vibrated swiftly on each other. The

apparently wingless female, as I thought, was near.

We experience pleasure when an elevated field or even road in which we

may be walking holds its level toward the horizon at a tangent to the

earth, is not convex with the earth’s surface, but an absolute level.

On or under east side of Annursnack, _Epilobium coloratum_,

colored willow-herb, near the spring. Also _Polygonum sagittatum_,

scratch-grass.

The Price Farm road, one of those everlasting roads which the sun

delights to shine along in an August afternoon, playing truant; which

seem to stretch themselves with terrene jest as the weary traveller

journeys on; where there are three white sandy furrows (_liræ_), two

for the wheels and one between them for the horse, with endless green

grass borders between and room on each side for huckleberries and

birches; where the walls indulge in freaks, not always parallel to

the ruts, and goldenrod yellows all the path; which some elms began to

border and shade once, but left off in despair, it was so long; from

no point on which can you be said to be at any definite distance from

a town.

I associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing

air.[308]

Our little river reaches are not to be forgotten. I noticed that seen

northward on the Assabet from the Causeway Bridge near the second stone

bridge. There was [a] man in a boat in the sun, just disappearing in

the distance round a bend, lifting high his arms and dipping his paddle

as if he were a vision bound to land of the blessed,—far off, as in

picture. When I see Concord to purpose, I see it as if it were not real

but painted, and what wonder if I do not speak to _thee_? I saw a snake

by the roadside and touched him with my foot to see if he were alive.

He had a toad in his jaws, which he was preparing to swallow with his

jaws distended to three times his width, but he relinquished his prey

in haste and fled; and I thought, as the toad jumped leisurely away

with his slime-covered hind-quarters glistening in the sun, as if I,

his deliverer, wished to interrupt his meditations,—without a shriek or

fainting,—I thought what a healthy indifference he manifested. Is not

this the broad earth still? he said.[309]

_Aug. 24._ _Mollugo verticillata_, carpet-weed, flat, whorl-leaved weed

in gardens, with small white flowers. _Portulaca oleracea_, purslane,

with its yellow blossoms. _Chelone glabra._ I have seen the small

mulleins as big as a ninepence in the fields for a day or two.[310]

The weather is warmer again after a week or more of cool days. There is

greater average warmth, but not such intolerable heats as in July. The

nights especially are more equably warm now, even when the day has been

comparatively rather cool. There are few days now, fewer than in July,

when you cannot lie at your length on the grass. You have now forgotten

winter and its fashions, and have learned new summer fashions. Your

life may be out-of-doors now mainly.

[Illustration]

Rattlesnake grass is ripe. The pods of the _Asclepias pulchra_ stand

up pointedly like slender vases on a salver,— an open salver truly!

Those of the _Asclepias Syriaca_ hang down. The interregnum in the

blossoming of flowers being _well_ over, many small flowers blossom

now in the low grounds, having just reached their summer. It is now dry

enough, and they feel the heat their tenderness required. The autumnal

flowers,—goldenrods, asters, and johnswort,—though they have made

demonstrations, have not yet commenced to reign. The tansy is already

getting stale; it is perhaps the first conspicuous yellow flower that

passes from the stage.[311]

In Hubbard’s Swamp, where the blueberries, dangleberries, and

especially the pyrus or choke-berries were so abundant last summer,

there is now perhaps not one (unless a blueberry) to be found. Where

the choke-berries held on all last winter, the black and the red.

The common skullcap (_Scutellaria galericulata_), quite a handsome and

middling-large blue flower. _Lobelia pallida_ still. Pointed cleavers

or clivers (_Galium asprellum_). Is that the naked viburnum, so common,

with its white, red, then purple berries, in Hubbard’s meadow?[312]

Did I find the dwarf tree-primrose in Hubbard’s meadow to-day? _Stachys

aspera_, hedge-nettle or woundwort, a rather handsome purplish flower.

The capsules of the _Iris versicolor_, or blue flag, are now ready for

humming [?]. Elderberries are ripe.

_Aug. 25. Monday._ What the little regular, rounded, light-blue flower

in Heywood Brook which I make Class V, Order 1? Also the small purplish

flower growing on the mud in Hubbard’s meadow, perchance C. XIV, with

one pistil? What the bean vine in the garden, Class VIII, Order 1? I

do not find the name of the large white polygonum of the river. Was it

the filiform ranunculus which I found on Hubbard’s shore? _Hypericum

Virginicum_, mixed yellow and purple. The black rough fruit of the

skunk-cabbage, though green within, barely rising above the level of

the ground; you see where it has been cut in two by the mowers in the

meadows. _Polygonum amphibium_, red, in river. _Lysimachia hybrida_

still. Checkerberry in bloom. Blue-eyed grass still. _Rhus copallina_,

mountain or dwarf sumach. I now know all of the _Rhus_ genus in

Bigelow. We have all but the staghorn in Concord. What a miserable name

has the _Gratiola aurea_, hedge hyssop! Whose hedge does it grow by,

pray, in this part of the world?[313]

_Aug. 26._ A cool and even piercing wind blows to-day, making all

shrubs to bow and trees to wave; such as we could not have had in

July. I speak not of its coolness but its strength and steadiness. The

wind and the coldness increased as the day advanced, and finally the

wind went down with the sun. I was compelled to put on an extra coat

for my walk. The ground is strewn with windfalls, and much fruit will

consequently be lost.

The wind roars amid the pines like the surf. You can hardly hear

the crickets for the din, or the cars. I think the last must be

considerably delayed when their course is against it. Indeed it is

difficult to enjoy a quiet thought. You sympathize too much with

the commotion and restlessness of the elements. Such a blowing,

stirring, bustling day,—what does it mean? All light things decamp;

straws and loose leaves change their places. Such a blowing day is

no doubt indispensable in the economy of nature. The whole country is

a seashore, and the wind is the surf that breaks on it. It shows the

white and silvery under sides of the leaves. Do plants and trees need

to be thus tried and twisted? Is it a first intimation to the sap to

cease to ascend, to thicken their stems? The _Gerardia pedicularia_,

bushy gerardia, I find on the White Pond road.

I perceive that some farmers are cutting turf now. They require

the driest season of the year. There is something agreeable to my

thoughts in thus burning a part of the earth, the stock of fuel is so

inexhaustible. Nature looks not mean and niggardly, but like an ample

loaf. Is not he a rich man who owns a peat meadow? It is to enjoy the

luxury of wealth. It must be a luxury to sit around the fire in winter

days and nights and burn these dry slices of the meadow which contain

roots of all herbs. You dry and burn the very earth itself. It is a

fact kindred with salt-licks. The meadow is strewn with the fresh bars,

bearing the marks of the fork, and the turf-cutter is wheeling them out

with his barrow. To sit and see the world aglow and try to imagine how

it would seem to have it so destroyed!

Woodchucks are seen tumbling into their holes on all sides.

_Aug. 27._ I see the volumes of smoke—not quite the blaze—from burning

brush, as I suppose, far in the western horizon. I believe it is at

this season of the year chiefly that you see this sight. It is always

a question with some whether it is not a fire in the woods, or some

building. It is an interesting feature in the scenery at this season.

The farmer’s simple enterprises.

The vervain which I examined by the railroad the other day has still

a quarter of an inch to the top of its spikes. Hawkweed groundsel

(_Senecio hieracifolius_) (fireweed). _Rubus sempervirens_, evergreen

raspberry, the small low blackberry, is now in fruit. The _Medeola

Virginica_, cucumber-root, the whorl-leaved plant, is now in green

fruit. _Polygala cruciata_, cross-leaved polygala, in the meadow

between Trillium Woods and railroad. This is rare and new to me.

It has a very sweet, but as it were intermittent, fragrance, as of

checkerberry and mayflowers combined. The handsome calyx-leaves.[314]

_Aug. 28._ The pretty little blue flower in the Heywood Brook, Class

V, Order 1. Corolla about one sixth of an inch in diameter, with five

rounded segments; stamens and pistil shorter than corolla; calyx with

five acute segments and acute sinuses; leaves not opposite, lanceolate,

spatulate, blunt, somewhat hairy on upper side with a midrib only,

sessile; flowers in a loose raceme on rather long pedicels. Whole

plant decumbent, curving upward. Wet ground. Said to be like the

forget-me-not.

_Raphanus Raphanistrum_, or wild radish, in meadows.

I find three or four ordinary laborers to-day putting up the necessary

outdoor fixtures for a magnetic telegraph from Boston to Burlington.

They carry along a basket full of simple implements, like travelling

tinkers, and, with a little rude soldering, and twisting, and

straightening of wires, the work is done. It is a work which seems to

admit of the greatest latitude of ignorance and bungling, and as if you

might set your hired man with the poorest head and hands to building

a magnetic telegraph. All great inventions stoop thus low to succeed,

for the understanding is but little above the feet. They preserve so

low a tone; they are simple almost to coarseness and commonplaceness.

Somebody had told them what he wanted, and sent them forth with a coil

of wire to make a magnetic telegraph. It seems not so wonderful an

invention as a common cart or a plow.

* * * * *

Evening.—A new moon visible in the east [_sic_]. How unexpectedly

it always appears! You easily lose it in the sky. The whip-poor-will

sings, but not so commonly as in spring. The bats are active.

The poet is a man who lives at last by watching his moods. An old poet

comes at last to watch his moods as narrowly as a cat does a mouse.

I omit the unusual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the

common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry.

You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me

have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor

and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest

share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see

the things which you possess.[315]

_Aug. 29._ Though it is early, my neighbor’s hens have strayed far into

the fog toward the river. I find a wasp in my window, which already

appears to be taking refuge from winter and unspeakable fate.

Those who first built it, coming from old France, with the memory

and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were

unquestionably behind their age, and those who now inhabit it and

repair it are behind their ancestors. It is as if the inhabitants of

Boston should go down to Fort Independence, or the inhabitants of New

York should go over to Castle William, to live. I rubbed my eyes to be

sure that I was in the Nineteenth Century. That would be a good place

to read Froissart’s Chronicles, I thought. It is a specimen of the Old

World in the New. It is such a reminiscence of the Middle Ages as one

of Scott’s novels. Those old chevaliers thought they could transplant

the feudal system to America. It has been set out, but it has not

thriven.[316]

Might I not walk a little further, till I hear new crickets, till their

creak has acquired some novelty, as if they were a new species whose

habitat I had reached?[317]

The air is filled with mist, yet a transparent mist, a principle in it

you might call _flavor_, which ripens fruits. This haziness seems to

confine and concentrate the sunlight, as if you lived in a halo. It is

August.

A flock of forty-four young turkeys with their old [_sic_], half a mile

from a house on Conantum by the river, the old faintly gobbling, the

half-grown young peeping. Turkey-men!

_Gerardia glauca_ (_quercifolia_, says one), tall gerardia, one flower

only left; also _Corydalis glauca_.

_Aug. 30. Saturday._ I perceive in the Norway cinquefoil (_Potentilla

Norvegica_), now nearly out of blossom, that the alternate five leaves

of the calyx are closing over the seeds to protect them. This evidence

of forethought, this simple _reflection_ in a double sense of the

term, in this flower, is affecting to me, as if it said to me: “Even

I am doing my appointed work in this world faithfully. Not even do I,

however obscurely I may grow among the other loftier and more famous

plants, shirk my work, humble weed as I am. Not even when I have

blossomed, and have lost my painted petals and am preparing to die down

to my root, do I forget to fall with my arms around my babe, faithful

to the last, that the infant may be found preserved in the arms of

the frozen mother.” That thus all the Norway cinquefoils in the world

had curled back their calyx leaves, their warm cloaks, when now their

flowering season was past, over their progeny, from the time they were

created! There is one door closed, of the closing year. Nature ordered

this bending back of the calyx leaves, and every year since this plant

was created her order has been faithfully obeyed, and this plant acts

not an obscure, but essential, part in the revolution of the seasons.

I am not ashamed to be contemporary with the Norway cinquefoil. May

I perform my part as well![318] There is so much done toward closing

up the year’s accounts. It is as good as if I saw the great globe go

round. It is as if I saw the Janus doors of the year closing. The fall

of each humblest flower marks the annual period of some phase of human

life, experience. I can be said to note the flower’s fall only when I

see in it the symbol of my own change. When I experience this, then the

flower appears to me.

_Drosera rotundifolia_ in Moore’s new field ditch. The _Viola pedata_

and the houstonia now. What is the peculiarity of these flowers that

_they_ blossom again? Is it merely because they blossomed so early in

the spring, and now are ready for a new spring? They impress me as so

much more native or naturalized here.

We love to see Nature fruitful in whatever kind. It assures us of

her vigor and that she may equally bring forth the fruits which we

prize. I love to see the acorns plenty, even on the shrub oaks, aye,

and the nightshade berries. I love to see the potato balls numerous

and large, as I go through a low field, poisonous though they look,

the plant thus, as it were, bearing fruit at both ends, saying ever

and anon, “Not only these tubers I offer you for the present, but if

you will have new varieties,—if these do not satisfy you,—plant these

seeds.”[319] What abundance! what luxuriance! what bounty! The potato

balls, which are worthless to the farmer, combine to make the general

impression of the year’s fruitfulness. It is as cheering to me as the

rapid increase of the population of New York.

_Aug. 31._ _Proserpinaca palustris_, spear-leaved proserpinaca,

mermaid-weed. (This in Hubbard’s Grove on my way to Conantum.)

A hornets’ (?) nest in a rather tall huckleberry bush, the stems

projecting through it, the leaves spreading over it. How these fellows

avail themselves of the vegetables! They kept arriving, the great

fellows, but I never saw whence they came, but only heard the buzz

just at the entrance. (With whitish abdomens.) At length, after I have

stood before the nest five minutes, during which time they had taken no

notice of me, two seemed to be consulting at the entrance, and then one

made a threatening dash at me and returned to the nest. I took the hint

and retired. They spoke as plainly as man could have done.[320]

I see that the farmers have begun to top their corn.

Examined my old friend the green locust (?), shrilling on an alder leaf.

What relation does the fall dandelion bear to the spring dandelion?

There is a rank scent of tansy now on some roads, disagreeable to many

people from being associated in their minds with funerals, where it is

sometimes put into the coffin and about the corpse. I have not observed

much St. John’s-wort yet. _Galium triflorum_, three-flowered cleavers,

in Conant’s Spring Swamp; also fever-bush there, now budded for next

year. Tobacco-pipe (_Monotropa uniflora_) in Spring Swamp Path. I came

out of the thick, dark, swampy wood as from night into day. Having

forgotten the daylight, I was surprised to see how bright it was. I

had light enough, methought, and here was an afternoon sun illumining

all the landscape. It was a surprise to me to see how much brighter an

ordinary afternoon is than the light which penetrates a thick wood.

One of these drooping clusters of potato balls would be as good a

symbol, emblem, of the year’s fertility as anything,—better surely than

a bunch of grapes. Fruit of the strong soil, containing potash (?). The

vintage is come; the olive is ripe.

“I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;

And with forc’d fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year;”

Why not for my coat-of-arms, for device, a drooping cluster of potato

balls,—in a _potato_ field?[321]

What right has a New England poet to sing of wine, who never saw a

vineyard, who obtains his liquor from the grocer, who would not dare,

if he could, tell him what it is composed of. A Yankee singing in

praise of wine! It is not sour grapes in this case, it is sweet grapes;

the more inaccessible they are the sweeter they are. It seemed to me

that the year had nothing so much to brag of as these potato balls.

Do they not concern New-Englanders a thousand times more than all her

grapes? In Moore’s new field they grow, cultivated with the bog hoe,

manured with ashes and sphagnum. How they take to the virgin soil![322]

Shannon tells me that he took a piece of bog land of Augustus Hayden,

cleared, turned up the stumps and roots and burned it over, making a

coat of ashes six inches deep, then planted potatoes. He never put a

hoe to it till he went to dig them; then between 8 o’clock A. M. and 5

P. M. he and another man dug and housed seventy-five bushels apiece!!

Cohush now in fruit, ivory-white berries tipped _now_ with black on

stout red pedicels,—_Actæa alba_. _Collinsonia Canadensis_, horseweed.

I had discovered this singular flower there new to me, and, having a

botany by me, looked it out. What a surprise and disappointment, what

an insult and impertinence to my curiosity and expectation, to have

given me the name “horseweed!”

Cohush Swamp is about twenty rods by three or four. Among rarer

plants it contains the basswood, the black (as well as white) ash,

the fever-bush, the cohush, the collinsonia, not to mention sassafras,

poison sumach, ivy, agrimony, _Arum triphyllum_, (sweet viburnum (?)

in hedges near by), ground-nut, touch-me-not (as high as your head),

and _Eupatorium purpureum_ (eight feet, eight inches high, with a large

convex corymb (hemispherical) of many stories, fourteen inches wide;

width of plant from tip of leaf to tip of leaf two feet, diameter of

stalk one inch at ground, leaves seven in a whorl). Rare plants seem to

love certain localities. As if the original Conant had been a botanist

and endeavored to form an arboretum. A natural arboretum?

The handsome sweet viburnum berries, now red on one cheek.

It was the filiform crowfoot (_Ranunculus filiformis_) that I saw by

the riverside the other day and to-day. The season advances apace.

The flowers of the nettle-leaved vervain are now near the ends of the

spike, like the blue. _Utricularia inflata_, whorled bladderwort,

floating on the water at same place. _Gentiana Saponaria_ budded.

_Gerardia flava_ at Conant’s Grove.

Half an hour before sunset I was at Tupelo Cliff, when, looking up from

my botanizing (I had been examining the _Ranunculus filiformis_, the

_Sium latifolium_ (? ?), and the obtuse galium on the muddy shore), I

saw the seal of evening on the river. There was a quiet beauty in the

landscape at that hour which my senses were prepared to appreciate. The

sun going down on the west side, that hand being already in shadow for

the most part, but his rays lighting up the water and the willows and

pads even more than before. His rays then fell at right angles on their

stems. I sitting on the old brown geologic rocks, their feet submerged

and covered with weedy moss (utricularia roots?). Sometimes their tops

are submerged. The cardinal-flowers standing by me. The trivialness

of the day is past. The greater stillness, the _serenity_ of the air,

its coolness and transparency, the mistiness being condensed, are

favorable to thought. (The pensive eve.) The coolness of evening comes

to condense the haze of noon and make the air transparent and the

outline of objects firm and distinct, and chaste (chaste eve); even as

I am made more vigorous by my bath, am more _continent_ of thought.

After bathing, even at noonday, a man realizes a morning or evening

life.[323] The evening air is such a bath for both mind and body. When

I have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has

been all trivial,—as well field and wood as highway,—then at eve the

sun goes down westward, and the wind goes down with it, and the dews

begin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and

rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of

the day. I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty.

Thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to

feel their oats, their nutriment, and are not oppressed by the belly’s

load. It is abstinence from loading the belly anew until the brain

and divine faculties have felt their vigor. Not till some hours does

my food invigorate my brain,—ascendeth into the brain. We practice at

this hour an involuntary abstinence. We are comparatively chaste and

temperate as Eve herself; the nutriment is just reaching the brain.

Every sound is music now. The grating of some distant boat which a man

is launching on the rocky bottom,—though here is no man nor inhabited

house, nor even cultivated field, in sight,—this is heard with such

distinctness that I listen with pleasure as if it was [_sic_] music.

The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not

distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting

because of their nakedness below. How rich, like what we love to read

of South American primitive forests, is the scenery of this river!

What luxuriance of weeds, what depth of mud along its sides! These old

antehistoric, geologic, antediluvian rocks, which only primitive wading

birds, still lingering among us, are worthy to tread. The season which

we seem to _live_ in anticipation of is arrived. The water, indeed,

reflects heaven because my mind does; such is its own serenity, its

transparency and stillness.

With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my

fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat

uses! Such a medicated bath as only nature furnishes. A fish leaps, and

the dimple he makes is observed now. How ample and generous was nature!

My inheritance is not narrow.[324] Here is no other this evening. Those

resorts which I most love and frequent, numerous and vast as they are,

are as it were given up to me, as much as if I were an autocrat or

owner of the world, and by my edicts excluded men from my territories.

Perchance there is some advantage here not enjoyed in older countries.

There are said to be two thousand inhabitants in Concord, and yet I

find such ample space and verge, even miles of walking every day in

which I do not meet nor see a human being, and often not very recent

traces of them. So much of man as there is in your mind, there will be

in your eye. Methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as it

is possible, I walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture,

fresh from society of men, but turned loose into the woods, the only

man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent as if man and

his customs and institutions were not. The catbird, or the jay, is sure

of the whole of your ear now. Each noise is like a stain on pure glass.

The rivers now, these great blue subterranean heavens, reflecting the

supernal skies and red-tinted clouds.

A fly (or gnat?) will often buzz round you and persecute you like an

imp. How much of imp-like, pestering character they express! (I hear

a boy driving home his cows.) What unanimity between the water and the

sky!—one only a little denser element than the other. The grossest part

of heaven. Think of a mirror on so large a scale! Standing on distant

hills, you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake

or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror they could be.

Does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth?

We commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. Our

customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as at the meeting of

two roads, one coming from the noon, the other leading to the night.

It might be [well] if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of

the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses

beat together, if men cared for the κόσμος, or _beauty_ of the world;

if men were _social_ in a high and rare sense; if they associated on

high levels; if we took in with our tea a draught of the transparent,

dew-freighted evening air; if, with our bread and butter, we took a

slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn were the

vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads.

The air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all

those fragrances which during the day have been filling and have been

dispersed in the atmosphere. The fine fragrances, perchance, which have

floated in the upper atmospheres have settled to these low vales!

I talked of buying Conantum once, but for want of money we did not come

to terms. But I have farmed it in my own fashion every year since.

I have no objection to giving the names of some naturalists, men of

flowers, to plants, if by their lives they have identified themselves

with them. There may be a few Kalmias. But it must be done very

sparingly, or, rather, discriminatingly, and no man’s name be used who

has not been such a lover of flowers that the flowers themselves may be

supposed thus to reciprocate his love.

VIII

SEPTEMBER, 1851

(ÆT. 34)

_Sept. 1._ _Mikania scandens_, with its purplish white flowers, now

covering the button-bushes and willows by the side of the stream.

_Bidens chrysanthemoides_, large-flowered bidens, edge of river.

Various-colored polygonums standing high among the bushes and weeds by

riverside,—white and reddish and red.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating

on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and

tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly

to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has

company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago,

a singular _red_, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers

surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there

is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning

from green to scarlet or bright brick-color. Then there is the mottled

fruit of the clustered Solomon’s-seal, and also the greenish (with blue

meat) fruit of the _Convallaria multiflora_ dangling from the axils of

the leaves.

_Sept. 2._ The dense fog came into my chamber early this morning,

freighted with light, and woke me. It was, no doubt, lighter at that

hour than if there had been no fog.

Not till after several months does an infant find its hands, and it

may be seen looking at them with astonishment, holding them up to the

light; and so also it finds its toes. How many faculties there are

which we have never found![325] Some men, methinks, have found only

their hands and feet. At least I have seen some who appeared never to

have found their heads, but used them only instinctively, as the negro

who butts with his,[326] or the water-carrier who makes a pack-horse of

his. They have but partially found their heads.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body,

the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the

whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless

to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every

member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should

be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he

is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always

essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.

The maturity of the mind, however, may perchance consist with a certain

dryness.

There are flowers of thought, and there are leaves of thought; most of

our thoughts are merely leaves, to which the thread of thought is the

stem.

What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower—both

yellow—to pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire

man, those let me record, and it will be poetry. The sounds which

I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my senses, these are

significant and musical; at least, they only are heard.[327]

In a day or two the first message will be conveyed or transmitted over

the magnetic telegraph through this town, as a thought traverses space,

and no citizen of the town shall be aware of it. The atmosphere is full

of telegraphs equally unobserved. We are not confined to Morse’s or

House’s or Bain’s line.

Raise some sunflowers to attract the goldfinches, to feed them as well

as your hens. What a broad and loaded, bounteously filled platter of

food is presented this _bon-vivant_!

Here is one of those thick fogs which last well into the day. While the

farmer is concerned about the crops which his fields bear, I will be

concerned about the fertility of my human farm. I will watch the winds

and the rains as they affect the crop of thought,—the crop of crops,

ripe thoughts, which glow and rustle and fill the air with fragrance

for centuries. Is it a drought? How long since we had a rain? What is

the state of the springs? Are the low springs high?

I now begin to pluck wild apples.

The difference is not great between some fruits in which the worm is

always present and those gall fruits which were produced by the insect.

Old Cato says well, “_Patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem, esse

oportet_.” These Latin terminations express better than any English

that I know the greediness, as it were, and tenacity of purpose with

which the husbandman and householder is required to be a seller and not

a buyer,—with mastiff-like tenacity,—these _lipped_ words, which, like

the lips of moose and browsing creatures, gather in the herbage and

twigs with a certain greed. This termination _cious_ adds force to a

word, like the lips of browsing creatures, which greedily collect what

the jaw holds; as in the word “tenacious” the first half represents

the kind of jaw which holds, the last the lips which collect. It can

only be pronounced by a certain opening and protruding of the lips;

so “avaricious”. These words express the sense of their simple roots

with the addition, as it were, of a certain lip greediness. Hence

“capacious” and “capacity,” “emacity.” When these expressive words are

used, the hearer gets something to chew upon. To be a seller with the

tenacity and firmness and steadiness of the jaws which hold and the

greediness of the lips which collect. The audacious man not only dares,

but he greedily collects more danger to dare. The avaricious man not

only desires and satisfies his desire, but he collects ever new browse

in anticipation of his ever-springing desires. What is _luscious_ is

especially enjoyed by the lips. The mastiff-mouthed are tenacious. To

be a seller with mastiff-mouthed tenacity of purpose, with moose-lipped

greediness,—ability to browse! To be edacious and voracious is to be

not nibbling and swallowing merely, but eating and swallowing while the

lips are greedily collecting more food.

There is a reptile in the throat of the greedy man always thirsting

and famishing. It is not his own natural hunger and thirst which he

satisfies.

The more we know about the ancients, the more we find that they were

like the moderns. When I read Marcus Cato De Re Rustica, a small

treatise or Farmer’s Manual of those days, fresh from the field

of Roman life, all reeking with and redolent of the life of those

days, containing more indirect history than any of the histories of

Rome of direct,—all of that time but that time,—_here_ is a simple,

direct, pertinent word addressed to the Romans. And where are _the

Romans_? Rome and the Romans are commonly a piece of rhetoric. As

if New England had disappeared poetically and there were left Buel’s

“Farmer’s Companion,” or the letters of Solon Robinson, or a volume

of extracts from the _New England Farmer_. Though the Romans are no

more but a fable and an ornament of rhetoric, we have here their _New

England Farmer_, the very manual those Roman farmers read, speaking as

if they were to hear it, its voice not silenced, as if Rome were still

the mistress of the world,—as fresh as a dripping dish-cloth from a

Roman kitchen.[328] As when you overhaul the correspondence of a man

who died fifty years ago, with like surprise and feelings you overhaul

the manuscripts of the Roman nation. There exist certain old papers,

manuscripts, either the originals or faithful and trustworthy old

copies of the originals, which were left by the Roman people. They have

gone their way, but these old papers of all sorts remain. Among them

there are some farm journals, or farm books; just such a collection of

diary and memorandum—as when the cow calved, and the dimensions, with

a plan, of the barn, and how much paid to Joe Farrar for work done on

the farm, etc., etc.—as you might find in an old farmer’s pocket-book

to-day.

Indeed the farmer’s was pretty much the same routine then as now.

Cato says: “Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. Stercus sedulo

conserva, cum exportabis purgato et comminuito. Per autumnum evehito.”

(Study to have a great dungheap. Carefully preserve your dung, when

you carry it out, make clean work of it and break it up fine. Carry

it out during the autumn.) Just such directions as you find in the

“Farmer’s Almanack” to-day. It reminds me of what I see going on in our

fields every autumn. As if the farmers of Concord were obeying Cato’s

directions. And Cato but repeated the maxims of a remote antiquity.

Nothing can be more homely and suggestive of the every-day life of the

Roman agriculturalists, thus supplying the very deficiencies in what is

commonly called Roman history, _i. e._ revealing to us the actual life

of the Romans, the how they got their living and what they did from day

to day.[329]

They planted _rapa_, _raphanos_, _milium_, and _panicum_ in low foggy

land, _ager nebulosus_.

I see the farmer now—_i. e._ I shall in autumn—on every side carting

out his manure and sedulously making his compost-heap, or scattering

it over his grass ground and breaking it up with a mallet; and it

reminds me of Cato’s advice. He died one hundred and fifty years before

Christ.[330] Before Christianity was heard of, this was done. A Roman

family appears to have had a great supply of tubs and kettles.

A fire in the sitting-room to-day. Walk in the afternoon by Walden road

and railroad to Minn’s place, and round it to railroad and home. The

first coolness is welcome, so serious and fertile of thought. My skin

contracts, and I become more continent. Carried umbrellas, it mizzling.

As in the night, now in the rain, I smell the fragrance of the woods.

The prunella leaves have turned a delicate claret or lake color by the

roadside. I am interested in these revolutions as much as in those of

kingdoms. Is there not tragedy enough in the autumn? Walden seems to

be going down at last. The pines are dead and leaning, red and half

upset, about its shore. Thus, by its rising once in twenty-five years,

perchance, it keeps an open shore, as if the ice had heaved them over.

Found the succory at Minn’s Bridge on railroad and beyond. Query: May

not this and the tree-primrose and other plants be distributed from

Boston on the rays of the railroads, the seeds mixing with the grains

and all kinds of dirt and being blown from the passing freight-cars?

The feathery-tailed fruit of the fertile flowers of the clematis

conspicuous now.

The shorn meadows looked of a living green as we came home at eve,

even greener than in spring. The _faenum cordum_, the aftermath,

_sicilimenta de prato_, the second mowings of the meadow, this reminds

me of, in Cato.[331]

_Sept. 3._ Why was there never a poem on the cricket? Its creak

seems to me to be one of the most prominent and obvious facts in the

world, and the least heeded. In the report of a man’s contemplations

I look to see somewhat answering to this sound.[332] When I sat on

Lee’s Cliff the other day (August 29th), I saw a man working with a

horse in a field by the river, carting dirt; and the horse and his

relation to him struck me as very remarkable. There was the horse, a

mere animated machine,—though his tail was brushing off the flies,—his

whole existence subordinated to the man’s, with no tradition, perhaps

no instinct, in him of independence and freedom, of a time when he was

wild and free,—completely humanized. No compact made with him that he

should have the Saturday afternoons, or the Sundays, or any holidays.

His independence never recognized, it being now quite forgotten both

by men and by horses that the horse was ever free. For I am not aware

that there are any wild horses known surely not to be descended from

tame ones. Assisting that man to pull down that bank and spread it over

the meadow; only keeping off the flies with his tail, and stamping,

and catching a mouthful of grass or leaves from time to time, on his

own account,—all the rest for man. It seemed hardly worth while that

he should be _animated_ for this. It was plain that the man was not

educating the horse; not trying to develop his nature, but merely

getting work out of him. That mass of animated matter seemed more

completely the servant of man than any inanimate. For slaves have their

holidays; a heaven is conceded to them, but to the horse none. Now

and forever he is man’s slave. The more I considered, the more the man

seemed akin to the horse; only his was the stronger will of the two.

For a little further on I saw an Irishman shovelling, who evidently was

as much tamed as the horse. He had stipulated that to a certain extent

his independence be recognized, and yet really he was but little more

independent. I had always instinctively regarded the horse as a free

people somewhere, living wild. Whatever has not come under the sway of

man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild,—not

tamed and broken by society. Now for my part I have such a respect for

the horse’s nature as would tempt me to let him alone; not to interfere

with him,—his walks, his diet, his loves. But by mankind he is treated

simply as if he were an engine which must have rest and is sensible

of pain. Suppose that every squirrel were made to turn a coffee-mill!

Suppose that the gazelles were made to draw milk-carts!

There he was with his tail cut off, because it was in the way, or to

suit the taste of his owner; his mane trimmed, and his feet shod with

iron that he might wear longer. What is a horse but an animal that has

lost its liberty? What is it but a system of slavery? and do you not

thus by _insensible_ and unimportant degrees come to human slavery?

Has lost its liberty!—and has man got any more liberty himself for

having robbed the horse, or has he lost just as much of his own, and

become more like the horse he has robbed? Is not the other end of the

bridle in this case, too, coiled round his own neck? Hence stable-boys,

jockeys, all that class that is daily transported by fast horses. There

he stood with his oblong square figure (his tail being cut off) seen

against the water, brushing off the flies with his tail and stamping,

braced back while the man was filling the cart.[333]

It is a very remarkable and significant fact that, though no man is

quite well or healthy, yet every one believes practically that health

is the rule and disease the exception, and each invalid is wont to

think himself in a minority, and to postpone somewhat of endeavor to

another state of existence. But it may be some encouragement to men to

know that in this respect they stand on the same platform, that disease

is, in fact, the _rule_ of our terrestrial life and the prophecy of a

_celestial_ life. Where is the coward who despairs because he is sick?

Every one may live either the life of Achilles or of Nestor. Seen in

this light, our life with all its diseases will look healthy, and in

one sense the more healthy as it is the more diseased. Disease is not

the accident of the individual, nor even of the generation, but of

life itself. In some form, and to some degree or other, it is one of

the permanent conditions of life. It is, nevertheless, a cheering fact

that men affirm health unanimously, and esteem themselves miserable

failures. Here was no blunder. They gave us life on exactly these

conditions, and methinks we shall live it with more heart when we

perceive clearly that these are the terms on which we have it. Life

is a warfare, a struggle, and the diseases of the body answer to the

troubles and defeats of the spirit. Man begins by quarrelling with the

animal in him, and the result is immediate disease. In proportion as

the spirit is the more ambitious and persevering, the more obstacles

it will meet with. It is as a seer that man asserts his disease to be

exceptional.[334]

* * * * *

2 P. M.—To Hubbard’s Swimming-Place and Grove in rain.

As I went under the new telegraph-wire, I heard it vibrating like a

harp high overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a

supernal life, which came down to us, and vibrated the lattice-work of

this life of ours.[335]

The melons and the apples seem at once to feed my brain.

Here comes a laborer from his dinner to resume his work at clearing

out a ditch notwithstanding the rain, remembering as Cato says, _per

ferias potuisse fossas veteres tergeri_, that in the holidays old

ditches might have been cleared out. One would think that I were the

paterfamilias come to see if the steward of my farm has done his duty.

The ivy leaves are turning red. Fall dandelions stand thick in the

meadows.

How much the Roman must have been indebted to his agriculture, dealing

with the earth, its clods and stubble, its dust and mire. Their farmer

consuls were their glory, and they well knew the farm to be the nursery

of soldiers. Read Cato to see what kind of legs the Romans stood on.

The leaves of the hardhack are somewhat appressed, clothing the stem

and showing their downy under sides like white, waving wands. Is it

peculiar to the season, or the rain,—or the plant?

Walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially

if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads,

appear more beautiful than ever,—the hypericums, for instance. They

are equally beautiful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost

spirited away, in a robe of dewdrops.[336]

Some farmers have begun to thresh and winnow their oats.

Identified spotted spurge (_Euphorbia maculata_), apparently out of

blossom. Shepherd’s-purse and chickweed.

As for walking, the inhabitants of large English towns are confined

almost exclusively to their parks and to the highways. The few

footpaths in their vicinities “are gradually vanishing,” says

Wilkinson, “under the encroachments of the proprietors.” He proposes

that the people’s right to them be asserted and defended and that

they be kept in a passable state at the public expense. “This,”

says he, “would be easily done by means of asphalt laid upon a good

foundation”!!! So much for walking, and the prospects of walking, in

the neighborhood of English large towns.

Think of a man—he may be a genius of some kind—being confined to

a highway and a park for his world to range in! I should die from

mere nervousness at the thought of such confinement. I should

hesitate before I were born, if those terms could be made known to me

beforehand. Fenced in forever by those green barriers of fields, where

gentlemen are seated! Can they be said to be inhabitants of this globe?

Will they be content to inhabit heaven thus partially?

_Sept. 4._ 8 A. M.—A clear and pleasant day after the rain. Start

for Boon’s Pond in Stow with C. Every sight and sound was the more

interesting for the clear atmosphere. When you are starting away,

leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a

walk, you look at every object with a traveller’s, or at least with

historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk

hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveller.

It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if

you were a traveller passing through it, commenting on your neighbors

as strangers.[337] We stood thus on Wood’s Bridge, the first bridge,

in the capacity of pilgrims and strangers to its familiarity, giving

it one more chance with us, though our townsmen who passed may not have

perceived it.

There was a pretty good-sized pickerel poised over the sandy bottom

close to the shore and motionless as a shadow. It is wonderful how they

resist the slight current of our river and remain thus stationary for

hours. He, no doubt, saw us plainly on the bridge,—in the sunny water,

his whole form distinct and his shadow,—motionless as the steel trap

which does not spring till the fox’s foot has touched it.

—— ——’s dog sprang up, ran out, and growled at us, and in his eye I

seemed to see the eye of his master. I have no doubt but that, as is

the master, such in course of time tend to become his herds and flocks

as well as dogs. One man’s oxen will be clever and solid, another’s

mischievous, another’s mangy,—in each case like their respective

owners. No doubt man impresses his own character on the beasts which

he tames and employs; they are not only humanized, but they acquire

his particular human nature.[338] How much oxen are like farmers

generally, and cows like farmers’ wives! and young steers and heifers

like farmers’ boys and girls! The farmer acts on the ox, and the ox

reacts on the farmer. They do not meet half-way, it is true, but they

do meet at a distance from the centre of each proportionate to each

one’s intellectual power.[339] The farmer is ox-like in his thought, in

his walk, in his strength, in his trustworthiness, in his taste.[340]

Hosmer’s man was cutting his millet, and his buckwheat already lay in

_red_ piles in the field.

The first picture we noticed was where the road turned among the pitch

pines and showed the Hadley house, with the high wooded hill behind

with dew and sun on it, the gracefully winding road path, and a more

distant horizon on the right of the house. Just beyond, on the left,

it was pleasant walking where the road was shaded by a high hill, as

it can be only in the morning. Even in the morning that additional

coolness and early-dawn-like feeling of a more sacred and earlier

season are agreeable.

The lane in front of Tarbell’s house, which is but little worn and

appears to lead nowhere, though it has so wide and all-engulfing an

opening, suggested that such things might be contrived for effect in

laying out grounds. (Only those things are sure to have the greatest

and best effect, which like this were not contrived for the sake of

effect.) An open path which would suggest walking and adventuring on

it, the going to some place strange and far away. It would make you

think of or imagine distant places and spaces greater than the estate.

It was pleasant, looking back just beyond, to see a heavy shadow (made

by some high birches) reaching quite across the road. Light and shadow

are sufficient contrast and furnish sufficient excitement when we are

well.

Now we were passing the vale of Brown and Tarbell, a sunshiny mead

pastured by cattle and sparkling with dew, the sound of crows and

swallows heard in the air, and leafy-columned elms seen here and there

shining with dew. The morning freshness and unworldliness of that

domain![341] The vale of Tempe and of Arcady is not farther off than

are the conscious lives of men from their opportunities. Our life is

as far from corresponding to its scenery as we are distant from Tempe

and Arcadia; that is to say, they are far away because we are far from

living natural lives. How absurd it would be to insist on the vale of

Tempe in particular when we have such vales as we have!

In the Marlborough road, in the woods, I saw a purple streak like

a stain on the red pine leaves and sand under my feet, which I was

surprised to find was made by a dense mass of purple fleas, somewhat

like snow-fleas,—a faint purple stain as if some purple dye had been

spilt. What is that slender pink flower that I find in the Marlborough

road,—smaller than a snapdragon? The slender stems of grass which hang

over the ruts and horses’ path in this little-frequented road are so

laden with dew that I am compelled to hold a bush before me to shake it

off. The jays scream on the right and left and are seen flying further

off as we go by.

We drink in the meadow at Second Division Brook, then sit awhile to

watch its yellowish pebbles and the cress (?) in it and other weeds.

The ripples cover its surface like a network and are faithfully

reflected on the bottom. In some places, the sun reflected from ripples

on a flat stone looks like a golden comb. The whole brook seems as

busy as a loom: it is a woof and warp of ripples; fairy fingers are

throwing the shuttle at every step, and the long, waving brook is the

fine product. The water is wonderfully clear.

To have a hut here, and a footpath to the brook! For roads, I think

that a poet cannot tolerate more than a footpath through the fields;

that is wide enough, and for purposes of winged poesy suffices. It

is not for the muse to speak of cart-paths. I would fain travel by a

footpath round the world.[342] I do not ask the railroads of commerce,

not even the cart-paths of the farmer. Pray, what other path would you

have than a footpath? What else should wear a path? This is the track

of man alone. What more suggestive to the pensive walker?[343] One

walks in a wheel-track with less emotion; he is at a greater distance

from man; but this footpath was, perchance, worn by the bare feet of

human beings, and he cannot but think with interest of them.

The grapes, though their leaves are withering and falling, are yet too

sour to eat.

In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the

squirrel of nuts,—something for conversation in winter evenings. I love

to think then of the more distant walks I took in summer.[344]

At the powder-mills the carbonic acid gas in the road from the building

where they were making charcoal made us cough for twenty or thirty

rods.

Saw some gray squirrels whirling their cylinder by the roadside. How

fitted that cylinder to this animal! “A squirrel is easily taught to

turn his cylinder” might be a saying frequently applicable. And as

they turned, one leaped over or dodged under another most gracefully

and unexpectedly, with interweaving motions. It was the circus and

menagerie combined. So human they were, exhibiting themselves.

In the Marlborough road, I forgot to say, we brushed the _Polygonum

articulatum_ with its spikes of reddish-white flowers, a slender and

tender plant which loves the middle of dry and sandy not-much-travelled

roads. To find that the very atoms bloom, that there are flowers we

rudely brush against which only the microscope reveals!

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so

you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions

to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies.

There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve

the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and

transient the provocation. What else is there to be improved? Who knows

what opportunities he may neglect? It is not in vain that the mind

turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it

inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious

of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the

right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak. He is a

wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and

plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something,

contributed something.[345]

And now, methinks, this wider wood-path[346] is not bad, for it admits

of society more conveniently. Two can walk side by side in it in the

ruts, aye, and one more in the horse-track.[347] The Indian walked in

single file, more solitary,—not side by side, chatting as he went. The

woodman’s cart and sled make just the path two walkers want through the

wood.

Beyond the powder-mills we watched some fat oxen, elephantine,

behemoths,—one Rufus-Hosmer-eyed, with the long lash and projecting

eye-ball.

Now past the paper-mills, by the westernmost road east of the river,

the first new ground we’ve reached.

Not only the prunella turns _lake_, but the _Hypericum Virginicum_ in

the hollows by the roadside,—a handsome blush. A part of the autumnal

tints, ripe leaves. Leaves acquire red blood. Red colors touch our

blood, and excite us as well as cows and geese.