20 October 1851 – 26 October 1851

The pines, both white and pitch, have now shed their leaves, and the ground in the pine woods is strewn with the newly fallen needles. The fragrant life- everlasting is still fresh, and the Canada snapdragon still blooms bluely by the roadside. ‘The rain and damp- ness have given birth to a new crop of mushrooms. ‘The small willow-like shrub (sage willow (?), Salix longi- rostris, Mx.) is shedding its small leaves, which turn black in drying and cover the path.

It is never too late to learn. I observed to-day the Inshman who helped me survey twisting the branch of a birch for a withe, and before he cut it off; and also, wishing to stick a tall, smooth pole in the ground, cut a notch in the side of it by which to drive it with a hatchet.

I awoke this morning to infinite regret. In my dream I had been riding, but the horses bit each other and occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my employment to hold their heads apart. Next I sailed over the sea in a small vessel such as the North- men used, as it were to the Bay of Fundy, and thence overland I sailed, still over the shallows about the sources of rivers toward the deeper channel of a stream which emptied into the Gulf beyond, — the Miramichi, was it? Again I was in my own small pleasure-boat, learning to sail on the sea, and I raised my sail before my anchor, which I dragged far into the sea. I saw the buttons which had come off the coats of drowned men, and suddenly I saw my dog — when I knew not that I had one — standing in the sea up to his chin, to warm his legs, which had been wet, which the cool wind numbed. And then I was walking in a meadow, where the dry season permitted me to walk further than usual, and there I met Mr. Alcott, and we fell to quoting and referring to grand and pleasing couplets and single lines which we had read in times past; and I quoted one which in my waking hours I have no knowledge of, but in my dream it was familiar enough. I only know that those which I quoted expressed regret, and were like the following, though they were not these, viz.: — “The short parenthesis of life was sweet,” “The remembrance of youth is a sigh,” etc. It had the word ‘‘memory” in it!! And then again the instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instru- ment from which I heard a strain die out, —a bugle, or a clarionet, or a flute. My body was the organ and channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it. My flesh sounded and vibrated still to the strain, and my nerves were the chords of the lyre. I awoke, therefore, to an infinite regret, — to find myself, not the thoroughfare of glorious and world- stirring inspirations, but a scuttle full of dirt, such a thoroughfare only as the street and the kennel, where, perchance, the wind may sometimes draw forth a strain of music from a straw. I can partly account for this. Last evening I was reading Laing’s account of the Northmen, and though I did not write in my Journal, I remember feeling a fer- tile regret, and deriving even an inexpressible satisfaction, as it were, from my ability to feel regret, which made that evening richer than those which had preceded it. I heard the last strain or flourish, as I woke, played on my body as the instrument. Such I knew I had been and might be again, and my regret arose from the consciousness how little like a musical instrument my body was now.