27 October 1851 – 2 November 1851

This morning I wake and find it snowing and the ground covered with snow; quite unexpectedly, for last night it was rainy but not cold. The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot move. She who was as the morning light to me is now neither the morn- ing star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet the more rapid our divergence. So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has | a greater distance between. The night is oracular. What have been the intima- tions of the night? I ask. How have you passed the night? Good-night! My friend will be bold to conjecture; he will guess bravely at the significance of my words. The cold numbs my fingers this morning. The strong northwest wind blows the damp snow along almost hor- izontally. ‘The birds fly about as if seeking shelter. Perhaps it was the young of the purple finch that I saw sliding down the grass stems some weeks ago; or was it the white-throated finch ? * Winter, with its znwardness, is upon us. A man is constrained to sit down, and to think. The Ardea minor still with us. Saw a woodcock ? feeding, probing the mud with its long bill, under the railroad bridge within two feet of me for a long time. Could not scare it far away. What a disproportionate length of bill! It is a sort of badge they [wear] as a punishment for greediness in a former state. The highest arch of the stone bridge is six feet eight inches above the present surface of the water, which I should think was more than a foot higher than it has been this summer, and is four inches below the long stone in the east abutment.

The wild apples are now getting palatable. I find a few left on distant trees, which the farmer thinks it not worth his while to gather. He thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker’s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have.* These apples cannot be too knurly and rusty and crabbed (to look at). The knurl- iest will have some redeeming traits, even to the eyes. You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprin- kled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere, though per- chance one side may only seem to betray that it has once fallen in a brick-yard, and the other have been bespattered from a roily ink-bottle.1 Some red stains it will have, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed ; some dark and rusty blotches, in mem- ory of the clouds and foggy mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green, reflecting the general face of nature, — green even as the fields; or yellowish ground, if it has a sunny flavor, — yellow as the harvests, or russet as the hills.? The saunterer’s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house.? The noblest of fruits is the apple. Let the most beautiful or swiftest have it.* The robins now fly in flocks. ° (Excursions, p. 311; Riv. 382.] * [Excursions, p. 297; Riv. 364, 365.]

Saturday. R. W. E. says that Channing calls [ ]‘ ‘“‘seven feet of sandstone with a spoonful of wit.” It is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact sim- ply and adequately, to digest some experience cleanly, to say “yes” and “no” with authority, to make a square. edge, to conceive and suffer the truth to pass through us living and intact, even as a waterfowl an eel, as it flies over the meadows, thus stocking new waters. First of all a man must see, before he can say. Statements are made but partially. Things are said with reference to cer- tain conventions or existing institutions, not absolutely. A fact truly and absolutely stated is taken out of the region of common sense and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. Say it and have done with it. Express it without expressing yourself. See not with the eye of science, which is barren, nor of youthful poetry, which is impotent. But taste the world and digest it. It would seem as if things got said but rarely and by chance. As you see, so at length will you say. When facts are seen superficially, they are seen as they lie in relation to certain institutions, perchance. But I would have them expressed as more deeply seen, with deeper references; so that the hearer or reader cannot recognize them or apprehend their significance from the platform of common life, but it will be necessary that he be in a sense translated in order to understand them; when the truth respecting his things shall naturally exhale from a man like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of the trapper. At first blush a man is not capable of re- porting truth; he must be drenched and saturated with it first. What was enthusiasm in the young man must become temperament in thematureman. Without excite- ment, heat, or passion, he will survey the world which excited the youth and threw him off his balance. As all things are significant, so all words should be significant. It is a fault which attaches to the speaker, to speak flip- pantly or superficially of anything. Of what use are words which do not move the hearer, — are not oracu- lar and fateful? A style in which the matter is all in all, and the manner nothing at all. In your thoughts no more than in your walks do you meet men. In moods I find such privacy as in dismal swamps and on mountain-tops. Man recognizes laws little enforced, and he conde- scends to obey them. In the moment that he feels his superiority to them as compulsatory, he, as it were, courteously reénacts them but to obey them. This on my way to Conantum, 2.30 p.m. Itis a bright, clear, warm November day. I feel blessed. Ilove my life. I warm toward all nature. The woods are now much more open than when I last observed them; the leaves have fallen, and they let in light, and Isee thesky through them as through a crow’s wing in every direction. For the most part only the pines and oaks (white?) retain their leaves. At a distance, accordingly, the forest is green and reddish. The crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod. Minott says that G. M. Barrett told him that Amos Baker told him that during Concord Fight he went over behind the hill to the old Whittaker place (Sam Buttrick’s) and stayed. Yet he was described as the only survivor of Concord Fight. Received a pension for running away? Fall dandelions look bright still. The grass has got a new greenness in spots. At this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about. The skunk-cab- bage is already pushing up again. The alders have lost their leaves, and the willows except a few shrivelled ones. It is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. Here in the causeway, as I walk toward the sun, I per- ceive that the air is full of them streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretching across the road, and yet I cannot see them in any other direc- tion, and feel not one. It looks as if the birds would be incommoded. They have the effect of a shimmer in the air. This shimmer, moving along them as they are waved by the wind, gives the effect of a drifting storm of light. It is more like a fine snow-storm which drifts athwart your path than anything else. What is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere, to call forth this activity? If there were no sunshine, I should never find out that they existed, I should not know that I was bursting a myriad barriers. Though you break them with your person, you feel not one. Why should this day be so distinguished ? The rain of night before last has raised the river at least two feet, and the meadows wear a late-fall look. The naked and weedy stems of the button-bush are sud- denly submerged; you no longer look for pickerel from the bridges. The shallow and shrunken shore is also submerged. I see so far and distinctly, my eyes seem to slide in this clear air. The river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual. It is all in the air. The cinque- foil on Conantum. Counted one hundred and twenty- five crows in one straggling flock moving westward. The red shrub oak leaves abide on the hills. The witch-hazels have mostly lost their blossoms, perhaps on account of the snow. The ground wears its red carpet under the pines. The pitch pines show new buds at the end of their plumes. How long this? Saw a canoe birch by road beyond the Abel Minott house; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs. It is of a more unspotted, trans- parent, and perhaps pinkish white than the common, has considerable branches as well as white ones, and its branches do not droop and curl downward like that. There will be some loose curls of bark about it. The common birch is finely branched and has frequently a snarly head; the former is a more open and free-grow- ing tree. If at a distance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. You can tell where it has grown after the wood has turned to mould by a small fragment of its bark still left, — if it divides readily. The common birch is more covered with moss, has the aspect of hay- ing grown more slowly, and has many more branches. I have heard of a man in Maine who copied the whole Bible on to birch bark. It was so much easier than to write that sentence which the birch tree stands for.

Sunday. The muskrat-houses are mostly covered by the rise of the river! — not a very unex- pected one either. Old wells as well as walls must be among the oldest monuments of civilized man here. How old may be the most ancient well which men use to-day. Saw a canoe birch beyond Nawshawtuct, growing out of the middle of a white pine stump, which still showed the mark of the axe, sixteen inches in dia- meter at its bottom, or two feet from the ground, or where it had first taken root on the stump.