31 May 1852 – 6 June 1852

Evening. —To the Lee place, the moon about full. The sounds I hear by the bridge: the midsummer frog (I think it is not the toad), the nighthawk, crickets, the peetweet (it is early), the hum of dor-bugs, and the whip-poor-will. ‘The boys are coming home from fish- ing, for the river is down at last. The moving clouds are the drama of the moonlight nights, and never-failing entertainment of nightly travellers. You can never fore- tell the fate of the moon,— whether she will prevail over or be obscured by the clouds half an hour hence. The traveller’s sympathy with the moon makes the drama of the shifting clouds interesting. The fate of the moon will disappoint all expectations. Her own light creates the shadows in the coming (advancing) clouds, and exaggerates her destiny.’ I do not perceive much warmth in the rocks.

Wednesday. Measured C. Davis’s elm at the top of his fence, just built, five feet from the ground. It is fifteen and two twelfths feet in circumference and much larger many feet higher. Buttercups now spot the churchyard. The elms now hold a good deal of shade and look rich and heavy with foliage. You see darkness in them. Golden alexanders — looks like a parsnip — near or beyond the East Quarter schoolhouse. The barberry blossoms are now abundant. They fill the air with a disagreeable, buttery fragrance. Low blackberry in bloom. Hazy days now. Milkweed, ele- campane, butter-and-eggs, etc., etc., are getting up. The dried brown petals of apple blossoms spot the sod in pastures. Measured a chestnut stump on Asa White’s land, twenty-three and nine twelfths feet in circumference, eight and one half feet one way, seven feet the other, at one foot from ground. Nest of Wil- son’s thrush with bluish-green eggs. Female sassafras in bloom. I think I may say the umbelled thesium has begun to bloom. The pincushion galls appear on the oaks. I found a plant whose name I know not; somewhat fern-like; leaves in a whorl of five, two double, one single; the whole nine inches high; no flower.

'The nepeta by Deacon Brown’s, a pretty blue flower. It has been a sultry day, and a slight thunder-shower, and now I see fireflies in the meadows at evening.

Friday. The birds sing at dawn. What sounds to be awakened by! If only our sleep, our dreams, are such as to harmonize with the song, the warbling of the birds, ushering in the day! They ap- pear comparatively silent an hour or two later. The dandelions are now almost all gone to seed, and children may now see if ‘‘ your mother wants you.” The golden alexanders is called Zizia aurea. The cistus is out. Lupines in prime. The Canada snap- dragon, that little blue flower that lasts so long, grows with the lupines under Fair Haven. The early chick- weed ! with the star-shaped flower is common in fields now.

The medeola has blossomed in a tumbler. I seem to perceive a pleasant fugacious fragrance from its rather delicate but inconspicuous green flower. Its whorls of leaves of two stages are the most remarkable. I do not perceive the smell of the cucumber in its root. To Harrington’s, p.m. The silver cinquefoil (Poten- tilla argentea) now, a delicate spring-yellow, sunny-yel- low (before the dog-days) flower; none of the fire of autumnal yellows in it. Its silvery leaf is as good as a flower. Whiteweed. The constant inquiry which nature puts is: ‘‘ Are you virtuous? Then you can behold me.” Beauty, fra- grance, music, sweetness, and joy of all kinds are for the virtuous. That I thought when I heard the tele- graph harp to-day. Raspberry some days since. The leaves of young oaks are full-grown. The Viburnum lentago, if that edged petiole marks it enough. The Veratrum viride, with its green and yellowish flower. Umbelled thesium, which has shown its buds so long. The Viola lanceo- lata now, instead of the V. blanda. In some places the leaves of the last are grown quite large. The sidesaddle- flowers. The Thalictrum anemonoides still. ‘The dwarf cornel by Harrington’s road looks like large snowflakes on the hillside, it is so thick. It is a neat, geometrical flower, of a pure white, sometimes greenish, or green. The white ' spruce cones are an inch and a half long. The larch cones appear not so red yet as they will be. Can it be that earliest potentilla that now stands up so high in open pine woods and wood-paths, — a foot high? The simplex variety? ‘There is now froth on the white and pitch pines, at the base of the new shoots, which are from three to six inches long. Some meadows are quite white with the cotton-grass. White clover now. Some rye-fields are almost fully grown, where it appears to have sown itself. It is commonly two feet high. Those great roots belong to the yellow ily. Some poet must sing in praise of the bulbous arethusa. The lupine is now in its glory. It is the more im- portant because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together, and of such a pleasing variety of colors, — purple, pink, or lilac, and white, — especially with the sun on it, when the transparency of the flower makes its color changeable. It paints a whole hillside with its blue, making such a field (if not meadow) as Proserpine might have wandered in. Its leaf was made to be covered with dewdrops. I am quite excited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps with narrow intervals. Such a profusion of the hea- venly, the elysian, color, as if these were the Elysian Fields. They say the seeds look like babies’ faces, and hence the flower is so named. No other flowers ex- hibit so much blue. That is the value of the lupine. The earth is blued with them. Yet a third of a mile distant I do not detect their color on the hillside. Per- chance because it is the color of the air. It is not dis- tinct enough. You passed along here, perchance, a fortnight ago, and the hillside was comparatively barren, but now you come and these glorious redeemers appear to have flashed out here all at once. Who planted the seeds of lupines in the barren soil? Who watereth the lupines in the fields? Distinguished the Geum rivale, water avens, in James P. Brown’s meadow, a drooping, half-closed, purplish- brown flower, with a strawberry-looking fruit. The Erigeron bellidifolius, robin’s-plantain (may it be the E. Philadelphicus ?), that rather rose-purple flower which looks like an early aster. A rather delicate and interesting flower, flesh-colored. Pray let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esqui- maux-fashion, a scrambling pack tearing over hill and vale and biting each other’s ears. What a despicable mode of progressing, to be drawn by a pack of dogs! Why not by a flock of mice? ? De Kay, of the New York Report, says the bream “is of no value as an article of food, but is often caught for amusement!” I think it is the sweetest fish in our river. Richardson says that white bears and arctic foxes frequent the most northern land discovered. * [Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, p. 473; Misc., Riv. 276.]

Sunday. First devil’s-needles in the air, and some smaller, bright-green ones on flowers. The earliest blueberries are now forming as greenberries. The wind already injures the just-expanded leaves, tearing them and making them turn black. I see the effects of recent frosts on the young oaks in hollows in the woods. The leaves are turned dry, black, and crisp. The side-flowering sandwort, an inconspicuous white flower like a chickweed.