18 October 1852 – 24 October 1852

Up river to Bittern Cliff. A mild, still, but cloudy, or rather misty, afternoon. The water is at present perfectly smooth and calm, but covered with a kind of smoky or hazy film. Never- theless, the reflections of distant woods, though less distinct, are softer, seen through this smoky and dark- ened atmosphere. I speak only of the reflections as seen in the broader bays and longer reaches of the river, as at the Willow End. The general impression made by the river landscape now is that of bareness and bleakness, the black willow (not yet the golden) and the button-bush having lost almost all their leaves (the latter perhaps all), and the last is covered with the fuzzy mikania blossoms gone to seed, a dirty white. There are a very few polygonums, hydropiperoides and perhaps the unknown rose-tinted one, but most have withered before the frosts. The vegetation of the im- mediate shore and the water is for the most part black and withered. A few muskrat-houses are going up, abrupt and precipitous on one side, sloped on the other. I distinguish the dark moist layer of weeds de- posited last night on what had dried in the sun. The tall bulrush and the wool-grass are dry and yellow, ex- cept a few in deep water, but the rainbow rush (Juncus militaris) is still green. The autumnal tints, though less brilliant and striking, are perhaps quite as agreeable, now that the frosts have somewhat dulled and softened [them]. Now that the forest is universally imbrowned, they make a more harmonious impression. Wooded hillsides reflected in the water are particularly agree- able. The undulation which the boat creates gives them the appearance of being terraced. Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter. Saw two or three ducks, which fly up before and alight far behind.

I see the dandelion blossoms in the path. The buds of the skunk-cabbage already show themselves in the meadow, the pointed involucres (?). At 5 p. m. I found the fringed gentian now some- what stale and touched by frost, being in the meadow toward Peter’s. (Gentiana crinita in September, Bige- low and Gray.) Probably on high, moist ground it is fresher. It may have been in bloom a month. It has been cut off by the mower, and apparently has put out in consequence a mass of short branches full of flowers. This may make it later. I doubt if I can find one naturally grown. At this hour the blossoms are tightly rolled and twisted, and I see that the bees have gnawed round holes in their sides to come at the nectar. They have found them, though I had not. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen” by man. An hour ago I doubted if fringed gentians were in Concord now, but, having found these, they as it were surrender, and I hear of them at the bottom of N. Barrett’s orchard toward the river, and by Tuttle’s (?). They are now, at 8 A. M., opening a little in a pitcher. It is too remarkable a flower not to be sought out and admired each year, however rare. It is one of the er- rands of the walker, as well as of the bees, for it yields him a more celestial nectar still. It is a very singular and agreeable surprise to come upon this conspicuous and handsome and withal blue flower at this season, when flowers have passed out of our minds and mem- ories; the latest of all to begin to bloom, unless it be the witch-hazel, when, excepting the latter, flowers are reduced to that small Spartan cohort, hardy, but for the most part unobserved, which linger till the snow buries them, and those interesting reappearing flowers which, though fair and fresh and tender, hardly delude us with the prospect of a new spring, and which we pass by indifferent, as if they only bloomed to die. Vide Bryant’s verses on the Fringed Gentian. There are a few bulrushes, lances of the pigmies or the cranes, still green in the brooks. I brought home one big as my finger and almost six feet high. Most are now yellowed and dry. It is remarkable how tightly the gentians roll and twist up at night, as if that were their constant state. Probably those bees were working late that found it necessary to perforate the flower.

Canada snapdragon, tansy, white golden- rod, blue-stemmed ditto. Aster undulatus, autumnal dandelion, tall buttercup, yarrow, mayweed. Picking chestnuts on Pine Hill. A rather cold and windy, somewhat wintry afternoon, the heavens overcast. The clouds have lifted in the northwest, and I see the moun- tains 1n sunshine, all the more attractive from the cold I feel here, with a tinge of purple on them, a cold but memorable and glorious outline. This is an advantage of mountains in the horizon: they show you fair weather from the midst of foul. The small red Solomon’s-seal berries spot the ground here and there amid the dry leaves. The witch-hazel is bare of all but flowers. Many a man, when I tell him that I have been on to a mountain, asks if I took a glass with me. No doubt, I could have seen further with a glass, and particular objects more distinctly,—could have counted more meeting-houses; but this has nothing to do with the peculiar beauty and grandeur of the view which an elevated position affords. It was not to see a few par- ticular objects, as if they were near at hand, as I had been accustomed to see them, that I ascended the mountain, but to see an infinite variety far and near in their relation to each other, thus reduced to a single picture. The facts of science, in comparison with poetry, are wont to be as vulgar as looking from the mountain with a telescope. It is a counting of meeting-houses. At the public house, the mountain-house, they keep a glass to let, and think the journey to the mountain-top is lost, that you have got but half the view, if you have not taken a glass with you.

Thursday. P. M.—To Second Division Brook and Ministerial Swamp. Cerastium. Apparently some flowers yield to the frosts; others linger here and there till the snow buries them. Saw that the side-flowering skull-cap was killed by the frost. If they grow in some nook out of the way of frosts, they last so much the longer. Methinks the frost puts a period to a large class. The goldenrods, being dead, are now a dingy white along the brooks (white fuzz, dark-brown leaves), together with rusty, fuzzy trumpet-weeds and asters in the same condition. This is a remarkable feature in the landscape now, the abundance of dead weeds. The frosts have done it. Win- ter comes on gradually. The red maples have lost their leaves before the rock maple, which is now losing its leaves at top first. All the country over, the frosts have come and seared the tenderer herbs along all brook- sides. How unobserved this change until it has taken place! The birds that fly at the approach of winter are come from the north. Some time since I might have said some birds are leaving us, others, like ducks, are just arriving from the north, the herbs are withering along the brooks, the humming insects are going into winter quarters. The deciduous trees are green but about four months in the year,—from June Ist to October Ist, per- haps. Polygonum articulatum lingers still.1 Silvery cinque- foil, hedge-mustard, and clover. I find caddis-cases with worms in Second Division Brook. And what mean those little piles of yellow sand on dark-colored stones at the bottom of the swift-running water, kept together and in place by some kind of gluten and looking as if sprinkled on ,the stones, one eighteenth of an inch in diameter? These caddis-worms just build a little case around themselves, and sometimes attach a few dead leaves to disguise it, and then fasten it(?) slightly to some swaying grass stem or blade at the bottom in swift water, and these are their quarters till next spring. This reminds me that winter does not put his rude fin- gers in the bottom of the brooks. When you look into the brooks you see various dead leaves floating or rest- ing on the bottom, and you do not suspect that some are the disguises which the caddis-worms have bor- rowed. Fresh Baeomyces roseus near Tommy Wheeler’s. The cotton-woolly aphides on the alders. Gilpin speaks of ‘‘ floats of timber”’ on the river Wey, in 1775, as picturesque objects. Thus in the oldest settled and civilized country there is a resemblance or reminiscence still of the primitive new country, and more or less timber never ceases to grow on the head waters of its streams, and perchance the wild muskrat still perforates its banks. England may endure as long as she grows oaks for her navy.‘ ‘Timber rafts still ( ?) annually come down the Rhine, like the Mississippi and St. Lawrence. But the forests of England are thin, for Gilpin says of the Isle of Wight in Charles II’s time, “There were woods in the island so complete and ex- tensive, that it is said a squirrel might have travelled in several parts, many leagues together, on the tops of the trees.”’

'To Walden. Ebby Hubbard’s oaks, now turned a sober and warm ted and yellow, have a very rich crisp and curled look, especially against the green pines. This is when the ripe high-colored leaves have begun to curl and wither. Then they have a warm and harmonious tint. First they are ripened by the progress of the year, and the character of each appears in distinct colors. Then come the severe frosts and, dulling the brilliancy of most, produce a harmony of warm brown or red and yellow tinges throughout the forest, something like marbling and painting over it, making one shade run into another. The forest is the more rug-like. When I approached the pond over Heywood’s Peak, I disturbed a hawk (a fish hawk?) on a white pine by the water watching for his prey, with long, narrow, sharp wings and a white belly. He flew slowly across the pond somewhat like a gull. He is the more pictur- esque object against the woods or water for being white beneath. Now and for some time past, northwest winds pre- vail, wafting the air cooled by the snows that way, per- haps. This being the direction of the wind, I see again the clouds lifted in the northwest horizon. And me- thinks this phenomenon is very often repeated during the winter. The blue-stemmed goldenrod. Aster undu- latus with a pinkish or lilac tinge, and humblebees on it. Solidago altissima. The bushy gerardia still with sticky stem and wrinkled radical leaves. Scarcely a skater insect to be seen. I see no water-bugs. It is getting too cool for them. In consequence of the above winds and clouds, we have to-night a bright warm sunset (to me on the water) after a cool gray afternoon, lighting up the green pines at the northeast end of the pond; every yellow leaf of birch or aspen or hickory is doubly bright, and, look- ing over the forest on Pine Hill, I can hardly tell which trees are lit up by the sunshine and which are the yel- low chestnut-tops. Thus both the spring and autumn tints or aspect of the woods reminds me of the sun- shine. The forest has never so good a setting and fore- ground as seen from the middle of a lake, rising from the water’s edge. The water’s edge makes the best frame for the picture and natural boundary to the forest."

P. M. — To Conantum. This may be called an Indian-summer day. It is quite hazy withal, and the mountains invisible. I see a horehound turned lake or steel-claret color. The yel- low lily pads in Hubbard’s ditch are fresh, as if recently expanded. There are some white lily pads in river still, but very few indeed of the yellow lily. A pasture thistle on Conantum just budded, but flat with the ground. The fields generally wear a russet hue. A striped snake out. The milkweed (Syriaca) now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun, and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by the extremities of the fine threads, until a stronger puff of wind sets them free. It is a pleasant sight to see it dispersing its seeds. The bass has lost its leaves. I see where boys have gathered the mockernut, though it has not fallen out of its shells. The red squirrel chirrups in the walnut grove. The chickadees flit along, following me inquisitively a few rods with lisping, tin- kling note, — flit within a few feet of me from curiosity, head downward on the pines. The white pines have shed their leaves, making a yellow carpet on the grass, but the pitch pines are yet parti-colored. Is it the pro- cumbent speedwell (Veronica agrestis) still in flower on Lee’s Cliff? But its leaves are neither heart-ovate nor shorter than the peduncles. The sprays of the witch- hazel are sprinkled on the air, and recurved. The pen- nyroyal stands brown and sere, though fragrant still, on the shelves of the Cliff. The elms in the street have nearly lost their leaves. October has been the month of autumnal tints. The first of the month the tints began to be more general, at which time the frosts began, though there were scat- tered bright tints long before; but not till then did the forest begin to be painted. By the end of the month the leaves will either have fallen or be sered and turned brown by the frosts for the most part. Also the month of barberries and chestnuts. My friend is one whom I meet, who takes me for what I am. A stranger takes me for something else than Iam. We do not speak, we cannot communicate, till we find that we are recognized. The stranger supposes in our stead a third person whom we do not know, and we leave him to converse with that one. It is suicide for us to become abetters in misapprehending ourselves. Suspicion creates the stranger and substi- tutes him for the friend. I cannot abet any man in misapprehending myself. What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is com- monly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm. It brings men to- gether in crowds and mobs in barrooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue.

Another Indian-summer day. P. M.— Rode to Stow via powder-mills with W. E. C., returning va the fir tree house, Vose’s Hill, and Corner. The road through the woods this side the powder- mills was very gorgeous with the sun shining endwise through it, and the red tints of the deciduous trees, now somewhat imbrowned, mingled with the liquid green of the pines. The andromeda is already browned, has a grayish-brown speckled look. I see, far over the river, boys gathering walnuts. At the fall on the river at Par- ker’s paper-mill, there is a bright sparkle on the water long before we get to it. I saw in Stow some trees fuller of apples still than I remember to have ever seen. Small yellow apples hanging over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with the weight of the fruit like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. The topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions.’ The larches in the swamps are now conspicuously yellow and ready for their fall. They can now be dis- tinguished at a distance. There is an agreeable pros- pect from near the post-office in the northwest of Sudbury. The southeast (?) horizon is very distant, —but what perhaps makes it more agreeable, it is a low distance, — extending to the Weston elm in the horizon. You are more impressed with the extent of earth overlooked than if the view were bounded by mountains.