20 June 1853 – 26 June 1853

Monday. 4a.mM.— No fog ; sky mostly over- cast; drought continues, I heard the robin first (before the chip-bird) this morning. Heard the chip-bird last evening just after sunset. 10 a. m. — To Assabet Bathing-Place. I see wood tortoises in the path; one feels full of eggs. Those great greenish-white puffs on the panicled andromeda are now decaying. On the swamp-pink they are solid. The pitchers of the comandra seeds are conspicuous. Meadow-sweet out, probably yester- day. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower. Some of the stone nests are a foot above the water now, but uninjured. I can find nothing in them. The bosky bank shows bright roses from its green recesses; the small white flowers of the panicled andromeda; be- neath, yellow lilies. Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike any- thing else that we have, is the first white lily just ex- panded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, — perfectly fresh and pure, before the in- sects have discovered it. How admirable its purity! how innocently sweet its fragrance! How significant that the rich, black mud of our dead stream produces the water-lily, — out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity! It is remarkable that those flowers which are most emblematical of purity should grow in the mud. There is also the exquisite beauty of the small sagit- taria, which I find out, maybe a day or two, — three transparent crystalline white petals with a yellow eye and as many small purplish calyx-leaves, four or five inches above the same mud. Coming home at twelve, I see that the white lilies are nearly shut. ‘The river has been some days full with weeds which drape and trail from my oars — I am now on foot — (the potamogeton), as if it were Charon’s boat, and this a funeral procession down the Cocytus. 8 p. M. — Up North River to Nawshawtuct. The moon full. Perhaps there is no more beautiful scene than that on the North River seen from the rock this side the hemlocks. As we look up-stream, we see a crescent-shaped lake completely embosomed in the forest. ‘There is nothing to be seen but the smooth black mirror of the water, on which there is now the slightest discernible bluish mist, a foot high, and thick- set alders and willows. and the green woods without an interstice sloping steeply upward from its very sur- face, like the sides of a bowl. The river is here for half a mile completely shut in by the forest. One hem- lock, which the current has undermined, has fallen over till it lies parallel with the water, a foot or two above it and reaching two thirds across the stream, its extremity curving upward to the light, now dead. Here it has been a year or two, and it has only taken the place of others which have successively fallen in and been carried away by the stream. One lies now cast up on the shore. Some wild roses, so pale now in the twilight that they look exactly like great blackberry blossoms. I think these would look so at midday. Saw a little skunk coming up the river-bank in the woods at the White Oak, a funny little fellow, about six inches long and nearly as broad. It faced me and actually compelled me to retreat before it for five min- utes. Perhaps I was between it and its hole. Its broad black tail, tipped with white, was erect like a kitten’s. It had what looked like a broad white band drawn tight across its forehead or top-head, from which two lines of white ran down, one on each side of its back, and there was a narrow white line down its snout. It raised its back, sometimes ran a few feet forward, sometimes backward, and repeatedly turned its tail to me, prepared to discharge its fluid like the old. Such was its instinct. And all the while it kept up a fine grunting like a little pig or a squirrel. It re- minded me that the red squirrel, the woodchuck, and the skunk all make a similar sound. Now there are young rabbits, skunks, and probably woodchucks. Walking amid the bushes and the ferns just after moonrise, I am refreshed with many sweet scents which I cannot trace to their source. How the trees shoot! The tops of young pines toward the moon are covered with fine shoots some eighteen inches long. Will they grow much more this year? There is a pe- culiarly soft, creamy light round the moon, now it is low in the sky. The bullfrogs begin about 8.30. They lie at their length on the surface amid the pads. I touched one’s nose with my finger, and he only gave a sudden froggish belch and moved a foot or two off. How hard to imitate their note exactly, —its sono- rousness. Here, close by, it is like er er ough, er er er ough, with a sonorous trump which these letters do not suggest. On our return, having reached the reach by Merrick’s pasture, we get the best view of the moon in the southeast, reflected in the water, on account of the length of the reach. The creamy light about it is also perfectly reflected; the path of insects on the surface between us and the moon is lit up like fire. The leafy-columned elms, planted by the river at foot of Prichard’s field, are exceedingly beautiful, the moon being behind them, and I see that they are not too near together, though sometimes hardly a rod apart, their branches crossing and interlacing. Their trunks look like columns of a portico wreathed with evergreens on the evening of an illumination for some great festival. They are the more rich, because in this creamy light you cannot distinguish the trunk from the verdure that drapes it. This is the most sultry night we have had. All win- dows and doors are open in the village and scarcely a lamp is lit. I pass many families sitting in their yards. The shadows of the trees and houses are too extended, now that the moon is low in the heavens, to show the richest tracery.

4.30 a. mM. — Up river for lilies. No dew even where I keep my boat. ‘The driest night yet, threatening the sultriest day. Yet I see big crystalline drops at the tips or the bases of the ponte- deria leaves. The few lilies begin to open about 5. The nest of a brown thrasher with three eggs, on some green-briar, perfectly concealed by a grape-vine run- ning over it; eggs greenish-brown; nest of dry sticks, lined with fibres of grape bark and with roots. Bird scolded me much. Carpet-weed out. I have got a pan full of lilies open. We have not had rain, except a mere sprinkling in the night of the 17th, since the 26th of May. P. M. — To Conantum. The warmest day yet. For the last two days I have worn nothing about my neck. This change or putting off of clothing is, methinks, as good an evidence of the increasing warmth of the weather as meteorological instruments. I thought it was hot weather perchance, when, a month ago, I slept with a window wide open and laid aside a comfortable, but by and by I found that I had got two windows open, and to-night two windows and the door are far from enough. Hyperi- cum perforatum just out. This year the time when the locust was first heard was the time to put on summer clothes. Early on the morning of the 18th the river felt lukewarm to my fingers when my paddle dipped deeper than usual. The galium with three small white petals (G. trifidum) has been out some time, and I find that erectish, broad-leaved, three-nerved, green- flowered one, perhaps G. circezans, at Corner Spring. Peltandra Virginica, perhaps a week, for many of its flowers are effete and curved downward. The Hyper- tcum ellipticum, by the riverside. The only violets I notice nowadays are a few white lanceolate ones in the meadows. The river has got down quite low, and the muddy shores are covered here and there with a sort of dark-brown paper, the dried filaments of confervze which filled the water. Now is their fall. The bright little flowers of the Ranunculus reptans var. filijormis are seen peeping forth between its inter- stices. Calopogon out. I think it surpasses the pogonia, though the latter is sometimes high-colored and is of a handsome form; but it is inclined to be pale, is sometimes even white. Now see many bright red amelanchier berries and some purple or dark-blue ones amid them. They [are] mostly injured by insects or apparently pecked and deformed by birds, but, from the few perfectly sound and ripe I have eaten to-day, I should pronounce them superior to either blueberries or huckleberries. Those of the Botryapium have a soft skin; of the shorter bush with a stiffer leaf, a tough skin. This is a little before blueberries. ‘The panicled cornel is the only one of the cornels or viburnums that now is noticed in flower, generally speaking. The last of our cornels — the C. sericea, I think it must be — is just beginning. The farmers have commenced haying. With this the summer culminates. The most extended crop of all is ready for the harvesting. Lint still comes off the leaves and shoots. It is so hot I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head. I notice that that low, rather rigid fern, about two feet high, on the Great Hubbard Meadow, which a month ago was yel- low, but now is green and in fruit, and with a harsh- feeling fruit atop, is decidedly inclined to grow in hollow circles from one foot to six or eight feet in diameter, — often, it is true, imperfect on one side, or, if large, filled up in the middle. How to account for it? Can it have anything to do with the hummocks deposited on the meadow? Many small stems near together in circles, 7. e. not a single line. Is it the Osmunda spectabilis ? Now I hear the spotted (? ) flies about my head, — flies that settle and make themselves felt on the hand sometimes. The morning-glory still fresh at 3 p. mM. A fine, large, delicate bell with waved border, some pure white, some reddened. The buds open perfectly in a vase. I find them open when I wake at 4 a. mM. Is not this one of the eras or culminating places in the flower season? Not this till the sultry mornings come. Angelica, perhaps a day or more. Elder just opening. The four-leaved asclepias, prob- ably some days. A rather handsome flower, with the peculiar fragrance of the milkweeds. Observed three or four sweet-briar bushes with white flowers of the usual size, by the wall under Conantum Cliff, — very slightly tinted with red or rose. In the paucity and form of prickles, at least, I make them answer to the micrantha, but not else. Is it intermediate? Opened at home in a vase in the shade. They are more dis- tinctly rose-tinted. Leaves and all together in the water, they have a strong spirituous or rummy scent. There are no flowers nor flower-buds on the bass this year, though it was so full last year. | Where the other day I saw a pigeon woodpecker tapping and enlarging a hole in the dead limb of an apple tree, when as yet probably no egg was laid, to-day I see two well-grown young woodpeckers about as big as the old, looking out at the hole, showing their handsome spotted breasts and calling lustily for something to eat, or, it may be, suffering from the heat. Young birds in some situations must suffer greatly from heat these days, so closely packed in their nests and perhaps insufficiently shaded. It is a wonder they remain so long there patiently. I saw a yellowbird’s nest in the willows on the causeway this afternoon and three young birds, nearly ready to fly, overflowing the nest, all holding up their open bills and keeping them steadily open for a minute or more, on noise of my approach. Still see cherry-birds in flocks. Dogsbane and Prinos verticillatus. My white lilies in the pan are mostly withering the first day, the wea- ther is so warm. At sunset to Island. The white anemone is withering with drought; else would probably have opened. Return while the sun is setting behind thunder-clouds, which now over- shadow us. Between the heavy masses of clouds, mouse-colored, with dark-blue bases, the patches of clear sky are a glorious cobalt blue, as Sophia calls it. How happens it that the sky never appears so intensely, brightly, memorably blue as when seen be- tween clouds and, it may be, as now in the south at sunset? This, too, is like the blue in snow. For the last two or three days it has taken me all the forenoon to wake up.

1 do not remember a warmer night than the last. In my attic under the roof, with all windows and doors open, there was still not a puff of the usual coolness of the night. It seemed as if heat which the roof had absorbed during the day was being reflected down upon me. It was far more intolerable than by day. All windows being open, I heard the sounds made by pigs and horses in the neighborhood and of children who were partially suffocated with the heat. It seemed as if it would be something to tell of, the experience of that night, as of the Black Hole of Cal- cutta in a degree, if one survived it. This forenoon a smart, straight-down shower from the eastward for ten or fifteen minutes, bordered round with thunder, — the first since May 26th. It did not touch the north part of the town. Some broad-leaved dock for a few days. Is it not the obtuszfolius, front of Conantum house and by wall front of E. Wood’s barn? 5.30 Pp. M. — To Walden and Fair Haven Hill. Epilobium shows some pale or pink purple flowers on its spike. Trifolium arvense. It is quite cool now, after the shower in the forenoon. Now is the time for young birds. You cannot go near any thicket but the old will scold at you, and you see the king- bird and the blackbird and swallows pursuing crows and hawks, as for several weeks. I looked for the nest of the Maryland yellow-throat, but could not find it. Some animal has carried it off from the tuft of sedge, but I found one little egg which had dropped out. How many tragedies of this kind in the fields! Butter-and-eggs is a handsome yellow-spiked flower which would be better appreciated if it grew less pro- fusely. The sun down, and I am crossing Fair Haven Hill, sky overcast, landscape dark and still. I see the smooth river in the north reflecting two shades of light, one from the water, another from the surface of the pads which broadly border it on both sides, and the very irregular waving or winding edge of the pads, especially perceptible in this light, makes a very agreeable bor- der to distinguish, — the edge of the film which seeks to bridge over and inclose the river wholly. These pads are to the smooth water between like a calyx to its flower. The river at such an hour, seen half a mile away, perfectly smooth and lighter than the sky, re- flecting the clouds, is a paradisaical scene. What are the rivers around Damascus to this river sleeping around Concord? Are not the Musketaquid and the Assabet, rivers of Concord, fairer than the rivers of the plain? And then the rich warble of the blackbird may still occasionally even at this season be heard. As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and ex- hilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It rein- states me in my dominion, makes me the lord of cre- ation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event jin the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and temporal? So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush’s song is a ranz des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever un- proved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.’ I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. A New Hampshire everlast- ing and unfallen. How wonderfully moral our whole life! There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Good- ness is the only investment that never fails. It is sung of in the music of the harp. This it is which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Uni- verse Insurance Company. One little goodness is all the assessment. All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece. I find my clothes covered with young caterpillars these days.

5 a. M.— Up Union Turnpike. The red morning-glory partly open at 5.45. Look- ing down on it, it is [a] regular pentagon, with sides but slightly incurved. 1.30 p. M. — To White Pond. Sultry, dogdayish weather, with moist mists or low clouds hanging about, —the first of this kind we have had. I suspect it may be the result of a warm southwest wind met by a cooler wind from the sea. It is hard to tell if these low clouds most shade the earth or reflect its heat back upon it. At any rate a fresh, cool moisture and a suffocating heat are strangely mingled.

P. M. — Boated to Clamshell Hill. My lilies in the pan have revived with the cooler weather since the rain. (It rained a little last night.) This is what they require that they may keep. May- weed yesterday. The calopogon is a more bluish purple than the pogonia. The Gnaphalium uligi- nosum seems to be almost in blossom. Gratiola out in mud near river, — those bare, rather hard, muddy tracts on the edge of the meadow next the river, where mint grows and the mud has wide cracks, some nearly an inch wide, produced by the sun since the water went down. It is cooler and remarkably windy this afternoon, showing the under sides of the leaves and the pads, the white now red beneath and all green above. Wind northwest. Found what I take to be an Indian hoe at Hubbard Bathing-Place, sort of slate stone four or five eighths of an inch thick, semi- circular, eight inches one way by four or more the other, chipped down on the edges. At the Clamshell curve, great masses of a kind of Iresh-water eel-grass have lodged against the potamo- geton in mid-channel, as against a shore, half a foot deep, and stretch across the river, long, green, narrow, ribbon-like. It is apparently the Vallisneria spiralis, eel-grass, tape-grass. It grows at the bottom in shallow places, slanting and waving down-stream. But what has collected it here all at once? Is it this strong wind operating on shallow places at curves? Or is it that some animal — muskrat or what-not — has loosened it? Or have men been at work up-stream somewhere? Does it always happen at this season? By the botany it does not blossom till August. ‘There were piles of dried heart-leaf on shore at the bathing-place, a foot high and more. Were they torn up and driven ashore by the wind? I suspect it is the wind in both cases. As storms at sea tear up and cast ashore the seaweeds from the rocks. These are our seaweeds cast ashore in storms, but I see only the eel-grass and the heart- leaf thus served. Our most common in the river ap- pears to be between the Potamogeton natans and pulcher ; it answers to neither, but can be no other described. See it in fruit. I do not see the ranunculus flowers very abundant yet — will it not be this year? Then there is that long, somewhat cylindrical, fine-capil- lary and bladdery leaved plant which I had wrongly thought belonged to the Ranunculus. Is it not a utr- cularia?* All these, but especially the R. Purshi, have a strong fresh-water marsh smell, rather agree- able sometimes as a bottle of salts, like the salt marsh and seaweeds, invigorating to my imagination. In our great stream of distilled water going slowly down to ocean to be salted. Sparganium, some time. Pontederia, just out. The lower translucent, waved leaves of the potamogeton are covered with a sort of very minute black caddis-case. The peat{ ? ]-black petioles of these leaves are much like seaweed. There are the heart-leaf ponds, but I cannot say the pota- mogeton rivers on account of the tautology, and, beside, I do not like this last name, which signifies that it grows in the neighborhood of rivers, when it is not a neighbor but an indweller. You might as well describe the seaweeds as growing in the neighborhood of the sea. The brown thrasher’s nest (vide 21st) has been robbed, probably by some other bird. It rested on a branch of a swamp-pink and some grape-vines, effectually concealed and protected by grape-vines and green- briar in a matted bower above it. The foundation of pretty stout twigs, eight or nine inches in diameter, surmounted by coarse strips of grape bark, giving form to the nest, and then lined with some harsh, wiry root-fibres; within rather small and shallow, and the whole fabric of loose texture, not easy to re- move. Also got a blackbird’s nest whose inhabitants had flown, hung by a kind of small dried rush (?) between two button-bushes which crossed above it; of meadow- grass and sedge, dried Mzkania scandens vine, horse- tail, fish-lines, and a strip apparently of a lady’s bath- ing-dress, lined with a somewhat finer grass; of a loose and ragged texture to look at. Green mikania running over it now. A yellowbird’s nest (vide 21st) in a fork of a willow on Hubbard’s Causeway, resting chiefly on the lead- ing branch; of fine grass, lined with hair, bottom outside puffing out with a fine, light, flax-like fibre, perhaps the bark of some weed, by which also it is fastened to the twigs. It is surprising that so many birds find hair enough to line their nests with. If I wish for a horsehair for my compass sights I must go to the stable, but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road. The small white (perhaps sometimes violet or pur- plish) aster-like flower of Hubbard’s meadow, for some days. If an aster, then the earliest one.

Saturday. P. M.— To Assabet Bathing- Place. Great orange lily beyond stone bridge. Found in the Glade (?}) Meadows an unusual quantity of ame- lanchier berries, —I think of the two common kinds, —one a taller bush, twice as high as my head, with thinner and lighter-colored leaves and larger, or at least somewhat softer, fruit, the other a shorter bush, with more rigid and darker leaves and dark-blue ber- ries, with often a sort of woolliness on them. Both these are now in their prime. These are the first berries after strawberries, or the first, and I think the sweet- est, bush berries. Somewhat like high blueberries, but not so hard. Much eaten by insects, worms, etc. As big as the largest blueberries or peas. These are the “service-berries” which the Indians of the north and the Canadians use. La poire of the latter (vide Indian books, No. 6, p. 13). They by a little precede the early blueberry (though Holbrook brought two quarts of the last day before yesterday), being now in their prime, while blueberries are but just beginning. I never saw nearly so many before. It is a very agree- able surprise. I hear the cherry-birds and others about me, no doubt attracted by this fruit. It is owing to some peculiarity in the season that they bear fruit. I have picked a quart of them for a pudding. I felt all the while I was picking them, in the low, light, wavy shrubby wood they make, as if I were in a for- eign country. Several old farmers say, “Well, though I have lived seventy years, I never saw nor heard of — them.” I think them a delicious berry, and no doubt they require only to be more abundant every year to be appreciated. I think it must be the purple finch, — with the crimson head and shoulders, — which I see and hear singing so sweetly and variedly in the gardens, — one or two to-day. It sits on a bean-pole or fence-pick[et]. It has a little of the martin warble and of the canary- bird.

Very cool day. Had for dinner a pudding made of service-berries. It was very much like a rather dry cherry pudding without the stones. A slight hail-storm in the afternoon. Euphorbia maculata. Our warmest night thus far this year was June 2Ist. It began to be cooler the 24th. 5.30 p. mM. — To Cliffs. Carrot by railroad. Mine apparently the Erigeron strigosus, yet sometimes tinged with purple. The tephrosia is an agreeable mixture of white, straw- color, and rose pink; unpretending. What is the re- sult of that one leaf (or more), much and irregularly, or variously, divided and cut, with milk in it, in woods, either a lactuca or prenanthes, probably, one foot or more high? Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest and wild. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until atlast the naturalist or poet distin- guishes that which attracted him and leaves the gun and fishing-rod behind. ‘The mass of men are still and always young in this respect. I have been surprised to observe that the only obvious employment which ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half-day, unless it was in the way of business, any of my “ fellow-citizens,’’ whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. They might go there a thousand times, perchance, before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure,— before they began to angle for the pond itself. ‘Thus, even in civilized so- ciety, the embryo man (speaking intellectually) passes through the hunter stage of development. They did not think they were lucky or well paid for their time unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. They measured their success by the length of a string of fish. The Governor faintly remembers the pond, for he went a-fishing there when he was a boy, but now he is too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so he knows it no longer. If the Legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used in fishing there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks. At Cliffs.— The air is warmer, but wonderfully clear after the hail-storm. I do not remember when I have seen it more clear. The mountains and horizon outlines on all sides are distinct and near. Nobscot has lost all its blue, is only a more distant hill pasture, and the northwest mountains are too terrestrial a blue and firmly defined to be mistaken for clouds. Billerica is as near as Bedford commonly. I see new spires far in the south, and on every side the horizon is extended many miles. It expands me to look so much farther over the rolling surface of the earth. Where I had seen or fancied only a hazy forest outline, I see successive swelling hills and remote towns. So often to the lux- urious and hazy summer in our minds, when, like Fletcher’s “ Martyrs in Heaven,” we, *‘ estranged from all misery As far as Heaven and Earth discoasted lie, Swelter in quiet waves of immortality,” some great chagrin succeeds, some chilling cloud comes over. But when it is gone, we are surprised to find that it has cleared the air, summer returns without its haze, we see infinitely further into the horizon on every side, and the boundaries of the world are enlarged. A beautiful sunset about 7.30; just clouds enough in the west (we are on Fair Haven Hill); they arrange themselves about the western gate. And now the sun sinks out of sight just on the north side of Watatic, and the mountains, north and south, are at once a dark indigo blue, for they had been darkening for an hour or more. Two small clouds are left on the horizon between Watatic and Monadnock, their sierra edges all on fire. Three minutes after the sun is gone, there is a bright and memorable afterglow in his path, and a brighter and more glorious light falls on the clouds above the portal. His car, borne further round, brings us in the angle of excidence. Those little sierra clouds look like two castles on fire, and I see the fire through ruined windows. The low west horizon glows now, five or six minutes after sunset, with a delicate salmon- color tinged with rose, deepest where the sun disap- peared, and fading off upward; and north and south are dark-blue cloud islands in it. When I invert my head these delicate salmon-colored clouds look like a celestial Sahara sloping gently upward, an inclined plane upward, to be travelled by caravans bound heaven- ward, with blue oases in it.