1 June 1857 – 7 June 1857

P. M. — To Hill. The weather has been less reliable for a few weeks past than at any other season of the year. Though fair in the forenoon, it may rain in the afternoon, and the continuance of the showers surpasses all expectation. After several days of rain a fair day may succeed, and you close your eyes at night on a starlit sky, but you awake unexpectedly to a steady rain in the morning. The morus at the Lee house is apparently the same with that at Howe’s and Pratt’s, and the berries are now three quarters of an inch long. I see no staminate blossoms. It must have been out several days. It is undoubtedly the Morus rubra, our only native one, for the nigra has lobed leaves and is a smaller tree, rare, and not quite hardy enough to do well in New England, they say.' | The second thorn on Hill will evidently open to- morrow. It is altogether smooth while the first has downy peduncles, and its sepals are about entire while those of the first are cut-fringed. That largest and earliest thorn is now in full bloom, and I notice that its bloom is much whiter at a little distance than that of an apple tree, which has a blue tinge (or, earlier, rosa- ceous). This thorn has pink anthers, seen close at hand. The leaves are very evenly distributed amid the bloom. I see a swamp white [oak] fully and abundantly out, apparently a day or two; so the chestnut oak (which begins to shed pollen in house June 2d; its young reddish leaves resemble the young Q. Chinqua- pin, and its bloom, and apparently it opens with it in similar places) may be put apparently with the white oak. But it grows in a rather late place. P. arbutifolia var. erythrocarpa in house; perhaps a day or two earlier in some places. A red-wing’s nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. What Champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? It is always wmiting of the same character, though much diversified. While the bird picks up the material and lays the egg, who determines the style of the marking? When you ap- proach, away dashes the dark mother, betraying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red-shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chattering and uttering a sharp phe phee-e. I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me. Though this bird’s full strain is ordinarily somewhat trivial, this one appears to be meditating a strain as yet unheard in meadow or orchard. Paulo majora canamus. He is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat.* It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. Methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever heard. They are refreshing to my ear as the first distant tin- kling and gurgling of a rill to a thirsty man. Oh, never advance farther in your art, never let us hear your full strain, sir. But away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody. His notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard. The very divinest part of his strain dropping from his overflowing breast singultim, in globes of melody. It is the foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all that we possess and are. Or it seemed as if in that vase full of melody some notes sphered themselves, and from time to time bubbled up to the surface and were with difficulty repressed.

Sterile buttonwood, not yet generally, but some apparently several days at least. It was a portion of the natural surface of the earth itself which jutted out and became my roof the other day. How fit that Nature should thus shelter her own children! The first drops were dimpling the pond even as the fishes had done. The grass is flaming up through the shallow water on the meadows. It is very warm till 3 p. M., and then a washing breeze arises, and before night probably distant thunder- showers have cooled the air, for after dark we see the flashes called heat lightning in the north, and hear the distant thunder. Geraniums bring thunder. That bobolink’s song affected me as if one were en- deavoring to keep down globes of melody within a vase full of liquid, but some bubbled up irrepressible, — kept thrusting them down with a stick, but they slipped and came up one side. A young sparrow already flies. Drove this afternoon to Painted-Cup Meadow. A tanager yesterday.

P. M. —'To White Cedar Swamp. Salix lucida out of bloom, but S. nigra still in bloom. I see a large branch of S. lweida, which has been broken off probably by the ice in the winter and come down from far up-stream and lodged, butt downward, amid some bushes, where it has put forth pink fibres from the butt end in the water, and is growing vigorously, though not rooted in the bottom. It is thus detained by a clump of bushes at high water, where it begins to sprout and send its pink fibres down to the mud, and finally the water, getting down to the summer level, leaves it rooted in the bank. The first crateegus on Hill is in many instances done, while the second is not fairly or generally in bloom yet. The pitch pine at Hemlocks is in bloom. The sterile flowers are yellowish, while those of the P. resinosa are dark-purple. As usual, when I jar them the pollen rises in a little cloud about the pistillate flowers and the tops of the twigs, there being a little wind. The bass at the Island will not bloom this year.1 The racemed andromeda (Leucothoé) has been partly killed, — the extremities of the twigs, —so that its racemes are im- perfect, the lower parts only green. It is not quite out; probably is later for this injury. The ground of the cedar swamp, where it has been burnt over and sprouts, etc., have sprung up again, is covered with the Marchantia polymorpha. Now shows its starlike or umbrella-shaped fertile flowers and its shield-shaped sterile ones. It is a very rank and wild- looking vegetation, forming the cuticle of the swamp’s foundation. I feel the suckers’ nests with my paddle, but do not see them on account of the depth of the river. Many small devil’s-needles, like shad-flies, in bushes. Early potatoes are being hoed. The gardener is killing the piper grass. I have several friends and acquaintances who are very good companions in the house or for an afternoon walk, but whom I cannot make up my mind to make a longer excursion with; for I discover, all at once, that they are too gentlemanly in manners, dress, and all their habits. I see in my mind’s eye that they wear black coats, considerable starched linen, glossy hats and shoes, and it is out of the question. It is a great disadvantage for a traveller to be a gentleman of this kind; he is so ill-treated, only a prey to landlords. It would be too much of a circumstance to enter a strange town or house with such a companion. You could not A a travel incognito; you might get into the papers. You should travel as a common man. If such a one were to set out to make a walking-journey, he would betray himself at every step. Every one would see that he was trying an experiment, as plainly as they see that a lame man is lame by his limping. The natives would bow to him, other gentlemen would invite him to ride, con- ductors would warn him that this was the second-class car, and many would take him for a clergyman; and. so he would be continually pestered and balked and run upon. You would not see the natives at all. Instead of going in quietly.at the back door and sitting by the kitchen fire, you would be shown into a cold parlor, there to confront a fireboard, and excite a commotion in a whole family. The women would scatter at your approach, and their husbands and sons would go right up to hunt up their black coats, —for they all have them; they are as cheap as dirt. You would go trailing your limbs along the highways, mere bait for corpu- lent innholders, as a pickerel’s [sc] leg is trolled along a stream, and your part of the profits would ‘be the frog’s. No, you must be a common man, or at least travel as one, and then nobody will know that you are there or have been there. I would not undertake a simple pedestrian excursion with one of these, because to enter a village, or a hotel, or a private house, with such a one, would be too great a circumstance, would create too great a stir. You could only go half as far with the same means, for the price of board and lodgings would rise everywhere; so much you have to pay for wearing that kind of coat. Not that the difference is in the coat at all, for the character of the scurf is deter- mined by that of the true liber beneath. Innkeepers, stablers, conductors, clergymen, know a true wayfaring man at first sight and let him alone. It is of no use to shove your gaiter shoes a mile further than usual. Sometimes it is mere shiftlessness or want of originality, — the clothes wear them; sometimes it is egotism, that cannot afford to be treated like a common man, — they wear the clothes. They wish to be at least fully ap- preciated by every stage-driver and schoolboy. They would like well enough to see a new place, perhaps, but then they would like to be regarded as important public personages. They would consider it a misfor- tune if their names were left out of the published list of passengers because they came in the steerage, — an obscurity from which they might never emerge.

P. M.— To Bare Hill. The early potentilla is now erect in the June grass. Salix tristis is going to seed, showing some cotton; also some S. rostrata. I am surprised to see some kind of fish dart away in Collier’s veronica ditch, for it about dries up and has no outlet. I observed yesterday, the first time this year, the lint on the smooth surface of the Assabet at the Hemlocks, giving the water a stagnant look. It is an agreeable phenomenon to me, as connected with the season and suggesting warm weather. I suppose it to be the down from the new leaves which so rapidly become smooth. There may be a little pitch pine pollen with it now. The current is hardly enough to make a clear streak in it here and there. The stagnant-looking surface, where the water slowly circles round in that great eddy, has the appearance of having been dusted over. This lint now covers my clothes as I go through the sprout- lands, but it gets off remarkably before long. Each under side of a leaf you strike leaves the mark of its lint on your clothes, but it is clean dirt and soon wears off. ;, One thing that chiefly distinguishes this season from three weeks ago is that fine serene undertone or earth- song as we go by sunny banks and hillsides, the creak of crickets, which affects our thoughts so favorably, imparting its own serenity. It is time now to bring our philosophy out of doors. Our thoughts pillow them- selves unconsciously in the troughs of this serene, rip- pling sea of sound. Now first we begin to be peripatetics. No longer our ears come in contact with the bold echoing earth, but everywhere recline on the spring cushion of a cricket’s chirp. These rills that ripple from every hillside become at length a universal sea of sound, nourishing our ears when we are most uncon- scious. In that first apple tree at Wyman’s an apparent hairy woodpecker’s nest (from the size of the bird), about ten feet from ground. The bird darts away with a shrill, loud chirping of alarm, incessantly , repeated, long before I get there, and keeps it up as long as I stay in the neighborhood. The young keep up an in- cessant fine, breathing peep which can be heard across the road and is much increased when they hear you approach the hole, they evidently expecting the old bird. I perceive no offensive odor. I saw the bird fly out of this hole, May Ist, and probably the eggs were laid about that time. Vide it next year. In the high pasture behind Jacob Baker’s, soon after coming out of the wood, I scare up a bay-wing. She runs several rods close to the ground through the thin grass, and then lurks behind tussocks, etc. The nest has four eggs, dull pinkish-white with brown spots; nest low in ground, of stubble lined with white horse- hair. Carya glabra, apparently a day at least. Oldenlandia on Bare Hill, along above wall opposite the oak, a rod or more off and westerly. Apparently several days at least, but it appears not to do well. It has a dry, tufted look, somewhat like young savory- leaved aster, on the bare rocky hill and in the clear spaces between the huckleberry bushes. Reminds me of a heath. Does not blossom so full as once I saw it. Arethusa. Crimson fungus (?) on black birch leaves, as if bespattered with blood.

P. M.— To Gowing’s Swamp and Poplar Hill. The shad-flies were very abundant probably last even- ing about the house, for this morning they are seen filling and making black every cobweb on the side of the house, blinds, etc. All freshly painted surfaces are covered with them. The surface of pools and ditches also is remarkably thick with them. The living ones are on the bushes which I pluck, far from any water. I find one Vaccinium Oxycoccus open. The petals are not white like the common, but pink like the bud. That low reedy sedge about the edge of the central pool in the swamp is just out of bloom and shows the seeds.' I see a great many tortoises in that pool, showing their heads and backs above water and pursuing each other about the pool. It is evidently their copulating- season. Their shells are yellow-spotted, and their throats are of a reddish yellow (?). Are they the Emys guttata?? It is a wonder how they made their way to this water through so many twiggy bushes and over so many tussocks. How should they know of such a wild water? To this wild water, then, the tortoises which inhabit the swamps resort in their breeding-season, and are there undisturbed. You would think it almost the labor of a lifetime for a tortoise to make its way from the surrounding shrubbery to this water, and how do they know that there is water here? The larch cones are still very beautiful against the light, but some cones, I perceive, are merely green. Some apparent beach plum (? ) almost completely out of bloom, ten to twelve feet high, along the wall behind Adolphus Clark’s. This is the largest I know of. Lambkill. The mocker-nuts on Mrs. Ripley’s hill apparently a day or more. Some red maples are much more fertile than others. Their keys are now very conspicuous. . But such trees have comparatively few leaves and have grown but little as yet. ° At evening, paddle up Assabet. There are many ephemerze in the air; but it is cool, and their great flight is not yet. Pincushion gall on oak. I am interested in each contemporary plant in my vicinity, and have attained to a certain acquaintance with the larger ones. They are cohabitants with me of this part of the planet, and they bear familiar names. Yet how essentially wild they are! as wild, really, as those strange fossil plants whose impressions I see on my coal. Yet I can imagine that some race gathered those too with as much admiration, and knew them as intimately as I do these, that even they served for a language of the sentiments. Stigmarie stood for a hu- man sentiment in that race’s flower language. Chick- weed, or a pine tree, is but little less wild. I assume to be acquainted with these, but what ages between me and the tree whose shade I enjoy! It is as if it stood substantially in a remote geological period.

8 a. M.— To Lee’s Cliff by river. Salix pedicellaris off Holden’s has been out of bloom several days at least. So it is earlier to begin and to end than our S. lucida. This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and reveal- ing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trem- bling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. I see a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a cer- tain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what this grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass. For I only see those other facts as through a glass darkly. Crategus Crus-Galli, maybe a day. Early iris. V2- burnum Lentago, a day or more. Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the fore- noon and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers. The long mocker-nut on Conantum not yet out, and the second, or round, one will be yet later. Its catkins are more grayish. I see many great devil’s-needles in an open wood, —and for a day or two, — stationary on twigs, ete., standing out more or less horizontally like thorns, hold- ing by their legs and heads (?). They do not incline to move when touched, and their eyes look whitish and opaque, as if they were blind. They were evidently just escaped from the slough. I often see the slough on plants and, I think, the pupa in the water, as at Callitriche Pool. As I sit on Lee’s Cliff, I see a pe-pe on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. Regu- larly, at short intervals, it utters its monotonous note | like ¢2dl-till-tall, or pe-pe-pe. Looking round for its prey and occasionally changing its perch, it every now and then darts off (phoebe-like), even five or six rods, to- ward the earth to catch an insect, and then returns to its favorite perch. If I lose it for a moment, I soon see it settling on the dead twigs again and hear its fill, till, tll. It appears through the glass mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail. There is a thorn now in its prime, 12. e. near the beaked hazel, Conantum, with leaves more wedge-shaped at base than the Crategus coccinea; apparently.a variety of it, between that and Crus-Galli. (In press.) A kingbird’s nest, with two of its large handsome eggs, very loosely set over the fork of a horizontal wil- low by river, with dried everlasting of last year, as usual, just below Garfield’s boat. Another in black willow south of long cove (east side, north of Hub- bard’s Grove) and another north of said cove. A brown. thrasher’s nest, with two eggs, on ground, near lower lentago wall and toward Bittern Cliff. The Ranun- culus Purshit is in some places abundantly out now and quite showy. It must be our largest ranunculus (flower).

Sunday. P. M.—To river and Ponkawtas- set with M. Pratt. Now I notice many bubbles left on the water in my wake, as if it were more sluggish or had more vis- cidity than earlier. Far behind me they rest without bursting. Pratt has got the Calla palustris, in prime, — some was withering, so it may have been out ten days,’ —from the bog near Bateman’s Pond; also Ozalis vio- lacea, which he says began about last Sunday, or May 31st, larger and handsomer than the yellow, though it blossoms but sparingly. Red huckleberry about same time. It is sticky like the black. His geranium from Fitzwilliam is well in bloom. It seems to be herb- robert, but without any offensive odor ! (? ) A small elm in front of Pratt’s which he says three years ago had flowers in flat cymes, like a cornel! !? I have pressed some leaves. At the cross-wall below N. Hunt’s, some way from road, the red cohush, one plant only in flower, the rest going to seed. Probably, therefore, with the white. It has slender pedicels and petals shorter than the white. Garlic grows there, not yet out. Rubus triflorus still in bloom there. At the base of some hellebore, in a tuft a little from under the east edge of an apple tree, below violet wood- sorrel, a nest well made outside of leaves, then grass, lined with fine grass, very deep and narrow, with thick sides, with four small somewhat cream-colored eggs with small brown and some black spots chiefly toward larger end. The bird, which flew off quickly, made me think of a wren and of a Maryland yellow-throat, though I saw no yellow.’