16 November 1857 – 22 November 1857

Rain last night.

P. M.— To Dam Meadows. Going along the Bedford road at Moore’s Swamp, I hear the dry rustling of seedy rattlesnake grass in the wind, a November sound, within a rod of me. The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight. Much cold, slate-colored cloud, bare twigs seen gleaming toward the light like gossa- mer, pure green of pines whose old leaves have fallen, reddish or yellowish brown oak leaves rustling on the hillsides, very pale brown, bleaching, almost hoary fine grass or hay in the fields, akin to the frost which has killed it, and flakes of clear yellow sunlight falling on it here and there, — such is November. The fine grass killed by the frost, withered and bleached till it is almost silvery, has clothed the fields for a long time. Now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places. Some corn is left out still even. What a mockery to turn cattle out into such pas- tures! Yet I see more in the fields now than earlier. I hear a low concert from the edge of Gowing’s Swamp, amid the maples, etc., — suppressed warblings from many flitting birds. With my glass I see only tree sparrows, and suppose it is they. What I noticed for the thousandth time on the 15th was the waved surface of thin dark ice just frozen, as if it were a surface composed of large, perhaps tri- angular pieces raised at the edges; 1. ¢., the filling up between the original shooting of the crystals — the midribs of the icy leaves — is on a lower plane. Flannery is the hardest-working man I know. Be- fore sunrise and long after sunset he is taxing his un- weariable muscles. ‘The result is a singular cheerful- ness. He is always in good spirits. He often overflows with his joy when you perceive no occasion for it. If only the gate sticks, some of it bubbles up and over- flows in his passing comment on that accident. How much mere industry proves! There is a sparkle often in his passing remark, and his voice is really like that of a bird. | Crows will often come flying much out of their way to caw at me. In one light, these are old and worn-out fields that I ramble over, and men have gone to law about them long before I was born, but I trust that I ramble over them in a new fashion and redeem them. I noticed on the 15th that that peculiar moraine or horseback just this side of J. P. Brown’s extends southerly of Nut Meadow Brook in the woods, maybe a third or a half a mile long in all. The rocks laid bare here and there by ditching in the Dam Meadows are very white, having no lichens on them. The musquash should appear in the coat of arms of some of the States, it is so common. I do not go by any permanent pool but, sooner or later, 1 hear its plunge there. Hardly a bit of board floats in any ditch or pond- hole but this creature has left its traces on it. How singularly rivers in their sources overlap each other! There is the meadow behind Brooks Clark’s and at the head of which Sted Buttrick’s handsome maple lot stands, on the old Carlisle road. The stream which drains this empties into the Assabet at Dove Rock. A short distance west of this meadow, but a good deal more elevated, is Boaz’s meadow, whose water finds its way, naturally or artificially, northeast- ward around the other, crossing the road just this side the lime-kiln, and empties into the Saw Mill Brook and so into the main river. There are many ways of feeling one’s pulse. In a healthy state the constant experience is a pleasurable sensation or sentiment. For instance, in such a state I find myself in perfect connection with nature, and the perception, or remembrance even, of any natural phenomena is attended with a gentle pleasurable ex- citement. Prevailing sights and sounds make the im- pression of beauty and music on me. But in sickness all is deranged. I had yesterday a kink in my back and a general cold, and as usual] it amounted to a cessation of life. I lost for the time my rapporé or relation to nature. Sympathy with nature is an evidence of per- fect health. You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. The cheaper your amusements, the safer and saner. They who think much of theatres, operas, and the like, are beside themselves. Each man’s necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of; though he con- verses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his rela- tives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint. Many a man who should rather describe his dinner imposes on us with a history of the Grand Khan.

P. M. — To Cliffs. In Stow’s sprout-land west of railroad cut, I see where a mouse which has a hole under a stump has eaten out clean the insides of the little Prinos verticillatus berries. These may be the doubtful seeds of the 14th. What pretty fruit for the mice, these bright prinos berries! They run up the twigs in the night and gather this shining fruit, take out the small seeds, and eat their kernels at the entrance to their burrows. The ground is strewn with them there. Turning up a stone on Fair Haven Hill, I find many small dead crickets about the edges, which have en- deavored to get under it and apparently have been killed by the frost; quite under it and alive, two or three small purplish-brown caterpillars; and many little ants, quite active, with their white grubs, in spacious galleries, somewhat semicylindrical, whose top often was the bottom of the stone. You would think they had been made by a worm. Going along close under the Cliffs, I see a dozen or more low blackberry vines dangling down a perpendicular rock at least eight feet high, and blown back and forth, with leaves every six inches, and one or two have reached the ground and taken firm root there. There are also many of the common cinquefoil with its leaves five inches asunder, dangling down five or six feet over the same rock. I see many acorn and other nut shells which in past years have been tucked into clefts in the rocks.

High wind in the night, shaking the house, apparently from the northwest. About 9.30 a. M., though there is very little cloud, I see a few flakes of snow, two or three only, like flocks of gossamer, straggling in a slanting direction to the ground, unnoticed by most, in a rather raw air. At ten there is a little more. The children in the next yard have seen it and are excited. They are searching to see if any rests on the ground. In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private ex- perience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home. If an equal emotion is ex- cited by a familiar homely phenomenon as by the Pyramids, there is no advantage in seeing the Pyra- mids. It is on the whole better, as it is simpler, to use the common language. We require that the reporter be very permanently planted before the facts which he observes, not a mere passer-by; hence the facts cannot be too homely. A man is worth most to him- self and to others, whether as an observer, or poet, or neighbor, or friend, where he is most himself, most contented and at home. ‘There his life is the most intense and he loses the fewest moments. Familiar and surrounding objects are the best symbols and illus- trations of his life. If a man who has had deep ex- periences should endeavor to describe them in a book of travels, it would be to use the language of a wan- dering tribe instead of a universal language. The poet has made the best roots in his native soil of any man, and is the hardest to transplant. The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself. If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learn- ing the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We only need travel enough to give our intellects an airing. In spite of Malthus and the rest, there will be plenty of room in this world, if every man will mind his own business. I have not heard of any planet running against another yet. P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp. Some bank swallows’ nests are exposed by the caving of the bank at Clamshell. The very smallest hole is about two and a half inches wide horizontally, by barely one high. All are much wider than high (vertically). One nest, with an egg in it still, is completely exposed. The cavity at the end is shaped like a thick hoe-cake or lens, about six inches wide and two plus thick, ver- tically. The nest is a regular but shallow one made simply of stubble, about five inches in diameter, and three quarters of an inch deep. I see many pollywogs in cold pools now. I enter the Ministerial Swamp at the road below Tarbell’s. The water andromeda leaves are brown now, except where protected by trees. In some places where many of the — shoots of high blue- berry are seen together, they have a very pretty effect, a crimson vigor to stand above the snow. Where the larches stand thick with their dark boles and stems, the ground is thickly strewn with their fine and pecu- liarly dark brown leaves, chaff-like, 7. e. darker than those of other pines, perhaps like black walnut or cherry shavings. As where other evergreens stand thick, little or nothing grows beneath. I see where squirrels (apparently) have eaten and stripped the spruce cones. I distinguished where the earth was cast out in cutting ditches through this swamp long ago, and this earth is covered and concealed with a thick growth of cup and cockscomb lichens. In this light-lying earth, in one place, I see where some crea- ture some time ago has pawed out much comb of some kind of bee (probably for the honey?), making a hole as big as my head, and this torn comb lies about. Returning through Harrington’s land, I see, me- thinks, two gentlemen plowing a field, as if to try an agricultural experiment,—for, it being cold and windy, both plowman and driver have their coats on, — but when I get closer, I hear the driver speak in a peculiarly sharp and petulant manner to the plow- man as they are turning the land furrow, and I know at once that they belong to those two races which are so slow to amalgamate. Thus my little idyl is dis- turbed. | I see a partridge on the ground under a white oak by Tarbell’s black birches, looking just like a snag. This is the second time I have seen them in such a place. Are they not after acorns? In the large Tommy Wheeler field, Ranunculus bulbosus in full bloom! I hear again the soft rippling of the Assabet under those black birches, which Tappan once remarked on. It is not so steep a fall as to be hoarse. The hardy tree sparrow has taken the place of the chipping and song sparrow, so much like the former that most do not know it is another. His faint lisping chip will keep our spirits up till another spring. I observed this afternoon how some bullocks had a little sportiveness forced upon them. ‘They were run- | ning down a steep declivity to water, when, feeling themselves unusually impelled by gravity downward, they took the hint even as boys do, flourished round gratuitously, tossing their hind quarters into the air and shaking their heads at each other, but what in- creases the ludicrousness of it to me is the fact that such capers are never accompanied by a smile. Who does not believe that their step is less elastic, their movement more awkward, for their long domesticity ?