28 February 1859 – 6 March 1859

To Cambridge and Boston. Saw a mackerel in the market. The upper half of its sides is mottled blue and white like the mackerel sky, as stated January 19th, 1858.

Wednesday. P. M.—'To Cassandra Ponds and down river. It is a remarkably cold day for March, and the river, etc., are frozen as solidly as in the winter and there is no water to be seen upon the ice, as usually in a winter day, apparently because it has chiefly run out from beneath on the meadows and left the ice, for often, as you walk over the meadows, it sounds hollow under your tread. I see in the Deep Cut, on the left-hand, or east, side, just beyond the clay, a ravine lately begun, in a slightly different manner from the Clamshell one. The water running down the steep sand-bank (which is some thirty or thirty-five feet high), it being collected from the field above, had worn a channel from four to six inches wide, gradually, through the frozen crust of the sand, which was one to two feet thick, and, reach- ing the loose unfrozen sand beneath, had washed it downward, and out through the narrow channel lower down, until quite a cavern was formed, whose bottom was eight or ten feet below the surface, while it was five or six feet wide. But within a few days the crust, thawing, had fallen in, and so the cavern, with its narrow “crack,” or skylight, was turned into an open ravine, and there is no telling where the mischief will end. The willow catkins by the railroad where you first come in sight of the [szc] have now all (on one or two bushes) crept out about an eighth of an inch, giving to the bushes already a very pretty appearance when you stand on the sunny side, the silvery-white specks contrasting with the black scales. Seen along the twigs, they are somewhat like small pearl buttons on a waist- coat. Go and measure to what length the silvery wil- low catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o’ the year it 1s by Nature’s clock. As I go through the Cassandra Ponds, I look round on the young oak woods still clad with rustling leaves as in winter, with a feeling as if it were their last rustle before the spring, but then I reflect how far away still is the time when the new buds swelling will cause these leaves to fall. We thus commonly antedate the spring more than any other season, for we look forward to it with more longing. We talk about spring as at hand before the end of February, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying. There may be a whole month of solid and uninterrupted winter yet, plenty of ice and good sleigh- ing. We may not even see the bare ground, and hardly the water, and yet we sit down and warm our spirits an- nually with this distant prospect of spring. As if a man were to warm his hands by stretching them toward the rising sun and rubbing them. We listen to the Feb- ruary cock-crowing and turkey-gobbling as to a first course, or prelude. The bluebird which some woodchopper or inspired walker is said to have seen in that sunny interval be- tween the snow-storms is like a speck of clear blue sky seen near the end of a storm, reminding us of an ethereal region and a heaven which we had forgotten. Princes and magistrates are often styled serene, but what is their turbid serenity to that ethereal serenity which the bluebird embodies? His Most Serene Bird- ship! His soft warble melts in the ear, as the snow is melting in the valleys around. The bluebird comes and with his warble drills the ice and sets free the rivers and ponds and frozen ground. As the sand flows down the slopes a little way, assuming the forms of foliage where the frost comes out of the ground, so this little rill of melody flows a short way down the con- cave of the sky. The sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard like single sparks or a shower of them shot up from the swamps and seen against the dark winter in the rear.' Under the alders at Well Meadow I see a few skunk- cabbage spathes fairly open on the side, and these may bloom after a day or two of pleasant weather. But for the most part, here and generally elsewhere, the spathes are quite small, slender, and closed as yet, or frost- bitten. The caltha leaves have grown decidedly. They make nearly a handful in one place, above the surface of the springy water, the leaves not yet quite flatted out, but curled up into a narrow ellipse. They barely peep above the water. Also what I take to be a kind of cress is quite fresh-looking, as if it had grown a little there. The chrysosplenium may have looked as it does, even under the snow, or all winter (?). It already, at any rate, makes pretty (dirty) green beds, about level with the surface of the water. These plants (7. e. first ones) are earlier than any pads, for the brooks, and ditches even, are generally frozen over still, firmly.

Going to Acton this morning, I saw some sparrows on the wall, which I think must have been the F. hyemalis (?). P. M. — Up river to Nut Meadow Brook. It is nearly as cold as yesterday. The piers of the bridge by the railroad bridge are adorned with very handsome salver or waiter shaped ice three or four feet in diameter (bottom upward), the crenate edges all around being adorned w @ BD § with bell-shaped pen- P dants (produced by the melting (?) or perchance the water dashed against them). Going by the solidago oak at Clamshell Hill bank, I heard a faint rippling note and, looking up, saw about fifteen snow buntings sitting in the top of the oak, all with their breasts toward me, — sitting so still and quite white, seen against the white cloudy sky, they did not look like birds but the ghosts of birds, and their ¥ boldness, allowing me to come quite near, enhanced this impression. ‘These were almost as white as snow- balls, and from time [to time] I heard a low, soft rip- pling note from them. I could see no-features, but only the general outline of plump birds in white. It was a very spectral sight, and after I had watched them for several minutes, I can hardly say that I was prepared to see them fly away like ordinary buntings when I advanced further. At first they were almost concealed by being almost the same color with the cloudy sky. I see in that ditch (call it Grassy Ditch) near John Hosmer’s second spring south of Nut Meadow Brook much grass which has lately grown an inch or more and lies flat on the water. Is it the Glyceria fluitans? It is somewhat frost-bitten too. It fills the ditch like moss, as seen at a little distance. It must be a very springy ditch to be thus open entirely. Also, pretty near the spring, I see a tuft of carex (?) whose stiff glaucous points have risen several inches above the surface. See two small water-bugs at the spring; none else- where. I see apparently some callitriche, fresh, in the spring. We recross the river at Grindstone Meadow, but probably cannot to-morrow or next day there. The ice is spotted with dark crescents, — we tread on the white parts, — and it is puffed up along the middle, be- ing at least six inches high in the middle where we cross. All the lower part of steep southern slopes of hills is now commonly bare,— though the snow may be pretty deep on the brow, —especially the springy bases where the skunk-cabbage, etc., grow. How imperceptibly the first springing takes place! In some still, muddy springs whose temperature is more equable than that of the brooks, while brooks and ditches are generally thickly frozen and concealed and the earth is covered with snow, and it is even cold, hard, and nipping winter weather, some fine grass which fills the water like a moss begins to lift its tiny spears or blades above the surface, which directly fall flat for half an inch or an inch along the surface, and on these (though many are frost-bitten) you may mea- sure the length to which the spring has advanced, — has sprung. Very few indeed, even of botanists, are aware of this growth. Some of it appears to go on even under ice and snow, or, in such a place as I have de- scribed, if it is also sheltered by alders, or the like, you may see (as March 2d) a little green crescent of caltha leaves, raised an inch or so above the F823. . : : water, ~ ~ with leaves but partially un- rolled and looking as if it would withdraw beneath the surface again at night. This, I think, must be the most conspicuous and forward greenness of the spring. The small reddish radical leaves of the dock, too, are ob- served flat on the moist ground as soon as the snow has melted there, as if they had grown beneath it. The mossy bank along the south side of Hosmer’s second spring ditch is very interesting. There are many coarse, hair-like masses of that green and brown moss on its edge, hanging over the ditch, alternating with withered-looking cream-colored sphagnum tinged with rose-color, in protuberances, or mamme, a foot across on the perpendicular side of the ditch. Cast water “ } on their cheeks, and they become much more reddish, yet hardly so interesting. This is while the top of the bank and all the hillside above is covered deep with snow. The pretty fingers of the Lycopodium clavatum, peeping out here and there amid the snow and hang- ing down the ditch-side, contrasting with the snow, are very interesting. Channing tells me he has met with a sassafras tree in New Bedford woods, which, according to a string which he put round it, is eleven and three quarters feet in circumference at about three feet from the ground. They consider them very good for rails there, they are so light and durable. Talk about reading! —a good reader! It depends on how he is heard. There may be elocution and pro- nunciation (recitation, say) to satiety, but there can be no good reading unless there is good hearing also. It takes two at least for this game, as for love, and they must codperate. The lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best heard. Sometimes, it is true, the faith and spirits of the reader may run a little ahead and draw after the good hearing, and at other times the good hearing runs ahead and draws on the good reading. The reader and the hearer are a team . not to be harnessed tandem, the poor wheel horse sup- porting the burden of the shafts, while the leader runs pretty much at will, while the lecture lies passive in the painted curricle behind. I saw some men unload- ing molasses-hogsheads from a truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes one round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot steadily pulled at — the ropes. ‘The first man was the lecturer, the last was the audience. It is the duty of the lecturer to team his hogshead of sweets to the depot, or Lyceum, place the horse, arrange the ropes, and shove; and it is the duty of the audience to take hold of the ropes and pull with all their might. ‘The lecturer who tries to read his essay without being abetted by a good hearing is in the predicament of a teamster who is engaged in the Sisyphean labor of rolling a molasses-hogshead up an inclined plane alone, while the freight-master and his men stand indifferent with their hands in their pockets. I have seen many such a hogshead which had rolled off the horse and gone to smash, with all its sweets wasted on the ground between the truckman and the freight-house, — and the freight-masters thought that the loss was not theirs. Read well! Did you ever know a full well that did not yield of its refreshing waters to those who put their hands to the windlass or the well-sweep? Did you ever suck cider through a straw? Did you ever know the cider to push out of the straw when you were not sucking, — unless it chanced to be in a complete fer- ment? An audience will draw out of a lecture, or en- able a lecturer to read, only such parts of his lecture as they like. A lecture is like a barrel half full of some palatable liquor. You may tap it at various levels, — in the sweet liquor or in the froth or in fixed air above. If it is pronounced good, it is partly to the credit of the hearers; if bad, it is partly their fault. Some- ~‘ times a lazy audience refuses to codperate and pull on the ropes with a will, simply because the hogshead is full and therefore heavy, when if it were empty, or had only a little sugar adhering to it, they would whisk it up the slope in a jiffy. The lecturer, therefore, de- sires of his audience a long pull, a strong pull, and all pull together. I have seen a sturdy truckman, or lec- turer, who had nearly broken his back with shoving his lecture up such an inclined plane while the audience were laughing at him, at length, as with a last effort, set it a-rolling in amid the audience and upon their toes, scattering them like sheep and making them cry out with pain, while he drove proudly away. Rarely it is a very heavy freight of such hogsheads stored in a vessel’s hold that is to be lifted out and deposited on the public wharf, and this is accomplished only after many a hearty pull all together and a good deal of heave-yo-ing.

Began to snow last evening, and it is now (early in the morning) about a foot deep, and raining. P. M.—To E. Hosmer Spring. Down Turnpike and back by E. Hubbard’s Close. We stood still a few moments on the Turnpike be- low Wright’s (the Turnpike, which had no wheel-track beyond Tuttle’s and no track at all beyond Wright’s), and listened to hear a spring bird. We heard only the jay screaming in the distance and the cawing of a crow. What a perfectly New England sound is this voice of the crow! If you stand perfectly still anywhere in the outskirts of the town and listen, stilling the almost incessant hum of your own personal factory, this is perhaps the sound which you will be most sure to hear rising above all sounds of human industry and lead- ing your thoughts to some far bay in the woods where the crow is venting his disgust. This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tink- ling of the forge. It sees a race pass away, but it passes not away. It remains to remind us of aboriginal na- ture. I find near Hosmer Spring in the wettest ground, which has melted the snow as it fell, little flat beds of light-green moss, soft as velvet, which have recently pushed up, and lie just above the surface of the water. They are scattered about in the old decayed trough. (And there are still more and larger at Brister’s Spring.) They are like little rugs or mats and are very obviously of fresh growth, such a green as has not been dulled by winter, a very fresh and living, perhaps slightly glaucous, green. ‘The myosotis and bitter cress are hardly clean and fresh enough for a new growth.’ The radical leaves of the Ranunculus repens are conspicu- ous, but the worse for the wear; but the golden saxi- frage has in one or two places decidedly and conspicu- ously grown, like the cowslip at Well Meadow and still more, rising in dense beds a half to three quarters of an inch above the water, the leaves, like those of the cowslip, only partly concealed and flatted out. This distinguishes the fresh-springing leaves of these two. Probably there is more of the chrysosplenium thus ad- =, vanced in Concord than of the caltha.'! I see none of the last here. The surface of the snow thus rapidly melting and sinking (there are commonly some inches of water under it, the rain having soaked through), though still very fresh and pure white, is all cracked, as it were, like that of some old toadstools. It has sunk so much that every inequality in the surface of the ground be- neath is more distinctly shown than when bare. The ruts of old wood-paths are represented in the surface a foot above, and the track of the man and of the dog that ran by the side of the team (in the old snow), — the thread, in short, of every valley. The surface of the snow, though so recent, is therefore, on account of the rain, very diversified. On steep slopes it is regularly furrowed, apparently by water that has flowed down it. In the brook in Hubbard’s Close I see the grass push- ing up from the bottom four or five inches long and waving in the current, which has not yet reached the surface. C. thinks this is called a sap snow, because it comes after the sap begins to flow. The story goes that at the Social Club the other night Cyrus Stow, hearing that the lecture before the Lyceum by Alger was to be on “The Sophistry of Ennui” and not knowing what that was, asked in good faith if it went by wind or water.

Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.’ There was a chick- adee close by, to which it may have been addressed. It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earli- est spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker! (This is before J have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in Concord this year.) It is the spring note of the nuthatch. It paused in its pro- gress about the trunk or branch and uttered this lively but peculiarly inarticulate song, an awkward attempt to warble almost in the face of the chickadee, as if it were one of its kind.. It was thus giving vent to the spring within it. If I am not mistaken, it is what I have heard in former springs or winters long ago, fabulously early in the season, when we men had but just begun to anti- cipate the spring, — for it would seem that we, in our anticipations and sympathies, include in succession the moods and expressions of all creatures. When only the snow had begun to melt and no rill of song had broken loose, a note so dry and fettered still, so inartic- ulate and half thawed out, that you might (and would commonly) mistake for the tapping of a woodpecker. As if the young nuthatch in its hole had listened only to the tapping of woodpeckers and learned that music, and now, when it would sing and give vent to its spring ecstasy and it can modulate only some notes like that, that is its theme still. ‘That is its ruling idea of song and music, — only a little clangor and liquidity added to the tapping of the woodpecker. It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring. This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark. - P. M. — Up river to Well Meadow. The snow melts and sinks very rapidly. This spring snow is peculiarly white and blinding. The inequal- ities of the surface are peculiar and interesting when it has sunk thus rapidly. I see crows walking about on the ice half covered with snow in the middle of the meadows, where there is no grass, apparently to pick up the worms and other insects left there since the midwinter freshet. We see one or two little gnats or mosquitoes in the air. See a large light-colored hawk circling a long time over Fair Haven Hill, and another, probably its mate, starts away from Holden Wood and circles toward it. The last being nearest, I distinguished that its wings were black tipped. (I have no glass.) What can they be? I think that I have seen the same in previous springs. They are too light-colored for hen-hawks, and for a pair of marsh hawks, — being apparently alike. Then the fish hawk is said by the books not to get here nearly so early, and, beside, they would not circle about so much over the hill. The goshawk, which I next think of, has no black tip to wings that Ican learn. May it not be the winter hawk of Wilson? for he says its pri- maries are black at the tips, and that [it] is ighter than the red-shouldered, of same species. At the same time I see a crow going north or north- east, high over Fair Haven Hill, and, two or three minutes after, two more, and so.many more at inter- vals of a few minutes. This is apparently their spring movement. Turkeys gobble in some distant farmyard at the same time. At length the sun is seen to have come out and to be shining on the oak leaves on the south side of Bear Garden Hill, and its light appears to be exactly limited to them. I saw on the ice, quite alive, some of those black water-beetles, + . which apparently had been left above by a VD rise of the river. Were they a Gyrinus ? } When I was last at Well Meadow, I saw where ap- parently a dozen hounds had all crossed the brook at exactly one point, leaving a great trail in the slosh above the ice, though there was but one track of a man. It reminded me of a buffalo-trail. Every half-mile, as you go up the river, you come to the tracks of one or two dogs which have recently crossed it without any man. Those skunk-cabbage buds which are most advanced have cast off their outmost and often frost-bitten sheaths, and the spathe is broader and slightly opened (some three quarters of an inch or more already) and has ac- quired brighter and more variegated colors. The out- side of the spathe shows some ripeness in its colors and markings, like a melon-rind, before the spadix begins to bloom. I find that many of the most forward spathes, etc., have been destroyed since I was here three days ago. Some animal has nibbled away a part of the spathes (or sometimes only a hole in it) — and I see the fragments scattered about — and then eaten out the whole of the spadix. Indeed, but few forward ones are left. Is this a mouse or musquash? or a bird? The spadix is evidently a favorite titbit to some crea- ture. : ; That more entire-leaved plant amid the early skunk- cabbage which I called a cress on the 3d has the bit- ter taste of cress. ‘he common cress has in one place grown considerably, and is fresh and clean and very good to eat. I wonder that I do not see where some creatures have eaten it. The sweet-gale brush seen in a mass at a little dis- tance 1s considerably darker than the alders above it. This will do for the sweet-gale maze in November. The cowslip there is very prominently flower-budded, lifting its yellow flower-buds above water in one place. The leaves are quite inconspicuous when they first come up, being rolled up tightly.

Sunday. P. M.—To Yellow Birch Swamp. We go through the swamp near Bee-Tree, or Oak, Ridge, listening for blackbirds or robins and, in the old orchards, for bluebirds. Found between .two of the little birches in the path (where they grow densely), in Indigo-bird Sprout-land, a small nest suspended between one and two feet above the ground, between two of the little birches. This is where I have seen the indigo-bird in summer, and the nest apparently an- swers to Wilson’s account of that bird’s, being fas- tened with saliva to the birch on each side. Wilson says it is “built in a low bush . . . suspended between two twigs, one passing up each side.” This is about the diameter of a hair-bird’s nest within, composed chiefly of fine bark-shreds looking like grass and one or two strips of grape-vine bark, and very securely fastened to the birch on each side by a whitish silk or cobweb and saliva. It is thin, the lining being prob- ably gone. There is a very pictur- ( / esque large black oak on i [ae J the Bee-Tree Ridge, of this am f a form :— The genista is not ever- green, having turned brown, though it is still quite leafy. I could not find a single green shoot. It is correctly represented in Loudon’s ‘‘Arboretum,” in ’44, as “a deciduous under-shrub.”’ Yet in his “ Encyclopeedia,” in ’55, it is represented as “an evergreen shrub.” Measured a thorn which, at six inches from the ground, or the smallest place below the branches, — for it branches soon, — was two feet three inches in circumference. Cut off a barberry on which I counted some twenty-six rings, the broadest diameter being about three and a half inches. Both these were on the west side the Yellow Birch Swamp. The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides, are very pretty. Like the alders, with their reddish catkins, they ex- press more life than most trees. Most trees look com- pletely at rest, if not dead, now, but these look as if the sap must be already flowing in them, — and in winter as well. In woodland roads you see where the trees which were bent down by ice, and obstructed the way, were cut off the past winter; their tops lie on one side.