19 September 1859 – 25 September 1859

A. M. — To Stow. Hear the note of the goldfinch on all sides this fine day after the storm. Butternuts have been falling for two or three weeks, — now mostly fallen, — but must dry and lose their outer shells before cracking them. They say that kittens’ tails are brittle, and perhaps the tip of that one’s was broken off. The young gentleman who travels abroad learns to pronounce, and makes acquaintance with foreign lords and ladies,— among the rest perchance with Lord Ward, the inventor and probably consumer of the cele- brated Worcestershire Sauce. See many yellow butterflies in the road this very pleasant day after the rain of yesterday. One flutters across between the horse and the wagon safely enough, though it looks as if it would be run down.

P. M. — To White Pond. The button-bushes by the river are generally overrun with the mikania. This is married to the button-bush as much as the vine to the elm, and more. I suspect that the button-bushes and black willows have been as ripe as ever they get to be. I get quite near to a blackbird on an apple tree, sing- ing with the grackle note very earnestly and not mind- ing me. He is all alone. Has a (rustyish) brown head and shoulders and the rest black. I think it is a grackle. Where are the red-wings now? I have not seen nor heard one for a long time. Is this a grackle come from its northern breeding-place ?

Heard in the night a snapping sound and the fall of some small body on the floor from time to time. In the morning I found that it was produced by the witch-hazel nuts on my desk springing open and casting their seeds quite across the chamber, hard and stony as these nuts are.’ It is overcast, like yesterday, and yet more rain-pro- mising.? Methinks the 19th was such a day (the second after rain) as the 18th in ’58, — a peculiarly fine September day, looking toward the fall, warm and bright, with . yellow butterflies in the washed road, and early-changed * maples and shrubs adorning the low grounds. The red neszea blazing along the Assabet above the powder- mills. ‘he apple crop, red and yellow, more conspicu- ous than ever amid the washed leaves. The farmers on all sides are digging their potatoes, so prone to their work that they do not see me going across lots. I sat near Coombs’s pigeon-place by White Pond. The pigeons sat motionless on his bare perches, from time to time dropping down into the bed and uttering a quivet or two. Some stood on the perch; others squatted flat. I could see their dove-colored breasts. Then all at once, being alarmed, would take flight, but ere long return in straggling parties. He tells me that he has fifteen dozen baited, but does not intend to catch any more at present, or for two or three weeks, hoping to attract others. Rice says that white oak acorns pounded up, shells and all, make the best bait for them. I see now in the wood-paths where small birds and partridges, etc., have been destroyed, — only their fea- thers left, probably by hawks. Do they not take their prey often to a smooth path in the woods? White Pond is being dimpled here and there all over, perhaps by fishes; and so is the river. It is an overcast day. Has that anything to do with it? I see some of the rainbow girdle reflected around its edge. Looking with the proper intention of the eye, I see it is ribbed with the dark prolonged reflections of the pines almost across. But why are they bent one side? Is it the effect of the wind ? We are having our dog-days now and of late, methinks, having had none to speak of in August; and now at last I see a few toadstools, — the elec- tion-cake (the yellowish, glazed over) and the taller, brighter-yellow above. Those shell-less slugs which eat apples eat | these also. Jays are more fre- quently heard of late, maybe because other birds are more silent. Considerable many acorns are fallen (black oak chiefly) in the path under the south edge of Conant’s Wood, this side of White Pond. Acorns have been fall- ing very sparingly ever since September 1, but are mostly wormy. They are as interesting now on the shrub oak (green) as ever. I suspect that it is not when the witch-hazel nut first gapes open that the seeds fly out, for I see many (if not most of them) open first with the seeds in them; but when I release a seed (it being still held by its base), it flies as [have said. I think that its slippery base is com- pressed by the unyielding shell, which at length expels it, just as I can make one fly by pressing it and letting it slip from between my thumb and finger. It appears to fit close to the shell at its base, even after the shell gapes. Theex-plenipotentiary refers in after[-dinner] speeches with complacency to the time he spent abroad and the various lords and distinguished men he met, as to a deed done and an ever-memorable occasion! Of what ac- count are titles and offices and opportunities, if you do no memorable deed ? I perceive that a spike of arum berries which I ga- thered quite green September 1 is now turned completely scarlet, and though it has lain on my desk in a dry and warm chamber all the while, the berries are still per- fectly plump and fresh (as well as glossy) to look at, — as much so as any. The greater part [of], almost all, the mikania was killed by the frost of the 15th and 16th. Only that little which was protected by its position escaped and is still in bloom. And the button-bush too is generally browned above by the same cause. This has given a consider- ably brown look to the side of the river. Saw beeomyces (lately opened, probably with the rain of the 17th) by roadside. Yesterday was a still, overcast, rain-promising day, and I saw this morning (perhaps it was yesterday) the ground about the back door all marked with worm-piles. Had they not come out for water after the dry weather ? See a St. Domingo cuckoo (black-billed) still.

A mizzling day, with less rain than yes- terday, filling the streams. As I went past the Hunt cellar, where Hosmer pulled down the old house in the spring, I thought I would see if any newor rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light. I was surprised to find there Urtica urens (?), very fresh and in bloom, one to three feet high, with ovate deeply cut leaves, which I never saw before; also Nicotiana, probably Ta- bacum (not the wild one), in flower, and Anethum grave- olens (?), or dill, also in flower. I had not seen either of the last two growing spontaneously in Concord before. It is remarkable that tobacco should have sprung up there. Could the seed have been preserved from a time when it was cultivated there?’ Also the Solanum nigrum, which is rare in Concord, with many flowers and green fruit. The prevailing plants in and about this cellar were mallows, Urtica urens, rich-weed (very rank), catnep, Chenopodium Botrys, Solanum nigrum, chickweed, Bidens frondosa, etc.’ It is remarkable what a curse seems to attach to any place which has long been inhabited by man. Vermin of various kinds abide with him. It 1s said that the site of Babylon is a desert where the lion and the jackal prowl. If, as here, an ancient cellar is uncovered, there springs up at once a crop of rank and noxious weeds, evidence of a certain unwholesome fertility, — by which perchance the earth relieves herself of the poisonous qualities which have been imparted to her. ~, As if what was foul, baleful, grovelling, or obscene in the inhabitants had sunk into the earth and infected it. Certain qualities are there in excess in the soil, and the proper equilibrium will not be attained until after the sun and air have purified the spot. The very shade breeds saltpetre. Yet men value this kind of earth highly and will pay a price for it, as if it were as good a soil for virtue as for vice. | In other places you find henbane and the Jamestown- weed and the like, in cellars, — such herbs as the witches are said to put into their caldron. It would be fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the house-site, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concord. ‘These vile weeds are sown by vile men. When the house is gone they spring up in the corners of cellars where the cider-casks stood always on tap, for murder and all kindred vices will out. And that rank crowd which lines the gutter, where the wash of the dinner dishes flows, are but more distant parasites of the host. What obscene and poisonous weeds, think you, will mark the site of a Slave State? — what kind of Jamestown-weed ? There are mallows for food, — for cheeses, at least; rich-weed for high living; the nettle for domestic fe- licity, — a happy disposition; black nightshade, tobacco, henbane, and Jamestown-weed as symbols of the moral atmosphere and influences of that house, the idiocy and insanity of it; dill and Jerusalem-oak and catnep for senility grasping at a straw; and beggar-ticks for poverty.’ I see the fall dandelions all closed in the rain this afternoon. Do they, then, open only in fair or cloudy forenoons and cloudy afternoons ? There is mallow with its pretty little button-shaped fruit, which children eat A: 2 and call cheeses, — eaten green. There are ae ‘Situs Several such fruits discoverable and edible by oo children. The mountain-ash trees are alive with robins and cherry-birds nowadays, stripping them of their fruit (in drooping clusters). It is exceedingly bitter and austere to my taste. Such a tree fills the air with the watch-spring-like note of the cherry-birds coming and going.

Pretty copious rain in the night. 11 a. M. — River risen about fourteen inches above lowest this year (or thirteen and three quarters above my mark by boat). What an army of non-producers society produces, — ladies generally (old and young) and gentlemen of lez- sure, so called! Many think themselves well employed as charitable dispensers of wealth which somebody else earned, and these who produce nothing, being of the most luxurious habits, are precisely they who want the most, and complain loudest when they do not get what they want. They who are literally paupers maintained at the public expense are the most importunate and insatiable beggars. They cling like the glutton to a living man and suck his vitals up. To every locomotive man there are three or four deadheads clinging to him, as if they conferred a great favor on society by living “™ } upon it. Meanwhile they fill the churches, and die and revive from time to time. They have nothing to do but sin, and repent of their sins. How can you expect such bloodsuckers to be happy? ? Not only foul and poisonous weeds grow in our tracks, but our vileness and luxuriance make simple - and wholesome plants rank and weed-like. All that I ever got a premium for was a monstrous squash, so coarse that nobody could eat it. Some of these bad qualities will be found to lurk in the pears that are invented in and about the purlieus of great towns. “The evil that men do lives after them.”’ The corn and potatoes produced by excessive manuring may be said to have, not only a coarse, but a poisonous, quality. They are made food [for] hogs and oxen too. What creatures is the grain raised on the corn-fields of Water- loo food for, unless it be for such as prey upon men? Who cuts the grass in the graveyard? I can detect the site of the shanties that have stood all along the rail- roads by the ranker vegetation. I do not go there for delicate wild-flowers. It is important, then, that we should air our lives from time to time by removals, and excursions into the fields and woods, — starve our vices. Do not sit so long over any cellar-hole as to tempt your neighbor to bid for the privilege of digging saltpetre there. So live that only the most beautiful wild-flowers will spring up where you have dwelt, — harebells, violets, and blue-eyed grass.’

P. M. — To Melvin’s Preserve. Was that a flock of grackles on the meadow? I have not seen half a dozen blackbirds, methinks, for a month. I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days. Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with incon- ceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it. It is not by a compromise, it is not by a timid and feeble repentance, that a man will save his soul and live, at last. He has got to conquer a clear field, letting Repentance & Co. go. That’s a well- meaning but weak firm that has assumed the debts of an old and worthless one. You are to fight in a field where no allowances will be made, no courteous bowing to one-handed knights. You are expected to do your duty, not in spite of every thing but one, but in spite of everything. See a green snake. Stedman Buttrick’s handsome maple and pine swamp is full of cinnamon ferns. I stand on the elevated road, looking down into it. The trees are very tall and slender, without branches for a long distance. All the ground, which is perfectly level, is covered and con- cealed, as are the bases of the trees, with the tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. It is a very pretty sight, these northern trees springing out of a ground- work of ferns. It is like pictures of the tropics, except that here the palms are the undergrowth. You could not have arranged a nosegay more tastefully. Itis a rich groundwork, out of which the maples and pines spring.’ But outside the wood and by the roadside, where they are exposed, these ferns are withered, shrivelled, and brown, for they are tenderer than the dicksonia. The fern, especially if large, is so foreign and tropical that these remind me of artificial groundworks set in sand, to set off other plants. These ferns (like brakes) begin to decay, 7. ¢. to turn yellow or brown and ripen, as here, before they are necessarily frost-bitten. Theirs is another change and decay, like that of the brake and sarsaparilla in the woods and swamps, only later, while the exposed ones are killed before they have passed through all their changes. The exposed ones attained to a brighter yellow early and were then killed; the shaded ones pass through various stages of rich, com- monly pale brown, as here, and last much longer. The brown ones are the most interesting. Going along this old Carlisle road, — road for walk- ers, for berry-pickers, and no more worldly travellers; road for Melvin and Clark, not for the sheriff nor butcher nor the baker’s jingling cart; road where all wild things and fruits abound, where there are countless rocks to jar those who venture there in wagons; which . no jockey, no wheelwright in his right mind, drives ’ over, no little spidery gigs and Flying Childers; road which leads to and through a great but not famous garden, zodlogical and botanical garden, at whose gate you never arrive,’ — as I was going along there, I perceived the grateful scent of the dicksonia fern, now partly decayed, and it reminds me of all up-country with its springy mountainsides and unexhausted vigor. Is there any essence of dicksonia fern, I wonder? Surely that giant who, my neighbor expects, is to bound up the Alleghanies will have his handkerchief scented with that. In the lowest part of the road the dicksonia by the wall-sides is more than half frost-bitten and withered, —a sober Quaker-color, brown crape! — though not so tender or early [?] as the cinnamon fern; but soon I rise to where they are more yellow and green, and so my route is varied. On the higher places there are very handsome tufts of it, all yellowish out- side and green within. The sweet fragrance of decay! When I wade through by narrow cow-paths, it is as if I had strayed into an ancient and decayed herb-garden. Proper for old ladies to scent their handkerchiefs with. Nature perfumes her garments with this essence now especially. She gives it to those who go a-barberrying and on dank autumnal walks. The essence of this as well as of new-mown hay, surely! The very scent of it, if you have a decayed frond in your chamber, will take you far up country in a twinkling. You would think you had gone after the cows there, or were lost on the mountains. It will make you as cool and well as a frog,—a wood frog, Rana sylvatica. It is the scent the earth yielded in the saurian period, before man was created and fell, before milk and water were invented, and the mints. Far wilder than they. Rana sylvatica passed judgment on it, or rather that peculiar- scented Rana palustris. It was in his reign it was intro- duced. That is the scent of the Silurian Period precisely, and a modern beau may scent his handkerchief with it. Before man had come and the plants that chiefly serve him. There were no Rosacee nor mints then. So the earth smelled in the Silurian (?) Period, before man was created and any soil had been debauched with manure. The saurians had their handkerchiefs scented with it. For all the ages are represented still and you can smell them out. A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sports- man knows when to look for plover. Though you may have sauntered near to heaven’s gate, when at length you return toward the village you give up the enterprise a little, and you begin to fall into the old ruts of thought, like a regular roadster. Your thoughts very properly fail to report themselves to headquarters. Your thoughts turn toward night and the evening mail and become begrimed with dust, as if you were just going to put up at (with?) the tavern, or even come to make an exchange with a brother clergyman here on the morrow. Some eyes cannot see, even through a spy-glass. I showed my spy-glass to a man whom I met this after- noon, who said that he wanted to see if he could look through it. I tried it carefully on him, but he failed. He said that he tried a lot lately on the muster-field but he never could see through them, somehow or other everything was all a blur. I asked him if he considered his eyes good. He answered that they were good to see far. They looked like two old-fashioned china saucers. He kept steadily chewing his quid all the while he talked and looked. This is the case with a great many, I suspect. Everything is in a blur to them. He enjoys the distinction of being the only man in the town who raises his own tobacco. Seeing is not in them. No focus will suit them. You wonder how the world looks to them, — if those are eyes which they have got, or bits of old china, familiar with soap- suds. As I stood looking over a wall this afternoon at some splendid red sumach bushes, now in their prime, I saw Melvin the other side of the wall and hailed him. “What are you after there?” asked he. ‘‘After the same thing that you are, perhaps,’’ answered I. But I mis- took, this time, for he said that he was looking amid the huckleberry bushes for some spectacles which a woman lost therein thesummer. It was his mother, no doubt. Road — that old Carlisle one — that leaves towns behind; where you put off worldly thoughts; where you do not carry a watch, nor remember the proprietor; where the proprietor is the only trespasser, — looking after his apples! — the only one who mistakes his call- ing there, whose title is not good; where fifty may be a-barberrying and you do not see one. It is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, successive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see out. There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid sashé-ing [sic] to the barberry bushes in hoops and crinoline, and none of them see me. The world-surrounding hoop! faery rings! Oh, the jolly cooper’s trade it is the best of any! Carried to the furthest isles where civilized man penetrates. This the girdle they ’ve put round the world! Saturn or Satan set the example. Large and small hogsheads, barrels, kegs, worn by the misses that go to that lone schoolhouse in the Pinkham notch. The lonely horse in its pasture is glad to see company, comes forward to be noticed and takes an apple from your hand. Others are called great roads, but this is greater than they all. The road is only laid out, offered to walkers, not accepted by the ~ town and the travelling world. To be represented by a dotted line on charts, or drawn in lime-juice, undis- coverable to the uninitiated, to be held to a warm imagi- nation. No guide-boards indicate it. No odometer would indicate the miles a wagon had run there. Rocks which the druids might have raised — if they could. There I go searching for malic acid of the right quality, with my tests. The process is simple. Place the fruit between your jaws and then endeavor to make your teeth meet. The very earth contains it. The Easter- brooks Country contains malic acid. To my senses the dicksonia fern has. the most wild and primitive fragrance, quite unalloyed and untam- able, such as no human institutions give out,—the early morning fragrance of the world, antediluvian, strength and hope imparting. They who scent it can never faint. It is ever a new and untried field where it grows, and only when we think original thoughts can we perceive it. If we keep that on [szc] our boudoir we shall be healthy and evergreen as hemlocks. Older than, but related to, strawberries. Before strawberries were, it was, and it will outlast them. Good for the trilobite and saurian in us; death to dandies. It yields its scent most morning and evening. Growing without manure; older than man; refreshing him; preserving his original strength and innocence. When the New Hampshire farmer, far from travelled roads, has cleared a space for his moun- tain home and conducted the springs of the mountain to his yard, already it grows about the sources of that spring, before any mint is planted in his garden. There his sheep and oxen and he too scent it, and he realizes that the world is new to him. There the pastures are rich, the cattle do not die of disease, and the men are strong and free. The wild original of strawberries and the rest. Nature, the earth herself, 1s the only panacea. They bury poisoned sheep up to the necks in earth to take the poison out of them. After four days cloud and rain we have fair weather. A great many have improved this first fair day to come a-barberrying to the Easterbrooks fields. These bushy fields are all alive with them, though I scarcely see one. I meet Melvin loaded down with barberries, in bags and baskets, so that he has to travel by stages and is glad to stop and talk with me. It is better to take thus what Nature offers, in her season, than to buy an extra dinner at Parker’s. The sumach berries are probably past their beauty. Fever-bush berries are scarlet now, and also green. They have a more spicy taste than any of our berries, carrying us in thought to the spice islands. Taste like lemon-peel. The panicled andromeda berries (? ) begin to brown. The bayberry berries are apparently ripe, though not so gray as they will be, — more lead-colored. They bear sparingly here. Leaves not fallen nor changed, and I the more easily find the bushes amid the changed huckleberries, brakes, etc., by their greenness. The poke on Eb. Hubbard’s hillside has been consid- erably frost-bitten before the berries are one-third ripe. It is in flower still. Great drooping cylindrical racemes of blackish-purple berries, six inches or more in length, tapering a little toward the end; great flat blackish and ripe berries at base, with green ones and flowers at the other end; all on brilliant purple or crimson-purple peduncle and pedicels.' Those thorns by Shattuck’s barn, now nearly leafless, have hard green fruit as usual. The shrub oak is apparently the most fertile of our oaks. I count two hundred and sixty-six acorns on a branch just two feet long. Many of the cups are freshly empty now, showing a pretty circular pink scar at the bottom, where the acorn adhered. They are of various forms and sizes on different shrubs; are now turning dark-brown and showing their converging meridional light-brown lines. Never fear for striped squirrels in our shrub oak land. Am surprised to find, by Botrychium Swamp, a Rhus radicans which is quite a tree by itself. It is about nine feet high by nine in width, growing in the midst of a clump of barberry bushes, which it overhangs. It is now at the height of its change, very handsome, scarlet and yellow, and I did not at first know what it was. I found it to consist of three or four branches, each nearly two inches thick and covered with those shaggy fibres, and these are twined round some long-since rotted bar- berry stems, and around one another, and now make a sizable-looking trunk, which rises to the height of four feet before it branches, and then spreads widely every way like an oak. It was, no doubt, indebted to the bar- berry for support at first, but now its very branches are much larger than that, and it far overtops and over- spreads all the barberry stems.

P.M. — To Emerson’s Cliff. Holding a white pine needle in my hand, and turning it in a favorable light, as I sit upon this cliff, I perceive that each of its three edges is notched or serrated with minute forward-pointing bristles. So much does Nature avoid an unbroken line that even this slender leaf is ser- rated; though, to my surprise, neither Gray nor Bige- low mention it. Loudon, however, says, “Scabrous and inconspicuously serrated on the margin; spreading in summer, but in winter contracted, and lying close to the branches.” Fine and smooth as it looks, it is ser- rated after all. ‘This is its concealed wildness, by which it connects itself with the wilder oaks. Prinos berries are fairly ripe for a few days. Moles work in meadows. I see at Brister Spring Swamp the (apparently) As- pidium Noveboracense, more than half of it turned white. Also some dicksonia is about equally white. These especially are the white ones. There is another, largish, and more generally decayed than either of these, with large serrated segments, rather far apart, — perhaps the Asplenium Filix-femina (?). The first may be called now the white fern, — with rather small entirish and flat segments close together. In shade is the laboratory of white. Color is produced in the sun. The cinnamon ferns are all a decaying brown there. The sober brown colors of those ferns are in harmony with the twilight of the swamp. The terminal shield fern and the Aspidium spinulosum (?) are still fresh and green, the first as much so as the polypody. At 2 p. M. the river is sixteen and three quarters inches above my hubj ? | by boat. Nabalus albus still common, though much past prime. Though concealed amid trees, I find three humble- bees on one. As when Antzeus touched the earth, so when the mountaineer scents the fern, he bounds up like a cha- mois, or mountain goat, with renewed strength. There is no French perfumery about it. It has not been tam- pered with by any perfumer to their majesties. It is the fragrance of those plants whose impressions we see on our coal. Beware of the cultivation that eradicates it. The very crab-grass in our garden is for the most part a light straw-color and withered, probably by the frosts of the 15th and 16th, looking almost as white as the corn; and hundreds of sparrows (chip-birds ?) find their food amid it. The same frosts that kill and whiten the corn whiten many grasses thus.