The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
Thoreau's
Life & Writings
_____
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
The Journal of Henry David
Thoreau:
1906 Edition
Journal I: 1837 - 1846
Journal II: 1850 - September 15, 1851
Journal III: September 16, 1851 - April 30, 1852
Journal IV: March 1, 1852 - February 27, 1853
Journal V: March 5 - November 30, 1853
Journal VI: December 1, 1853 - August 31, 1854
Journal VII: September 1, 1854 - October 30, 1855
Journal VIII: November 1, 1855- August 15, 1856
Journal IX: August 16, 1856 - August 7, 1857
Journal X: August 8, 1857 - June 29, 1858
Journal XI: July 2, 1858 - February 28, 1859
Journal XII: March 2, 1859 - November 30, 1859
Journal XIII: December 1, 1859 - July 31, 1860
Journal XIV: August 1, 1860 -
November 3, 1861 and Index
Selected
sketches from Thoreau's Journal
"No pages in my Journal are so suggestive as those which contain a rude
sketch."
-- Thoreau in his Journal, 25 April 1857
"At Hubbard's Bridge. . . . Looking from bridge to hill, above is the moon, separated from attendant star by a bar of white clouds, below which the star shines brightly through a clearing; beneath this, bars of white clouds to the horizon. The hill and opposite woods are dark with fine effect." "With [John Lewis] Russell to Fair Haven by boat. . . . At the steam-mill sand-bank was the distinct shadow of our shadows, ― first on the water, then the double one on the bank botom to bottom, one being upside down, ― three in all, ― one on water, two on land or bushes." "White oak acorns have many of them fallen. Theyare small and very neat light-green acorns, with small cups, commonly arranged two by two close together. . . . " "The hardhack above the snow has this form. . . " "The surface of the snow was diversified by those slight drifts, or perhaps cliffs, which are left a few inches high (like the fracture of slate rocks), with a waved outline, and all the sand was collected in waving lines just on the edge of thee little drifts, in ridges, maybe an eighth of an inch high." This morning (the 15th), it having rained in the night, and thinking the fire would be mostly out, I made haste to the ruins of the Lee house to read that inscription. By laying down boards on the bricks and cinders, which were quite too hot to tread on and covered a smothered fire, I was able to reach the chimney. The inscription was on the east side of the east chimney (which had fallen), at the bottom, in a cupboard on the west side of the late parlor, which was on a level with the ground on the east and with the cellar on the extreme west and the cellar kitchen on the north. There was a narrow lower (milk) cellar south and southeast of it, and an equally lower and narrower cellar east of it, under the parlor. This side of the chimney was perhaps fifteen feet from the east side of the house and as far from the north side. The inscription was in a slight recess in the chimney three feet four inches wide and a little more in height up and down, as far as I could see into the pile of bricks,
thus:—" "In the sluiceway of Pole Brook, by the road just beyond, I found another kind of Indian pot. It was an eel-pot (?) or creel, a wattled basket or wickerwork, made of willow ossiers with the bark on, very artfully. It was about four feet long and shaped thus. . . " "I see the fish hawk again. . . As it flies low, directly over my head, I see that its body is white beneath, and the white on the forward side of the wings beneath, if extended across the breast, would form a regular crescent. Its wings do not form a regular curve in front, but an abrupt angle." "The tail-coverts of the young hen-hawk, i.e. this year's bird, at present are white, very handsomely barred or watered with dark brown in an irregular manner, somewhat as above, teh bars on opposite sides of the midrib alternating in an agreeable manner." "The scarlet oak leaf! What a graceful and pleasing outline! a combination of graceful curves and angles.
These deep bays in the leaf are agreeable to us as the thought of deep and smooth and secure havens to the mariner. But both your love of repose and your spirit of adventure are addressed, for both bays and headlands are represented,--sharp-pointed rocky capes and rounded bays with smooth strands. To the sailor’s eye it is a much indented shore, and in his casual glance he thinks that if he doubles its sharp capes he will find a haven in its deep rounded bays. If I were a drawingmaster, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. It is a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats. How different from the white oak leaf with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed!" "Examining those minnows by day, I find that they are one and one sixth inches long by two fifths of an inch wide (this my largest); in form like a bream; of a very pale golden like a perch, or more bluish. Have but one dorsal fin . . . Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? Have young breams transverse bars? A little narrower than this" "So with the tupelos under the Hill shore, east of Fair Haven Pond. They terminate abruptly like a bull's horn, having no upward leading shoot, and bend off over the water, ― are singularly one-sided." "There is a very picturesque large black oak on the Bee-Tree Ridge, of this form: ―" "The Hunt house, to draw from memory, ― though I have given its measures within two years in my Journal, ― looked like this: ―
This is only generally correct, without a scale." "It is now high time to look for arrowheads, etc. I spend many hours every spring gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. . . . As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travellers of adventures, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes round again. . . . These durable implements seem to have been suggested to the Indian mechanic with a view to my entertainment in a succeeding period. After all the labor expended on it, the bolt may have been shot but once perchance, and the shaft which was devoted to it decayed, and there lay the arrowhead, sinking into the ground, awaiting me. . . . They are sown, like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. Like the dragon’s teeth which bore a crop of soldiers, these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought." "If you scan the horizon at this season of the year you are very likely to detect a small flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undulating line of migrating geese against the sky." "I see on the snow in Hubbard’s Close one of those rather large flattish black bugs some five-eighths of an inch long, with feelers and a sort of shield at the forward part with an orange mark on each side of it." "The sun-dogs, if that is their name, were not so distinctly bright as an ordinary rainbow, but were plainly orange-yellow and a peculiar light violet-blue, the last color looking like a hole in the cloud, or a thinness through which you saw the sky. This lasted perhaps half an hour, and then a bow about the sun became quite distinct, but only those parts where the sun-dogs were were distinctly rainbow-tinted, the rest being merely reddish-brown and the clouds within finely raying from the sun more or less. But higher up, so that its centre would have been in the zenith or apparently about in the zenith, was an arc of a distinct rainbow." "The chestnut is remarkable for branching low, occasionally so low that you cannot pass under the lower limb. In several instances a large limb had fallen out on one side.
Commonly, you see great rugged strips of bark, like straps or iron clamps made to bind the tree together, three or four inches wide and as many feet long, running more or less diagonally across the trunk and suggesting a very twisted grain, while the grain of the recent bark beneath them may be perpendicular. Perhaps this may be owing to old portions of the bark which still adhere, being wrenched aside by the unequal growth of the wood. I think that all these old trunks show this."
"At Hubbard's Bridge. . . . Looking from bridge to hill, above is the moon, separated from attendant star by a bar of white clouds, below which the star shines brightly through a clearing; beneath this, bars of white clouds to the horizon. The hill and opposite woods are dark with fine effect."
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