It may interest you to hear that Cholmondeley has been this way again, via Montreal and Lake Huron, going to the West Indies, or rather to Weiss-nicht-wo, whither he urges me to accompany him. He is rather more demonstrative than before, and, on the whole, what would be called “a good fellow,”—is a man of principle, and quite reliable, but very peculiar. I have been to New Bedford with him, to show him a whaling town and Ricketson. I was glad to hear that you had called on R. How did you like him? I suspect that you did not see one another fairly.

  I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say. They have got a club, the handle of which is in the Parker House at Boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, expecting to make me tender or minced meat, so fit for a club to dine off.

 The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering from want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got. It is indispensable that I should take a dose of Lowell & Agassiz & Woodman.

  As for the Parker House, I went there once, when the Club was away, but I found it hard to see through the cigar smoke, and men were deposited about in chairs over the marble floor, as thick as legs of bacon in a smoke-house. It was all smoke, and no salt, Attic or other. The only room in Boston which I visit with alacrity is the Gentlemen’s Room at the Fitchburg Depot, where I wait for the cars, sometimes for two hours, in order to get out of town. It is a paradise to the Parker House, for no smoking is allowed, and there is far more retirement. A large and respectable club of us hire it (Town and Country Club), and I am pretty sure to find some one there whose face is set the same way as my own.

  My last essay, on which I am still engaged, is called Autumnal Tints, I do not know how readable (i.e., by me to others) it will be.

  I met Mr. [Henry] James the other night at Emerson’s, at an Alcottian conversation, at which, however, Alcott did not talk much, being disturbed by James’s opposition. The latter is a hearty man enough, with whom you can differ very satisfactorily, on account of both his doctrines and his good temper. He utters quasi philanthropic dogmas in a metaphysic dress; but they are for all practical purposes very crude. He charges society with all the crime committed, and praises the criminal for committing it. But I think that all the remedies he suggests out of his head—for he goes no farther, hearty as he is—would leave us about where we are now. For, of course, it is not by a gift of turkey on Thanksgiving Day that he proposes to convert the criminal, but by a true sympathy with each one,—with him, among the rest, who lyingly tells the world from the gallows that he has never been treated kindly by a single mortal since he was born. But it is not so easy a thing to sympathize with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it. There is Dobson over the hill. Have not you and I and all the world been trying, ever since he was born, to sympathize with him (as doubtless he with us), and yet have got farther than to send him to the House of Correction once at least; and he, on the other hand, as I hear, has sent us to another place several times. This is the real state of things as I understand it, at least so far as Jame’s remedies go. We are now, alas! exercising what charity we actually have, and new laws would not give us any more. But, perchance we might make some improvements in the House of Correction. You and I are Dobson; what will James do for us?

  Have you found at last in your wanderings a place where the solitude is sweet? What mountain are you camping on nowadays? Though I had a good time at the mountains, I confess that the journey did not bear any fruit that I know of. I did not expect it would. The mode of it was not simple and adventurous enough. You must first have made an infinite demand, and not unreasonably, but after a corresponding outlay, have an all-absorbing purpose, and at the same time that your feet bear you hither and thither, travel much more in imagination.

  To let the mountains slide,—live at home like a traveler. It should not be in vain that these things are shown us from day to day. It is not each withered leaf that I see in my walks something which I have traveled to find?—traveled, who can tell how far? What a fool he must who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives!

  We are always methinks, in some kind of ravine, though our bodies may walk the smooth streets of Worcester. Our souls (I use this word for want of a better) are ever perched in its rocky sides, overlooking that lowland. (What a more than Tuckerman’s Ravine is the body itself, in which the “soul” is encamped, when you come to look into it! However, eagles always have chosen such places for their eyries.)

  Thus it is every with your fair cities of the plain. Their streets may be paved with silver and gold, and six carriages roll abreast in them, but the real homes of the citizens are in the Tuckerman’s Ravine which ray out from that centre into the mountains round about, one for each man, woman, and child. The master of life have so ordered it. That is the beau-ideal of a country seat. There is no danger of being tuckered out before you get to it.

  So we live in Worcester and in Concord, each man taking his exercise regularly in his ravine, like a lion in his cage, and sometimes spraining his ankle there. We have very few clear days, and a great many small plagues which keep us busy. Sometimes, I suppose, you hear a neighbor halloo (Brown, may be) and think it is a bear. Nevertheless, on the whole, we think it very grand and exhilarating, this ravine life. It is a capital advantage withal, living so high, the excellent drainage of that city of God. Routine is but a shallow and insignificant sort of ravine, such as the ruts are, the conduits of puddles. But these ravines are the source of mighty streams, precipitous, icy, savage, as they are, haunted by bear and loup-cerviers; there are born not only on Sacos and Amazons, but prophets who will redeem the world. The at last smooth and fertilizing water at which nations drink and naives supply themselves begins with melted glaciers, and burts thunder—spouts. Let us pray that, if we are not flowing through some Mississippi valley which we fertilize,—and it is not likely we are,—we may know ourselves shut in between grim and mighty mountain walls amid the clouds, falling a thousand feet in a mile, though dwarfed fir and spruce, over the rocky insteps of slides, being exercised in our minds, and so developed.

  Miles had hanging in his barn a little owl (Strix Acadica) which he caught alive with his hands about a week ago. He had forced it to eat, but it died. It was a funny little brown bird, spotted with white, seven and a half inches long to the end of the tail, or eight to the end of the claws, by nineteen in alar extent,—not so long by considerable as a robin, though much stouter . . .

Dear Sir,

  Will you do me the favor of meeting me at the Probate Court in East Cambridge on Tuesday next (11th inst) at ten o’clock A.M. in order to prove my father’s will to which [page torn] sness. My mother [page torn]

  This is much the coldest afternoon to bear as yet, but, bold as it is,—four or five below at 3 P.M.,—I see, as I go round the Island, much vapor blowing from a bare space in the river just below, twenty rods off . . . At Sam Barrett’s Pond, where Joe Brown is now getting his ice, I think I see about ten different freezings in ice some fifteen or more inches thick . . . About half an hour before sunset this intensely clear cold evening (thermometer at five -6º), I observe all the sheets of ice (and they abound everywhere now in the fields), when I look from one side about at right angles with the sun’s rays, reflect a green light . . .

  When, this evening, I took a split hickory stick which was very slightly charred or scorched, but quite hot, out of my stove, I perceived a strong scent precisely like that of a burnt or roasted walnut,—as was natural enough.

  P.M.—Up Assabet to bridge . . .

  It is a remarkably warm, still, and pleasant afternoon for winter, and the wind, as I discover by my handkerchief, southwesterly. I noticed last night, just after sunset, a sheet of mackerel sky far in the west horizon, very finely imbricated and reflecting a coppery glow, and again I saw still more of it in the cast this morning at sunrise, and now, at 3.30 P.M., looking up, I perceive that almost the entire heavens are covered with a very beautiful mackerel sky . . .

  If I could have given a favorable report as to the skating, I should have answered you earlier. About a week before you wrote there was good skating; there is now none. As for the lecture, I shall be glad to come. I cannot now say when, but I will let you know, I think within a week or ten days at most, and will then leave you a week clear to make the arrangements in. I will bring something else than “What shall it profit a Man?” My father is very sick, and has been for a long time, so that there is the more need of me at home. This occurs to me, even when contemplating so short an excursion as to Worcester.

  I want very much to see or hear your account of your adventures in the Ravine [Tuckerman’s], and I trust I shall do so when I come to Worcester. Cholmondeley has been here again, returning from Virginia (for he went no farther south) to Canada; and will go thence to Europe, he thinks, in the spring, and never ramble any more, (January 29). I am expecting daily that my father will die, therefore I cannot leave home at present. I will write you again within ten days.

  P.M.—Up river . . .

  I learn from J. Farmer that he saw to-day in his wood-lot, on removing the bark of a dead white pine, an immense quantity of mosquitoes, moving but little, in a cavity between the bark and the wood made probably by some other insect. These were probably like mine. There were also wasps and what he calls lightning-bugs there.

  It is surprising how suddenly the slumbering snow has been melted, and with what a rush it now seeks the lowest ground on all sides. Yesterday, in the streets and fields, it was all snow and ice and rest; now it is chiefly water and motion. Yesterday afternoon I walked in the merely moist snow-track of sleds and sleighs, while all the sides of the road and the ditches rested under a white, mantle of snow. This morning I go picking my way in rubbers through broad puddles on a slippery icy bottom, stepping over small torrents . . .

  I notice where a musquash has lately swam under this thin ice, breaking it here and there, and his course for many rods is betrayed by a continuous row of numerous white bubbles as big as a ninepence under the ice. J. Farmer tells me that he once saw a musquash rest three or four minutes under the ice with his nose against the ice in a bubble of air about an inch in diameter, and he thinks that they can draw air through the ice, and that one could swim across Nagog Pond under the ice . . .

  P.M.—I see many caterpillars on the ice still, and those glow-worm-like ones . . .

  I see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows, many of those large, dark, hairy, with longitudinal light stripes, somewhat like the common apple one. Many of them are frozen in yet, some for two thirds their length, yet all are alive . . .

  These are remarkably warm and pleasant days. The water is going down, and the ice is rotting. I see some insects—those glow-worm-like ones—sunk half an inch or more into the ice by absorbed heat and yet quite alive in these little holes, in which they alternately freeze and thaw. At Willow Bay I see for many rods black soil a quarter of an inch deep, covering and concealing the ice (for several rods). This, I find, was blown some time ago from a plowed field twenty or more rods distant. This shows how much the sediment of the river may be increased by dust blown into it from the neighboring fields . . .

  As I look south just before sunset, over this fresh and shining ice, I notice that its surface is divided, as it were, into a great many contiguous tables in different planes, somewhat like so many different facets of a polyhedron as large as the earth itself . . .

  When I look westward now to the flat snow-crusted shore, it reflects a strong violet color. Also the pink light reflected from the low, flat snowy surfaces amid the ice on the meadows, just before sunset, is a constant phenomenon these clear winter days. Whole fields and sides of hills are often the same, but it is more distinct on these flat islands of snow scattered here and there over the meadow ice. I also see this pink in the dust made by the skaters . . .

  The river having suddenly gone down since the freshet, I see cakes of ice eight or ten feet across left two feet high or more above the banks, frozen to four or five maples or oaks. Indeed, each shore is lined with them, where wooded, a continuous row attached to alders, maples, swamp white oaks, etc. . . .

  After a sickness of some two years, going down-town in pleasant weather, doing a little business from time to time, hoeing a little in the garden, etc., Father took to his chamber January 13th, and did not come down again . . .

  As far as I know, Father, when he died, was not only one of the oldest men in the middle of Concord, but, the one perhaps best acquainted with the inhabitants, and the local, social, and street history of the middle of the town, for the last fifty years. He belonged in a peculiar sense to the village street ; loved to sit in the shops or at the post-office and read the daily papers . . .

  I will come and read you an extract from “Autumnal Tints,” on Tuesday the 15th, of this month, if that is agreeable to you,—leaving here probably at noon. Perhaps you had better acknowledge the receipt of this.

H.D.T.

  I received last evening a Boston newspaper with your superscription, containing the record of the decease of your father. It had previously been published in the New Bedford Mercury, perhaps by Channing. [William Ellery Channing]

  You must all feel his loss very much, particularly your mother. I have rarely, if ever, met a man who inspired me with more respect. He appeared to me to be a real embodiment of honest virtue, as well as a true gentleman of the old school. I also recognized in him a fund of good fellowship, or what would perhaps better and more respectfully express it, kindly friendship. I remember with pleasure, a ramble I took with him about Concord some two or three years ago, at a time when you were away from home, on which occasion I was much impressed with his good sense, his fine social nature, and genuine hospitality. He reminded me much of my own father, in fact, I never saw a man more like him even in his personal appearance and manners—both bore upon their countenances the impress of care and sorrow, a revelation of the experience of life, written in the most legible characters, and one which always awakens my deepest sympathy and reverence.

  I doubt not but that he was a good man, and however we may be unable to peer beyond this sphere of experience, may we not trust that some good angel, perhaps that of his mother (was her name Jeanie Burns?), has already welcomed him to the spirit land? At any rate, if there be any award for virtue and well doing I think it is for such as he. Veiled as the future is in mystery profound, I think we may fully rely upon Divine Wisdom who has seen it proper not only to conceal from us knowledge beyond this life, but has also wrapped us in so much obscurity even here. But let us go on trustfully in Him—the sun yet shines, the birds sing, the flowers bloom, and Nature is still as exhaustless as ever in her charms and riches for those who love her.

  I trust that your mother and sister will find that consolation which they so much need. They as well as you have my warmest sympathy, and it is a pleasurable sorrow for me to bear my poor tribute to the memory and worth of him from whom you have so lately parted.

  It seems to me that Nature—and by this I always mean the out-o’-door life in woods and fields, by streams and lakes, etc.—affords the best balm for our wounded spirits. One of the best things written by Francis Jeffrey, and which I have tacked upon my Shanty wall, is, “If it were not for my love of beautiful nature and poetry, my heart would have died within me long ago.”

  Would not a little run from home soon, if you can be spared, be well for you? Can you not catch the early spring a little in advance? We are probably a week or two before you in her maiden steps. Soon shall we see the catkins upon the willows, and hear the bluebird and song sparrow again—how full of hope and cheer! Even this morning (a soft, drizzling one) I have heard the sweet, mellow, long-drawn pipe of the meadow lark. I have also seen robins occasionally during the winter, and a flock of quails several times, besides numerous partridges and rabbits.

  I see nothing of Channing of late.

  With my best regards to your mother and sister, believe me

Very truly your friend,
D. Ricketson

  P.S. Your letter indicates health of mind and good pluck. In fact, Dr. Pluck is a capital physician. Glory in whortle and blackberries; eat them like an Indian, abundantly and from the bushes and vines. When you can, smell of sweet fern, bayberry, sassafras, yellow birch, and rejoice in the songs of crickets and harvest flies.

Io Paean

Dear Sir,

  Inclosed please find five dollars, for the object above described. I would gladly give more, but this exceeds my income from all sources together for the last four months.

Y’rs respectfully,
Henry D. Thoreau.

  Among the common phenomena of the ice are those triangular points of thick ice heaved up a couple of feet where the ice has recently settled about a rock. The rock looks somewhat like a dark fruit within a gaping shell or bur. Also, now, as often after a freshet in cold weather, the ice which had formed around and frozen to the trees and bushes along the shore, settling, draws them down to the ground or water, often breaking them extensively . . .

Dear Sir,

  I am happy to acknowledge the receipt of five dollars from you, as a contribution to the fund for the public library of Harvard College.

Respectfully yours,

Henry G. Denny, Sec’y Library Committee

  I thank you for your kind letter. I sent you the notice of my Father’s death as much because you knew him, as because you know me. I can hardly realize that he is dead. He had been sick about two years, and at last declined rather rapidly though steadily. Till within a week or ten days before he died, he was hoping to see another spring; but he then discovered that this was a vain expectation, and thinking that he was dying he took his leave of us several times within a week before his departure. Once or twice he expressed a slight impatience at the delay. He was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy, that though we had all been sitting around the bed for an hour or more, expecting that event, as we had sat before, he was gone at last almost before we were aware of it.

  I am glad to read what you say about his social nature. I think I may say that he was wholly unpretending; and there was this peculiarity in his aim, that, though the had pecuniary difficulties to contend with the greater part of his life, he always studied merely how to make a good article, pencil or other, (for he practised various arts) and was never satisfied with what he had produced,—nor was he ever in the least disposed to put off a poor one for the sake of pecuniary gain;—as if he labored for a higher end.

  Though he was not very old, and was not a native of Concord, I think that he was, on the whole, more identified with Concord street than any man now alive, having come here when he was about twelve years old, and set up for himself as a merchant here at the age of 21, fifty years ago.

  As I sat in a circle the other evening with my mother and sister, my mother’s two sisters & my Father’s two sisters, it occurred to me that my Father, though 71 belonged to the youngest four of the eight who recently composed our family.

  How swiftly, at last, but unnoticed, a generation passes away! Three years ago I was called with my Father to be a witness to the signing of our neighbor Mr Frost’s will. Mr Samuel Hoar, who was there writing it, also signed it. I was lately required to go to Cambridge to testify to the genuineness of the will, being the only one of the four who could be there; and now I am the only one alive.

  My Mother & Sister thank you heartily for your sympathy. The latter in particular agrees with you in thinking, that it is communion with still living & healthy nature alone which can restore to sane and cheerful views.

  I thank you for your invitation to New Bedford – but I feel somewhat confined here for the present. I did not know but we should see you the day after [William R.?] Alger was here. It is not too late for a winter walk in Concord.

  It does me good to hear of spring birds, and singing ones too, for spring seems far away from Concord yet. I am going to Worcester to read a parlor lecture on the 22nd, and shall see Blake [H. G. O. Blake] & Brown. [Theophilus Brown] What if you were to meet me there! or go with me from here! You would see them to good advantage.

  Cholmondeley [Thomas Cholmondeley] has been here again, after going as far south as Virginia, and left for Canada about three weeks ago. He is a good soul, and I am afraid that I did not sufficiently recognize him.

  Please remember me to Mrs Ricketson, and to the rest of your family

Yrs
Henry D. Thoreau

  Yesterday there was no skating, unless you swept the snow from the ice; but to-day, though there has been no rain nor thaw, there is pretty good skating. Yesterday the water which had flowed, and was flowing, back over the ice on each side of the river and the meadows, a rod or two in width, was merely skimmed over, but last night it froze so that there is good skating there . . .

  I thought, by the peculiar moaning sound of the wind about the dining-room at noon, that we should have a rain-storm . . .

  Against Bittern Cliff I feel the first drop strike the right slope of my nose and run down the ravine there. Such is the origin of rivers. Not till half a mile further my doubting companion feels another on his nose also, and I get one [in] my eye, and soon after I see the countless dimples in the puddles on the ice. So measured and deliberate is Nature always . . .

  P.M.—The rain ceases, and it clears up at 5 P. M. . . . (Journal, 11:451-453).

  Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year.

  P.M.—Up river on ice . . .

  There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little. I mean the trappers. They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about . . . But, few as the trappers are here, it seems by Goodwin’s accounts that they steal one another’s traps . . .

  Though it was a dry, powdery snow-storm yesterday, the sun is now so high that the snow is soft and sticky this afternoon . . . (Journal, 11:457).

  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 . . .

  P.M.—Up river to Nut Meadow Brook . . .

  Channing [William Ellery 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 . . .

  P.M.—To E. Hosmcr Spring. Down Turnpike and back by E. Hubbard’s Close.

  We stood still a few moments on the Turnpike below 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! . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] thinks this is called a sap snow, because it comes after the sap begins to flow . . .

  P.M.—Up river to Well Meadow.

  The snow melts and sinks very rapidly. This spring snow is peculiarly white and blinding. The inequalities 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 . . .

  This fine spring morning with its cheering influences brings you to my mind; for I always associate you with the most genial aspects of our beloved Nature, with the woods, the fields, lakes and rivers, with the birds and flowers. As I write, the meadow lark is piping sweetly in the meadows near by, and lo! at this instant, the very first I have heard this season, a bluebird has warbled on a tree near the Shanty. What salutation could be more welcome or more in unison with my subject? Yesterday, my son Walton saw and heard the red-winged Blackbird, and this morning robins are flying about. The song-sparrow (F. melodia) now singing, has also been in time since the 23d of February. Truly may we say, “Spring is come!”

  At my present writing, the thermometer at my north window indicates 44 degrees and is rising; yesterday p.m. 50 degrees, wind W. S. W. It seems to me quite time to stop the abuse of our climate. In my boyhood and even until after my marriage (1834), I do not remember it ever occurred to me but that our climate was a very good one. And had I never heard it complained of by others, should hardly have ever suspected it otherwise. A climate that has sustained such men as R.W.E., [Ralph Waldo Emerson] A.B.A., [A. Bronson Alcott] H.D.T., and other kindred natures, can’t be a very bad one, and may be the very best.

  March is to me the month of hope. I always look forward to its coming with pleasure, and welcome its arrival. Others may speak of it in terms of reproach, but to me it has much to recommend itself. The backbone of winter, according to the homely adage, is now broken. Every day brings us nearer to the vernal influences, to the return of the birds and the appearance of wild flowers. Mingled with storms are many warm sunny days. I am no longer in haste for finer weather, so near at hand. Each day has something to interest me, and even in a severe snow or rainstorm, accompanied with cold weather, I know that the glorious sun, when once he shines again, will dispel all gloom and soften the temperature. Although it is my custom to walk in the woods, field, and by-places at all seasons of the year and in all weathers, the spring (and in this I include March as fairly belonging) is my most favorite time. Nature, ever attractive to me, is at this season particularly inviting, the kind solace and hope of my days. Although I am but an indifferent versifier, yet I fancy but few poets have experienced richer or happier emotions than myself from her benign spirit.

  I am most happy to record at this time, that I have, I trust, recovered my good spirits, such as blessed me in my earlier years of manhood. I shall endeavor by a life of purity and retirement to keep them as the choicest of blessings. My desires, I believe, are moderate, and not beyond my reach. So far as the false luxuries of life are concerned, I have but little taste for them, and I would willingly dispense with almost every unnecessary article in the economy of living, for the sake of being the master of my own time and the leisure to pursue the simple occupations and enjoyments of rural life. I do not covet wealth, I certainly do not wish it. With the intelligent and worthy poor, I feel far greater sympathy and affinity, than with the large portion of the rich and falsely great. I would give more for one day with the poet-peasant, Robert Burns, or Shakespeare, than for unnumbered years of entertainment at the tables of proud and rich men.

“Behind the plough Burns sang his wood-notes wild,
And richest Shakespeare was a poor man’s child.”

  So sung Ebenezor Elliot, the Corn-law rhymer, himself a true poet and friend of the “virtuous and struggling poor.”

  I copy the foregoing, suggested by the season from my daily Journal, on the entrance of March. You may therefore, read it as a soliloquy, by which it may savor less of egotism and bombast, to which objection it might otherwise be open.

  During my walk, yesterday p.m., in a sunny spot, I found the “pussy willows” (S. eriocephala) and enclose one of the “catkins” or “woolly aments” in testimony thereof. I also enclose a pansy from the south side of the Shanty. How should I rejoice to have you as the companion of my walks!

  I suppose you have some time since returned from your literary exploit into Worcester, and trust that you had a good time with your disciples, Blake, [H.G.O. Blake] and Brown. [Theophilus Brown] They must be thoreauly brown by this time. “Arcades ambo” under your pupilage-though, I think, the classic term applies better to you and R. W. E. or W. E. C. [William Ellery Channing] May I not also claim as a birthright to rank in your fraternity, as a disciple, at least? Please not reject me. Failing in you I shall be bankrupt, indeed. Shall echo respond, to my complaint, “Is there none for me in the wide world, no kindred spirit?” “None”?

  Don’t be alarmed, “Amicus Mihi,” you shall be as free as air for aught me.

  During the past winter I have been reviewing somewhat my law studied, and what will not surprise you, have received and accepted a commission as justice of the peace. I have collected the relic of my law library, and raged them in formidable array upon a shelf in the Shanty. I find myself much better able to grasp and cope with these legal worthies than when a young man.

  I don’t suppose I shall do much in the way of my profession, but may assist occasionally the injured in the recovery of their rights. I have not done this hastily, as you may suppose. I intend to me free from all trammels, and believing, as I do, that la, or rather government, was made for the weal of all concerned, and particularly for the protection of the weak against the strong and that, according to Blackstone, “What is not reason is not law,” I shall act accordingly if I act at all.

  I may make use of the elective franchise, but of this am as yet undetermined. It seems to me as though a crisis was approaching in the affairs of our government, when the use of every means that “God and nature affords” will be required to oppose tyranny. I trust that I shall have your sympathy in this matter.

  I shall seek no opportunity for the exercise of my opposition, but “bide my time.”

  A visit from you would be very welcome. With kind regards to your household and my Concord friends, one and all, I remain,

  Yours truly,
  D. R.

Yours of 12th Feb. came duly to hand.

  I come out to hear a spring bird, the ground generally covered with snow yet and the channel of the river only partly open. On the Rill I hear first the tapping of a small woodpecker. I then see a bird alight on the dead top of the highest white oak on the hilltop, on the topmost point. It is a shrike . . .

  A lady tells me that she saw, last Cattle-Show Day, — — putting up a specimen of hairwork in a frame (by his niece) in the exhibition hall . . .

  P.M.—To Ministerial Swamp.

  I hear of two who saw bluebirds this morning, and one says he saw one yesterday. This seems to have been the day of their general arrival here, but I have not seen one in Concord yet.

  It is a good plan to go to some old orchard on the south side of a hill, sit down, and listen, especially in the morning when all is still. You can thus often hear the distant warble of some bluebird lately arrived, which, if you had been walking, would not have been audible to you. As I walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground, especially the reddish subsoil, where it is exposed by a cutting, and by the few green radical leaves, I stand still, shut my eyes, and listen from time to time, in order to hear the note of some bird of passage just arrived . . .

  P.M.—To Hill in rain.

  To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!

  The earth is still mostly covered with ice and snow. As usual, I notice large pools of greenish water in the fields, on an icy bottom, which cannot owe their greenness to the reflected blue mingled with the yellowish light at sundown . . .

  I sec at near [sic] the stone bridge where the strong northwest wind of last night broke the thin ice just formed, and set the irregular triangular pieces on their edges quite perpendicular and directed northwest and southeast and pretty close together . . .

  P.M.—To Witherell Vale.

  There are some who never do nor say anything, whose life merely excites expectation. Their excellence reaches no further than a gesture or mode of carrying themselves. They are a sash dangling from the waist, or a sculptured war-club over the shoulder. They are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming rusty in a shop-window. I like as well, if not better, to see a piece of iron or steel, out of which many such tools will be made, or the bush-whack in a man’s hand . . .

  P.M.—To Hunt house.

  I go to get one more sight of the old house which Hosmer is pulling down, but I am too late to sec much of it. The chimney is gone and little more than the oblong square frame stands. E. Hosmer and Nathan Hosmer are employed in taking it down . . .

  Going up the railroad in this rain, with a south wind, I see a pretty thick low fog extending across the railroad only against Dennis’s Swamp. There being touch more ice and snow within the swamp, the vapor is condensed and is blown northward over the railroad . . .

  P.M.—To Great Fields . . . Talking with Garfield to-day about his trapping, he said that mink brought three dollars and a quarter, a remarkably high price, and asked if I had seen any . . .

  Saw E. Hosmer take up the cellar stairs. They are of white oak . . .

  The cowslip in pitcher has fairly blossomed to-day.

  I see a large flock of grackles searching for food along the water’s edge, just below Dr. Bartlett’s. Some wade in the water . . .

  I come home in the evening through a very heavy rain after two brilliant rainbows at sunset, the first of the year (Journal, 12:49).

  P.M.—Launch my boat and sail to Ball’s Hill . . .

  We meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind, at Flint’s Bridge. (One says they were seen about a week ago, but there was very little water then.) Its is a very leisurely sort of limping flight, tacking its way along like a sailing vessel, yet the slow security with which it advances suggests a leisurely contemplativeness in the bird, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure . . .

  P.M.—To Flint’s Bridge by water.

  The water is very high, and smooth as ever it is. It is very warm. I wear but one coat on the water. The town and the land it is built on seem to rise but little above the flood. This bright smooth and level surface seems here the prevailing clement, as if the distant town were an island . . .

  Flood, who is saving rails, etc., at the stone bridge, remarks that old settlers say this stream is highest the third day after a rain . . .

  Rice thinks that he has seen two gulls on the Sudbury meadows,—the white and the gray gulls . . .

  P.M.—To Tarbell’s via J. P. Brown’s . . .

  Melvin says that in skinning a mink you must cut round the parts containing the musk, else the operation will be an offensive one . . .

  P.M.—I see under the east side of the house amid the evergreens, where they were sheltered from the cold northwest wind, quite a parcel of sparrows . . .

  P.M.—Up Assabet. Very strong northwest wind.

  When I get opposite the end of the willow-row, the sun comes out and they are very handsome, like a rossette, pale-tawnv or fawn-colored at base and a rich yellow or orange yellow in the upper three or four feet. This is, methinks, the brightest object in the landscape these days . . .

  P.M.—Sail to Fair Haven Pond.

  A strong northwest wind. Draw my boat over the road on a roller. Raising a stone for ballast from the south side of the railroad causeway, where it is quite sunny and warm, I find the under sides very densely covered with little ants . . .

  Returning from Poplar Hill through the west end of Sleepy Hollow, it is very still, the air thick, just ready to rain, and I hear there, on the apple trees and small oaks, the tree sparrows and hyemalis singing very pleasantly . . .

  As we sail upward toward the pond, we scare up two or three golden-eyes, or whistlers, showing their large black heads and black backs, and afterward I watch one swimming not far before us and see the white, spot, amid the black, on the side of his head . . .

  Southeast wind. Begins to sprinkle while I am sitting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking . . . . It is a singular sound for awakening Nature to make, associated with the first warmer days, when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. How moderate on her first awakening, how little demonstrative! You may sit half an hour before you will hear another . . .

  Returning, above the railroad causeway, I see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring, flitting along the causeway-bank . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] sees geese go over again this afternoon . . .

  I heard the what what what what of the nuthatch this forenoon. Do I ever hear it in the afternoon? It is much like the cackle of the pigeon woodpecker and suggests a relation to that bird.

  Again I walk in the rain and see the rich yellowish browns of the moist banks. These Clamshell hills and neighboring promontories, though it is a dark and rainy day, reflect a certain yellowish light from the wet withered grass which is very grateful to my eyes . . .

  Much earth has been washed away from the roots of grasses and weeds along the banks of the river, and many of those pretty little bodkin bulbs are exposed and so transported to new localities. This seems to be the way in which they are spread . . .

  P.M.—Sail from Cardinal Shore up Otter Bay, close to Deacon Farrar’s . . .

  Cousin Charles says that he took out of the old Haverhill house a very broad panel from over the fireplace, which had a picture of Haverhill at some old period on it. The panel had been there perfectly sheltered in an inhabited house for more than a hundred years. It was placed in his shop and no moisture allowed to come near it, and yet it shrunk a quarter of an inch in width when the air came to both sides of it . . .

  I transmit to you herewith the subjoined copy of a Report made to the Board of Overseers, and accepted by that body.

  You will perceive your name in the list of the Committee, and you will be pleased to consider this communication as a notice of your appointment as a member of the Committee in which you name occurs.

I am, Sir, with great respect,

Your obedient servant,
JAMES WALKER, President

  Walden is first clear after to-day . . . (Journal, 12:99).

  Hear a red squirrel chirrup at me by the hemlocks (running up a hemlock), all for my benefit; not that lie is excited by fear, I think, but so full is he of animal spirits that lie makes a great ado about the least event . . .

  P.M.—To Walden via Hubbard’s Close . . .

  I notice again in the spring-holes in Hubbard’s Close that water purslane, being covered with water, is an evergreen,—though it is reddish.

  Little pollywogs two inches long are lively there.

  Sec on Walden two sheldrakes, male and female, as is common. So they have for some time paired . . .

  P.M.—To Holbrook’s improvements.

   Many painted turtles out along a ditch Swamp. These the first I have seen, the water is so high in the meadows. One drops into the water from some dead brush which lies in it, and leaves on the brush two of its scales. Perhaps the sun causes the loosened scales to curl up, and so helps the turtle to get rid of them . . .

  P.M.—To Assabet over meadows in boat . . .

As I go down the street just after sunset, I hear many snipe to-night . . . (Journal, 12:106-109).

  For a fortnight past, or since the frost began to come out, I have noticed the funnel-shaped holes of the skunk in a great many places and their little mincing tracks in the sand. Many a grub and beetle meets its fate in their stomachs . . .

  Such an appetite have we for new life that we begin by nibbling the very crust of the earth. We betray our vegetable and animal nature and sympathies by our delight in water . . .

  P.M.—To Cliffs . . .

  I see several earthworms to-day under the shoe of the pump, on the platform. They may have come through the cracks from the well where the warm has kept them stirring . . .

  P.M.—Up Assabet with Pratt.

  Standing under the north side of the hill, I hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe of a fish hawk (for it is not a scream, but a rather soft and innocent note), and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. The body looks quite short in proportion to the spread of the wings, which are quite dark or blackish above. IIe evidently has something in his talons. We soon after disturb him again, and, at length, after circling around over the hill and adjacent fields, he alights in plain sight on one of the half-dead white oaks on the top of the hill, where probably he sat before. As I look through my glass, he is perched on a large dead limb and is evidently standing on a fish (I had noticed something in his talons as lie flew), for he stands high and uneasily, finding it hard to keep his balance in the wind . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] says that he found a musquash’s skull (which he showed me) at the fox-burrow in Laurel Glen, from which it would appear that they kill the musquash . . . I saw Heavy Haynes fishing for trout down the Mill Brook this morning, cold and blustering as it was . . .

  We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. [William Ellery Channing] calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it . . . (Journal, 12:127-131).

  P.M.—Paddle to Well Meadow.

  I see some remarkable examples of meadow-crust floated off on the A. Wheeler meadow and above, densely covered with button-bushes and willows, etc. one sunk in five feet of water on a sandy shore, which I must examine again . . .

  P.M.—Paddle to Ball’s Hill and sail back . . . (Journal, 12:140-141).

  It is surprising how quickly the earth, which was covered half an inch deep this morning, and since so wet, has become comparatively dry, so that we sit on the ground or on the dry leaves in woods at 3 P.M. and smell the pines and see and hear the flies, etc., buzz about, though the sun did not come out till 12 M . . .

  How pleasing and soothing are some of the first and least audible sounds of awakened nature in the spring, as this first humming of bees, etc., and the stuttering of frogs! They cannot be called musical . . . Nature has taken equal care to cushion our ears on this finest sound and to inspire us with the strains of the wood thrush and poet. We may say that each gnat is made to vibrate its wings for man’s fruition. In short, we hear but little music in the world which charms us more than this sound produced by the vibration of an insect’s wing and in some still and sunny nook in spring . . .

  P.M.—Began to set white pines in R. W. E.’s [Ralph Waldo Emerson] Wyman lot (Journal, 12:152).

  Setting pines all day (Journal, 12:152).

  R. W. E. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound.

  We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us.

  See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. [William Ellery Channing] sees a cicindela to-day . . .

  Within a few days I pricked my fingers smartly against the sharp, stiff points of some sedge coming up. At Heywood’s meadow, by the railroad, this sedge, rising green and dense with yellow tips above the withered clumps, is very striking, suggesting heat, even a blaze, there . . .

  Clears up at 3 P.M., and a very strong south wind blows . . . (Journal, 12:156-158).

  Dr. B. asked me what I found that was new these days, if I was still looking after the beautiful. I told [him] yes and that I wished to hire two or three good observers . . .

  E. Bartlett has found a crow’s nest with four eggs a little developed in a tall white pine in the grove east of Beck Stow’s . . . Young Stewart tells me that he saw last year a pout’s nest at Walden in the pond-hole by the big pond . . .

  P.M.—Walked with C. M. Tracy in the rain in the western part of Lynn, near Dungeon Rock . . . (Journal, 12:164).

  Struck inland and passed over the west end of High Rock, through the cemetery, and over Pine Hill, where I heard a strange warbler, methought, a dark-colored, perhaps reddish-headed bird. Thence through East Saugus and Saugus to Cliftondale, I think in the southern part of Saugus . . . Saw at the Aquarium in Bromfield Street apparently brook minnows with the longitudinal dark lines bordered with light . . .

  First observe the dandelion well out in R. W. E.’s [Ralph Waldo Emerson] yard; also anemone at Sassafras Shore . . .

  Land at Holden Wood. That interesting small blue butterfly (size of small red) is apparently just out, fluttering over the warm dry oak leaves within the wood in the sun. Channing [William Ellery Channing also first sees them to-day . . .

  I notice under the southern edge of the Holden Wood, on the Arrowhead Field, a great many little birches in the grass, apparently seedlings of last year, and I take up a hundred and ten from three to six or seven inches high. They are already leafed, the little rugose leafets more than half an inch wide . . .

  We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they cat more grubs than they do cherries . . .

  P.M.—To Second Division . . .

  What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel . . .

  Hear the te-e-e of a white-throat sparrow . . . (Journal, 12:175).

  After crossing the Arrowhead Fields, we see a woodchuck run along and climb to the top of a wall and sit erect there,—our first . . .

  Looking up through this soft and warm southwest wind, I notice the conspicuous shadow of Middle Conantum Cliff, now at 3 P.M., and elsewhere the shade of a few apple trees,—their trunks and boughs . . .

  Red-wings fly in flocks yet. Near the oak beyond Jarvis land, a yellow butterfly,—how hot! this meteor dancing through the air. Also see a scalloped-edge dark-colored butterfly resting on the trunk of a tree, where, both by its form and color, its wings being closed, it resembles a bit of bark, or rather a lichen. Evidently their forms and colors, especially of the under sides of their wings are designed to conceal them when at rest with their wings closed . . .

  This is about the last ofthe very dry leaves in the woods, for soon the ground will be shaded by expanded green leaves. It is quite hazy, if not smoky, and I smell smoke in the air, this hot day. My assistants, being accustomed to work indoors in the factory, are quite overcome by this sudden heat . . .

  At evening I hear the first sultry buzz of a fly in my chamber, telling of sultry nights to come.

  Go on river . . .

  Hear a dor-bug in the house at evening.

  Apple in bloom (Journal, 12:187).

  A woodcock starts up with whistling sound.

  I have been struck of late with the prominence of the Viburnum nudism leaf in the swamps . . .

  I see an oak shoot (or sprout) already grown ten inches, when the buds of oaks and of most trees are but just burst generally. You are surprised to see such a sudden and rapid development when you had but just begun to think of renewed life, not yet of growth . . .

  Our corydalis was out the 13th. Hear a tanager to-day, and one was seen yesterday. Sand cherry out . . . (Journal, 12:189).

  Hoping the May flowers will be fresh when they reach you:

yours truly
Mary H. Brown

  It is a warm, muggy, rainy evening . . . (Journal, 12:189).

  Excuse me for not acknowledging before the receipt of your beautiful gift of may-flowers. The delay may prove that I did not fear I should forget it, though very busily engaged in surveying. The flowers were somewhat detained on the road, but they were not the less fragrant, and were very superior to any that we can show.

  It chanced that on the very day they arrived, while surveying in the next town, I found more of these flowers than I have ever seen hereabouts, and I have accordingly named a certain path “May-flower Path” on my plan. But a botanist’s experience is full of coincidences. If you think much about some flower which you never saw, you will be pretty sure to find it some day actually growing near by you. In the long run, we find what we expect. We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things.

  Please remember me to your Father & Mother

Yours truly
Henry D. Thoreau

  Eleocharis tenuis in bloom, apparently the earliest elcocharis. The rhodora at Ledum Swamp is now in its perfection, brilliant islands of color . . .

  Melvin and Skinner tell me of three wild geese, to their surprise seen within a week down the river,—a gander and two geese,—which must be breeding here . . .

  Went by Temple’s. For rural interest, give me the houses of the poor, with simply a cool spring, a good deal of weather-stained wood, and a natural door-stone: a house standing somewhere in nature, and not merely in an atmosphere of art . . .

  At the extreme cast side of Trillium Wood, come upon a black snake, which at first keeps still prudently, thinking I may not see him,—in the grass in open land,—then glides to the edge of the wood and darts swiftly up into the top of some slender shrubs there . . .

  Cinnamon fern pollen [sic]. Lady’s-slipper pollen. These grow under pines even in swamps, as at Ledum Swamp.

  The lint from leaves sticks to your clothes now. Hear a rose-breasted grosbeak . . .

  When I entered the interior meadow of Gowing’s Swamp I heard a slight snort, and found that I had suddenly come upon a woodchuck amid the sphagnum, lambkill, Kalmia glauca, andromeda, cranberry, etc., there. It was only seven feet off, and, being surprised, would not run. It would only stand erect from time to time,—perfectly erect with its blackish paws held like hands near together in front,—just so as to bring its head, or eyes, above the level of the lambkill, kalmia, etc., and look round, turning now this ear toward me, then that; and every now and then it would make a short rush at me, half a foot or so, with a snort, and then draw back, and also grit its teeth—which it showed—very audibly, with a rattling sound, evidently to intimidate me . . .

  Strawberries reddening on some hills.

  Found within three rods of Flint’s Pond a rose-breasted grosbeak’s nest. It was in a thicket where there was much cat-briar, in a high blueberry bush, some five feet from the ground, in the forks of the bush, and of very loose construction . . .

  A large vellow butterfly (somewhat Harris Papilio Asterias like but not black-winged) three and a half to four inches in expanse. Pale-yellow, the front wings crossed by three or four black bars; rear, or outer edge, of all wings widely bordered with black, and some yellow behind it; a short black tail to each hind one, with two blue spots in front of two red-brown ones on the tail . . .

  Cornus alternifolia well out . . . (Journal, 12:199).

  Cat-briar in flower, how long? Allium not out . . . (Journal, 12:199).

  Hear of a kingfisher’s nest just found in a sandbank behind Abner Buttrick’s, with six fresh eggs, of which I have one. The boy said it was six or seven feet deep in the bank.

  When I return, about 5 P.M., the shad-flies swarm over the river in considerable numbers, but there are very few at sundown . . . (Journal, 12:201).

  I am struck with the beauty of the sorrel now, e.g. Lepidium campestre field. What a wholesome red! . . . (Journal, 12:201).

  Early strawberries begin to be common. The lower leaves of the plant are red, concealing the fruit. Violets, especially of dry land, are scarce now . . .

  Sitting by Hubbard Bath [?] swamp wood and looking north, at 3 P.M., I notice the now peculiar glaucous color of the very water, as well as the meadow-grass (i.e. sedge), at a dozen or twenty rods’ distance, seen through the slight haze which accompanies this first June heat . . .

  Small snapdragon, how long?

  Examined a kingfisher’s nest,—though there is a slight doubt if I found the spot. It was formed singularly like that of the bank swallow, i.e. flat-elliptical . . .

  A flying squirrel’s nest and young on Emerson’s hatchet path, south of Walden, on hilltop, in a covered hollow in a small old stump at base of a young oak, covered with fallen leaves and a portion of the stump; nest apparently of dry grass. Saw three young run out after the mother and up a slender oak . . .

  The testimony of the farmers, etc., is that the river thirty to fifty years ago was much lower in the summer than now. Deacon Richard Heard spoke of playing when a boy on the river side of the bushes where the pads are, and of wading with great ease at Heard’s Bridge, and I hear that one Rice (of Wayland or Sudbury), an old man, remembers galloping his horse through the meadows to the edge of the river . . . Colonel David Heard, who accompanied me and is best acquainted of any with the details of the controversy,—has worked at clearing out the river (I think about 1820),—said that he did not know of a rock in the river from the falls near the Framingham line to perhaps the rear of Hubbard’s in Concord . . .

  Daniel Garfield, whom I met fishing on the river, and who has worked on Nine-Acre Corner and Lee’ s Bridges for fifty years or more, could remember one year when Captain Wheeler dug much mud from the river, when the water was so low that he could throw out pickerel on each side outside the bushes (where the pads now are) . . .

  Ebenezer Conant remembers when the Canal dam was built, and that before that it used to be dry at midsummer outside the bushes on each side. Lee says that about 1819 the bridge near him was rebuilt and the mud-sills taken up . . .

  The black willow down is now quite conspicuous on the trees, giving them a parti-colored or spotted white and green look, quite interesting, like a fruit . . .

  P.M.—To Walden.

  At the further Brister’s Spring, under the pine, I find an rlttacus tuna, half hidden under a skunk-cabbage leaf, with its back to the ground and motionless, on the edge of the swamp. The under side is a particularly pale hoary green. It is somewhat greener above with a slightly purplish brown border on the front edge of its front wings, and a brown, yellow, and whitish eye-spot in the middle of each wing. It is very sluggish and allows rue to turn it over and cover it up with another leaf,—sleeping till the night come . . .

  Very hot. The piper grass bloom in prime. Examined the flying squirrel’s nest at the base of a small white [oak] or two (sprouts), four inches through, in a small old white oak stump, half open above, just below the level of the ground, composed of quite a mass of old withered oak leaves and a few fresh green ones . . .

  Have heard the peculiar peep of young tailless golden robins for a day or more.

  White water ranunculus in full bloom at least a week, in Second Division Brook, near the dam, in the shade of the bank, a clear day . . .

  Waded out thirteen rods from rock in Flint’s Pond, and was only up to my middle . . . (Journal, 12:216).

  You see in rich moist mowing the yet slender, recurving unexpanded panicles or heads of the red-top (?), mixed with the upright, rigid herd’s-grass. Much of it is out in dry places . . .

  As you walk beside a ditch or brook, you see the frogs which you alarm launching themselves from a considerable distance into the brook. They spring considerably upward, so as to clear all intervening obstacles . . .

  Having sounded the river yesterday and to-day from entrance to Fair Haven Pond to oak at Ball’s Hill, the water being to-day three inches lower than yesterday,—or now a foot and a quarter above what I call summer level,—I make these observations . . .

  P.M.—To Lee’s Cliff.

  The fields are now purplish with the anthers of herd’s-grass, which is apparently at its height . . .

  The heart-leaf flower is now very conspicuous and pretty (3 P.M.) in that pool westerly of the old Conantum house . . .

  P. Hutchinson says he once found a wood duck’s nest in a hollow maple by Heywood’s meadow (now by railroad), and tried to get the young as soon as hatched, but they were gone too soon for him . . . Bathing at Barrett’s Bay, I find it to be composed in good part of sawdust, mixed with sand . . .

  P.M.—To Clamshell by river . . .

  The islands of the river, below the Assabet especially,—as Hosmer’s, and the one just below French’s Rock,—are now covered with canary grass, which has almost. entirely done and closed up . . .

  See young kingbirds which have lately flown perched in a family on the willows,—the airy bird, lively, twittering . . . (Journal, 12:227-230).

  To-dav, like yesterday, is very hot, with a blue haze concealing the mountains and hills, looking like hot dust in the air .
. . (Journal, 12:230-232).

  P.M.—To Assabet Bath.

  The elm avenue above the Wheeler farm is one of the hottest places in the town ; the heat is reflected from the dusty road. The grass by the roadside begins to have a dry, hot, dusty look. The melted ice is running almost in a stream from the countryman’s covered wagon. . .

  In the evening, the moon being about full, I paddle up the river to see the moonlight and hear the bullfrogs . . . I see at 9.30 P.M. a little brood of four or five barn swallows, which have quite recently left the nest, perched close together for the night on a dead willow twig in the shade of the tree, about four feet above the water . . .

  Gather a few Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum. Raspberries, in one swamp, are quite abundant and apparently at their height (Journal, 12:237-238).

  Nathan Hosmer remembers that when the two new stone piers at Hunt’s Bridge were built, about 1820, one Nutting went under water to place the stones, and he was surprised to see how long he would remain under about this business . . .

  The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly, not with mud. Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places, but sand is the ordinary building material.

  It is remarkable how the river, while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up the other side . . .

  P.M.—To Eddy Bridge.

  Abel Hosmer says that the Turnpike Company did not fulfill their engagement to build a new bridge over the Assabet in 1807; that the present stone bridge was not built till about the time the Orthodox meeting-house was built. (That was in 1826.) Benjamin says it was built soon after the meeting-house, or perhaps 1827, and was placed some fifty feet higher up-stream than the old wooden one . . .

  Jacob Farmer tells me that he remembers that when about twenty-one years old he and Hildreth were bathing in the Assabet at the mouth of the brook above Winn’s, and Hildreth swam or waded across to a sandbar (now the island there), but the water was so deep on that bar that he became frightened, and would have been drowned if he had not been dragged out and resuscitated by others . . .

  Harrington has what he calls his Elm Hole, where he thinks he finds the old bed of the river some ten rods from the present . . . (Journal, 12:247-248).

  At Hills’ Bridge we begin to find ourselves shut in by hills, and the character of the shores is fairly changed . . .

  We lunched about 12 o’clock (having got to the Falls about eleven), sitting on the largest rocky islet there, which, as I remember, may have been four to six rods long, but though it was not six feet above the water, if so much, there was no trace of the water ever having washed over it . . .

  A carpenter who lives (?) at Billerica Corner says the water stood all around the nearest inhabited two-story house to the bridge last spring, so that you could go round it in a boat . . .

  Going through Thrush Alley and beyond, I am pestered by flies about my head,—not till now (though I may have said so before). They are perfect imps, for they gain nothing for their pains and only pester me . . .

  The hairy hueldeberry still lingers in bloom,—a few of them. The white orchis will hardly open for a week . . . (Journal, 12:257-258).

  P.M.—Water three and a half inches above summer level. I measure the rapidity of the river’s current . . . (Journal, 12:258).

  Now observe the darker shades, and especially the apple trees, square and round, in the northwest landscape. Dogdayish . . . (Journal, 12:258-259).

D Sir

  We enclose Ten dollars, Rockland Bank, in settlement of your bill of 21st inst

  Please acknowledge & oblige

Yours Respy
Lucas, Bros

  I see what I take to be young purple finches eating mountain-ash berries (ours). The kingbirds eat currants . . .

  The black willows are the children of the river. They do not grow far from the water, not on the steep banks which the river is wearing into, not on the unconverted shore, but on the bars and banks which the river has made. A bank may soon get to be too high for it. It grows and thrives on the river-made shores and banks, and is a servant which the river uses to build up and defend its, banks and isles. It is married to the river . . .

  Tire river is very nearly down to summer level now, and I notice there, among other phenomena of low water by the river, the great yellow lily pads flat on bare mud . . .

  This dog-day weather I can see the bottom where five and a half feet deep. At five feet it is strewn clear across with sium, heart-leaf, Ranunculus Parshii, etc. It is quite green and verdurous, especially with the first. I see the fishes moving leisurely about amid the weeds, their affairs revealed . . .

  P.M.—Left boat at Rice’s Bend. I spoke to him of the clapper rail . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] and I, having left our boat at Rice’s Bend last night, walk to it this forenoon on our way to Saxonville . . .

  A man fishing at the Ox-Bow said without hesitation that the stone-heaps were made by the sucker, at any rate that he had seen them made by the sucker in Charles River,—the large black sucker (not the horned one). Another said that the water rose five feet above its present level at the bridge on the edge of Framingham, and showed me about the height on the stone . . .

  Now, at 5 P.M., the river has risen an inch and a half since 6 A.M., though we have not had a drop of rain for three days . . . (Journal, 12:272-273).

  Tlcat fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is, methinks, an August sound and is very inspiriting. It is a certain maturity in the year which it suggests. My thoughts are the less crude for it. There is a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer . . .

  P.M.—I see two or three birds which I take to be rose-breasted grosbeaks of this year . . .

  Warren Miles tells me that in mowing lately he cut in two a checkered “adder,” by his account it was the chicken snake,—and there was in its stomach a green snake, dead and partly digested, and he was surprised to find that they ate them . . .

  Rice has had a little experience once in pushing a canal-boat up Concord river. Says this was the way they used to get the boat off a rock when by chance it had got on to one. If it had run quite on, so that the rock was partly under the main bottom of the boat, they let the boat swing round to one side and placed a stout stake underneath, a little aslant, with one end on the bottom of the river and the other ready to catch the bows of the boat . . .

  Please send us ten pound of Plumbago for Electrotyping purposes, such as we got last from you—as it is some risk to send the money by mail, we would prefer paying the Express agent on delivery of the box—I suppose this arrangement will be satisfactory to you but if not please let us know at once as we have but a very little on hand.

Respectfully Yours &c
Tho. H. Mumford

  When I reached the upper end of this weedy bar, at about 3 P.M., this warm day, I noticed some light-colored object in mid-river, near the other end of the bar . . . I saw C., who had just bathed, making signals to me with his towel, for I referred the object to the shore twenty rods further . . . But about this time I discovered with my naked eye that it was a blue heron standing in very shallow water amid the weeds of the bar and pluming itself . . .

  Suddenly comes a second, flying low, and alights on the bar yet nearer to me, almost high and dry. Then I hear a note from them, perhaps of warning,—a short, coarse, frog-like purring or eructating sound. You might easily mistake it for a frog. I heard it half a dozen times. It was not very loud. Anything but musical. The last proceeds to plume himself, looking warily at me from time to time, while the other continues to edge off through the weeds . . .

Dear Sir

  Inclosed please find $15 00 for which send us 10 lbs Blacklead by return of express—directed as usual

Yours truly
Welch, Bigelow, & Co

  Riding to the factory, I see the leaves of corn, planted thick for fodder, so rolled by the drought that I mistook one row in grass for some kind of rush or else reed, small and terete . . .

  Please send by return Express 6 lbs best Black Lead & Enclosed please find Nine Dollars to pay for the same—

  Send a receipt.

Yrs Resp’y &c
Hobart & Robbins

  Mother unites with me in assuring Charles Benjamin & Caleb, that we shall be happy to see them, & trust that they will not be in a hurry to go hence to Peterboro, but will first exhaust at their leisure whatever entertainment the dull town may afford. Accommodations will be provided for them at any rate, and such visitors as come later must take their chance. The prospect is that Concord will not be herself that week. I fear it will be more like Discord. Thank fortune, the camp will be nearly 2 miles west of us; yet the scamps will be “all over the lot.” The very anticipation of this muster has greatly increased the amount of travel past our house, for a month; & now, at last, whole houses have begun to roll that way. I fear that we shall have no melons to speak of for either friends or foes, unless perchance the present rain may revive them, for we are in the midst of a severe drought. Sophia is on a short visit to Miss Swift in Roxbury. Please let aunts know that their letter to her reached us yesterday, & that we shall expect them muster [indecipherable word]. We hope that Aunt Jane will be able to travel without inconvenience. I believe that the soldiers will come over the road on Tuesday; & I hear that cars will be run between Boston & Concord at very short intervals on the days of the muster.

  I should think that you might have a very pleasant journey to New Brunswick, & for my own part, I would rather go to where men will be mustered less thickly than they will be hereabouts next month.

  Edward Hoar, with wife & sister, leave Liverpool for home the 27 inst.

  I know the fatigue of much concentrating, especially of drawing accurate plans. It is the hardest work I can do. While following it, I need to go to Moosehead every afternoon, & camp out every night.

Yrs truly
Henry D. Thoreau

  P.M.—To Fair Haven Hill . . . (Journal, 12:292-296).

  What were those insects, some winged, with short backs and say Half an inch long, others wingless and shorter, like little coils of brass wire (so marked), in dense droves together on trees and fences,—apparently harmless,—especially a week or ten days ago? . . .

  What is often called poverty, but which is a simpler and truer relation to nature, gives a peculiar relish to life, just as to be kept short gives us an appetite for food . . .

  A cool day; wind northwest Need a half-thick coat. Thus gradually we withdraw into winter quarters. It is a clear, flashing air, and the shorn fields now look bright and yellowish and cool, tinkled and twittered over by bobolinks, goldfinches, sparrows, etc. . . .

  I saw a month or more ago where pine-needles which had fallen (old ones) stood erect on low leaves of the forest floor, having stuck in, or passed ass through, them. They stuck up as a fork which falls from the table. Yet you would not think that they fell with sufficient force . . .

  It is so cool a morning that for the first time I move into the entry to sit in the sun. But in this cooler weather I feel as if the fruit of my summer were hardening and maturing a little, acquiring color and flavor like the corn and other fruits in the field. When the very earliest ripe grapes begin to be scented in the cool nights, then, too, the first cooler airs of autumn begin to waft my sweetness on the desert airs of summer . . .

  We start when we think we are handling a worm, and open our hands quickly, and this I think is designed rather for the protection of the worm than of ourselves.

  Acorns are not fallen yet. Some haws are ripe.

  The plants now decayed and decaying and withering are those early ones which grow in wet or shady places . . .

  There was another shower in the night (at 9 P.M.), making the sixth after 1.30 P.M. It was evidently one cloud thus broken into six parts, with some broad intervals of clear sky and fair weather. It would have been convenient for us, if it had been printed on the first cloud, “Five more to come!” Such a shower has a history which has never been written . . .

  The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon. Now, at 11 A.M., it makes quite a show, yet at 2 P.M. I do not notice it . . .

  The farmer is obliged to hide his melon-patch in the midst of his coat or potatoes, far away. I sometimes stutnhlc on it as I tern going across lots. I see one today where the watermelons are intermixed with carrots in a carrot-bed, and so concealed by the general resemblence of leaf, etc., at a little distance . . .

  The purple culms and spikes of the. crab-grass or finger-grass, spreading and often almost prostrate under our feet in sandy paths and causeways, are where the purple cuticle of the earth again shows itself, and we seem to be treading in our vintage whether we will or not. Earth has donned the purple . . .

Dear Sir

  I will read a lecture to your company on the 9th of October, for the compensation named. I should prefer, however, to bring one which I call “Life Misspent,” instead of “Autumnal Tints.”

Yrs truly
Henry D. Thoreau

  P.M.—To Fair Haven Pond.

  Grapes are turning purple, but are not ripe . . .

  The prinos berries are now seen, red (or scarlet), clustered along the stems, amid the as yet green leaves. A cool red . . . (Journal, 12:318-320).

  The bloom and freshness of the river was gone as sont as the pickerel-weed began to be imbrowned, in the latter part of August. It is fall and harvest there now.

  I remember my earliest going a-graping. (It was a wonder that we ever hit upon the ripe season.) There was more fun in finding, and eying the big purple clusters high on the trees tend climbing to them than in eating them. We used to take care not to chew the skins long lest they should make our mouths sore . . .

  This wind has strewn the Fair Haven Hill-side with apples . I think that fully three quarters of all are on the ground. Many trees are almost entirely stripped, the whole crop lying in a circular form beneath, yet hard and green. Others on the hillside have rolled far down. The farmers will be busy for some time gathering these windfalls. The winds have come to shake the apple trees prematurely, making fruit (for pies) cheap . . .

  P.M.—To Annursnack . . .

  The Emersons tell me that their Irishman, James, held his thumb for the calf to suck, after dipping it in a pitcher of milk, but, the milk not coming fast enough, [the calf] butted (or bunted) the pitcher to make the milk come down, and broke it . . .

  Young Nealy says that there are blue-winged teal about now . . . (Journal, 12:329-333).

  Rice, who walks with me, thinks that that fine early sedge grass would be a capital thing to stuff cushions and beds with, it is so tough. (In hollows in woods.) . . .

  Dr. Bartlett handed me a paper to-day, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann . . .

  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 . . .

  The button-hushes 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 . . .

  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 sportsman 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 when Antmus touched the earth, so when the mountaineer scents the fern, he bounds up like a chamois, or mountain goat, with renewed strength. There is no French perfumery about it. It has not been tampered 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 . . .

  Heavy Haynes says he has seen one or two fish hawks within a day or two. Also that a boy caught a
very large snapping turtle on the meadow a day or two ago . . .

  I am not sure that I am in a fit mood to write to you, for I feel and think rather too much like a business man, having some very irksome affairs to attend to these months and years on account of my family. This is the way I am serving King Admetus, confound him! If it were not for my relations, I would let the wolves prey on his flocks to their bellies’ content. Such fellows you have to deal with! herdsmen of some other king, or of the same, who tell no tale, but in the sense of counting their flocks, and then lie drunk under a hedge. How is your grist ground? Not by some murmuring stream, while you lie dreaming on the bank; but, it seems, you must take hold with your hands, and shove the wheel round. You can’t depend on streams, poor feeble things! You can’t depend on worlds, left to themselves; but you’ve got to oil them and goad them along. In short, you’ve got to carry on two farms at once,—the farm on the earth and the farm in your mind. Those Crimean and Italian battles were mere boys play, they are the scrapes into which truants get. But what a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array through the always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. Men may sit in chambers, seemingly safe and sound, and yet despair, and turn out at last only hollowness and dust within, like a Dead Sea apple. A standing army of numerous, brave, and well-disciplined thoughts, and you at the head of them, marching straight to your goal,—how to bring this about is the problem, and Scott’s Tactics will not help you to it. Think of a poor fellow begirt only with a sword-belt, and no such staff of athletic thoughts! his brains rattling as he walks and talks! These are your prætorian guard. It is easy enough to maintain a family, or a state, but it is hard to maintain these children of your brain (or say, rather, these guests that trust to enjoy your hospitality), they make such great demands; and yet, he who does only the former, and loses the power to think originally, or as only he ever can, fails miserably. Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.

  Zouaves?-piste! How you can overrun a country, climb any rampart, and carry any fortress, with an army of alert thoughts!—thoughts that send their bullets home to heaven’s door,—with which you can take the whole world, without paying for it, or robbing anybody. See, the conquering hero comes! You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only. Provided you think well, the heavens falling, or the earth gaping, will be music for yon to march by. No foe can ever see you, or you him; you cannot so much as think of him. Swords have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a contest. In your mind must be a liquor which will dissolve the world whenever it is dropt in it. There is no universal solvent but this, and all things together cannot saturate it. It will hold the universe in solution, and yet be as translucent as ever. The vast machine may indeed roll over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on the smallest and least angular of a man’s thoughts.

  You seem not to have taken Cape Cod the right way. I think that you should have persevered in walking on the beach and on the bank, even to the land’s end, however soft, and so, by long knocking at Ocean’s gate, have gained admittance at last,—better, if separately, and in a storm, not knowing where you would sleep by night, or eat by day. Then you should have given a day to the sand behind Provincetown, and ascended the hills there, and been blown on considerably. I hope that you like to remember the journey better than you did to make it. I have been confined at home all this year, but I am not aware that I have grown any rustier than was to be expected. One while I explored the bottom of the river pretty extensively. I have engaged to read a lecture to [Theodore] Parker’s society on the 9th of October next. I am off-a barberrying.

  Horse-chestnuts strew the roadside, very handsomecolored but simply formed nuts, looking like mahogany knobs, with the waved and curled grain of knots.

  Having just dug my potatoes in the garden,—which did not turn out very well,—I took a basket and trowel and went forth to dig my wild potatoes, or ground-nuts, by the railroad fence . . .

  Ever since the unusually early and severe frost of the 16th, the evergreen ferns have been growing more and more distinct amid the fading and decaying and withering ones, and the sight of those suggests a cooler season. They are greener than ever, by contrast. The terminal shield fern is one of the handsomest . . .

  Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden.

  The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit . . .

  We had all our dog-days in September this year. It was too dry before, even for fungi. Only the last three weeks have we lead any fungi to speak of. Nowadays I see most of the election-cake fungi, with crickets and slugs eating them . . .

  P.M.—To lygodium . . .

  I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying.
It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years.

  So many maple and pine and other leaves have now fallen that in the woods, at least, you walk over a carpet of fallen leaves . . .

Looking from the hog-pasture over the valley of Spencer Brook westward, we see the smoke rising from a huge chimney above a gray roof amid the woods, at a distance, where some family is preparing its evening meal . . .

  P.M.—To Conantum . . .

  It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange . . .

Dear Sir

  Your aunts wish you to come by the next train to the Superior Court 1st Session to testify that the family tradition is that they & you are descended from the Orrocks which is necessary to be proved in this case vs. Miss Palleis [Pallies.]

Very truly yours
Edward Bangs.

  Colder weather, and the cat’s fur grows (Journal, 12:374).

Looking under large oaks, black and white, the acorns appear to have fallen or been gathered by squirrels, etc I see in many distant places stout twigs (black or scarlet oak) three or four inches long which have been gnawed off by the squirrels, with four to seven acorns on each, and left on the ground . . .

  I perceive the peculiar scent of the witch-hazel in bloom for several rods around, which at first I refer to the decaying leaves. I see where dodder was killed, with the button-bush, perhaps a week.

  British naturalists very generally apologize to the reader for having devoted their attention to natural history to the neglect of some important duty . . .

We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden. There is a thick haze almost entirely concealing the mountains.

There is wind enough to raise waves on the pond and make it bluer. What strikes me in the scenery here now is the contrast of the unusually blue water with the brilliant-tinted woods around it. The tints generally may be about at their height. The earth appears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red, or with imbricated scales of that color, and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, and a distant circumference of whitish haze . . .

  Shall I break our long silence, silence so much more instructive than any words I may utter? Yet should my rashness procure a response from you, I, at least, may be the wiser. Solemn though the undertaking be, I would fain venture.

  Well, imprimis, you have been talking, as I learn from various sources, in Boston. I hope you were understood, in some small measure, at least, though I fear not; but this is not your business—to find understanding for your audience. I respect your benevolence in thus doing, for I esteem it one of the most gracious and philanthropic deeds, for a wise, thoughtful man, a philosopher, to attempt, at least, to awaken his fellow men from their drunken somnolence, perhaps to elevate them.

“But unimproved, Heaven’s noblest browns are vain,
No sun plenty crowns the uncultured vale;
Where green lakes languish on the silent plain,
Death rides the billows of the western gale.”

  What are we to think of a world that has had a Socrates, a Plato, a Christ for its teachers, and yet remaining in such outer darkness?

  It appears to me it is only, age after age, the working over of the old original compound-man. We appear to gain nothing. A few noble, wise ones, mark the lustrums of the past—a few also will mark what we call the present. The things men rate so highly in modern times do not appear to me to be of very great value after all. What is it for a ship to cross the ocean by steam if its passengers have no godlike errand to perform? We have enough to wonder at in Nature already, why seek new wonders?

  I have passed some peaceful hours of late, sawing wood by moonlight, in the field near the lane to our cow-pastures—the work does not interfere with, but rather favors meditation, and I have found some solace in the companionship of the woods near by, and the concert of their wind harps.

  During my evening walks I hear the flight of passenger birds overhead, probably those of noctura habits, as I suppose other rest at this season (Night).

  A small flock, only ten wild geese, passed over a few days ago. The Sylviacola coronata [Myrtle Warbler] have arrived from the north, and will remain until driven away by the severe cold. I have often seen them in the company of snow bunting about the house and during snowstorms, but they suffer and often die at such times if the storm be severe. Quails are gradually increasing, though still scarce. Last winter I saw a convey of some twelve or more near here, and occasionally have heard their whistle during the early parts of the past summer.

  I made the acquaintance of your friends, Blake [H. G. O. Blake] and Brown, [Theophilus Brown] very favorably at the Middleborough ponds, last June, on their way to Cape Cod. I had, however, seen Mr. Blake once before.

  I should be happy to have a visit from you. Can you not come soon?

  I have passed through some deep experiences since I last saw you. We are getting nearer. Is there not such a fact as human companionship? I need not add how much I owe you, and that I remain, faithfully your friend,

  D. R.

Bluebirds are still here, and meadow-larks are tuneful.

  A cold northwest wind.

  I see some black oak acorns on the trees still and in some places at least half the shrub oak acorns. The last are handsomer now that they have turned so much darker.

  I go along the east edge of poplar Hill. This very cold and windy clay, now that so many leaves have fallen . . .

  P.M.—To Gowing’s Swamp.

  The water standing over the road at Moore’s Swamp, I see the sand spotted black with many thousands of little snails with a shell, and two feelers out, slowly dragging themselves over the bottom. They reminded me by their color, number, and form of the young tadpoles . . .

  P.M.—To Assabet, front of Tarbell’s.

  Going by Dennis Swamp on railroad, the sour scent of decaying ferns is now very strong there. Rhus venenata is bare, and maples and some other shrubs, and more are very thin-leaved, as alder and birches, so that the swamp, with so many fallen leaves and migrating sparrows, etc., flitting through it, has a very late look . . .

  It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted to violence, resisted the government, threw his life away! . . . C. [William Ellery Channing] says that he saw a loon at Walden the 15th . . .

  The book came duly to hand, and as it was not for me, I intend to send you the money for it in this note—

  Blake [H.G.O. Blake] must speak for himself and not for me when speaking of that mountain walk of ours. I enjoyed it well enough, and ought to be ashamed of myself that I did, perhaps, since it yielded me so little.

  Our Cape Cod walk salts down better with me, & yet there wasn’t much salt in that,—enough to save it perhaps, but not enough of the sea & sand & sky. The good things I got in it were rather incidental—did not belong to the sea, But I did get some glimpses of the sea. I remember a smoke we had on a little barren knoll where we heard the plover, in North Dennis, in the twilight after a long & hot days walk. We heard the pounding of the surf against a shore twenty miles off (so said the man at whose house we passed the night,—) and we were expecting to arrive there the next day.

  I have been in the habit of thinking our journey culminated in that smoke, if it did’nt end there, for, though we arrived at the beach the next day according to programme & found the thirty miles stretch of it, with its accompaniments too large to complain of, yet—our anticipations were immense. But now in thinking of it the actual sea & sky loom up larger, while our smoke & dreams—hold their own pretty well—

Your friend
Theo Brown

  Dug some artichokes behind Alcott’s, the largest about one inch in diameter. Now apparently is the time to begin to dig them, the plant being considerably frost-bitten. Tried two or three roots. The main root ran clown straight about six inches and then terminated abruptly . . .

  The government, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the Constitution with it, as farmers in the winter contrive to turn a penny by following the coopering business. When the reporter to the Herald (!) reports the conversation “verbatim,” he does not know of what undying words he is made the vehicle . . .

  The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds ; a small crew of slaveholders is smothering four millions under the hatches ; and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by “the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak”! And in the same breath they tell us that all is quiet now at Harper’s Ferry. What is that that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead, who have found deliverance. That is the way we are diffusing humanity, and all its sentiments with it . . .

  It was evidently far from being a wild and desperate and insane attempt. It was a well-matured plan.

  The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. He would have no rowdy or swaggerer, no profane swearer, for, as he said, he always found these men to fail at last. He would have only men of principle, and they are few . . .

  Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was thus a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; a man of principle, of rare courage, and of devoted humanity; ready to lay down their lives any moment for the weak and enslaved. It may be doubted if there were any more their equals in all the land, for their leader scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop . . .

  I spoke to my townsmen last evening on “The character of Capt. Brown, now in the clutches of the slaveholder.” I should like to speak to any company in Worcester who may wish to hear me, & will come, if only my expenses are paid. I think that we should express ourselves at once, while Brown is alive. The sooner the better. Perhaps [T. W.] Higginson may like to have a meeting.

  Wednesday evening would be a good time.

  The people here are deeply interested in the matter.

  Let me have an answer as soon as may be.

Henry D. Thoreau

[The following was written in pencil]
  P.S. I may be engaged toward the end of the week.

  Thoreau must lecture for Fraternity Tuesday Evening—Douglas [Frederick Douglass] fails—Letter mailed

Charles W. Slack

Mr. Thoreau took special pains to include the Liberator is the censure which he had at first bestowed upon the press generally. In doing this, he ignored the fact that Mr. Garrison has bestowed high and hearty eulogy upon Captain Brown, representing him as not only (judged from the ordinary stand-point of patriotism) superior in nobleness to the heroes of the American Revolution, but entitled to the higher praise of faithfully practising towards the most oppressed people of our country the lessons of the Golden Rule; and, moreover, he distorted Mr. Garrison’s first statement, (made on receipt of the first day’s telegraphic reports,) that the attempt was apparently an insane one, into a charge that he had represented Captain Brown as insane.

A very large audience listened to this lecture, crowding the hall half an hour before the time of its commencement, and giving hearty applause to some of the most energetic expressions of the speaker.

C. K. W. [Charles King Whipple ?]

  Coombs says that quite a little flock of pigeons bred here last summer . . . (Journal, 12:441-442).

  The clouds were never more fairly reflected in the water than now, as I look up the Cyanean Reach from Clamshell.

  A fine gossamer is streaming from every fence and tree and stubble, though a careless observer would not notice it. As I look along over the grass toward the sun at Hosmer’s field, beyond Lupine Hill, I notice the shimmering effect of the gossamer,—which seems to cover it almost like a web,—occasioned by its motion, though the air is so still . . .

  In the midst of Ledum Swamp I came upon a white cat under the spruces and the water brush, which evidently had not seen me till I was within ten feet. There she stood, quite still, as if hoping to be concealed, only turning her bead slowly away from and toward me, looking at me thus two or three times . . .

  All through the excitement occasioned by Brown’s remarkable attempt and subsequent behavior, the Massachusetts Legislature, not taking any steps for the defense of her citizens who are likely to be carried to Virginia as witnesses and exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob . . .

  If any person, in a lecture or a conversation, should now cite any ancient example of heroism, such as Cato, or Tell, or Winkelried, passing over the recent deeds and words of John Brown, I am sure that it would be felt by any intelligent audience of Northern men to be tame and inexcusably far-fetched . . . .

  I have been so absorbed of late in Captain Brown’s [John Brown] fate as to be surprised whenever I detected the old routine running still,—met persons going about their affairs indifferent . . .

  An apothecary in New Bedford told R. [Daniel Ricketson] the other day that a man (a Mr. Leonard) of Springfield told him that he once attended a meeting in Springfield where a woman was exhibited as in a mesmeric state, insensible to pain . . .

  I trust that you also, with Emerson, [Ralph Waldo Emerson] will be moved by old and high memories to help us in starting out here a new incarnation of the old Dial. It certainly will prove worthy to be so called if we can obtain help from R. W. E. yourself and others. We will not be able at once to pay contributors, and the Editor expects to lose; but in due time we shall reap if we faint not. Will you not give the babe a birth-present? One of those fresh wood-zephyrs that fan our fevered hearts and bring health to blasé cheeks! You are the man, the only man, who can make green grass and flowers grow upon the pages of our Dial.

  What is my chief wish of you? It is to have you interested in us: willing to send us a love-gift of thought: noting, now and then on paper, the form and [?] of some pearls, which I know you are constantly finding in that Oriental Sea of yours upstairs. So now Mr. Pearl-Diver, I await your word of cheer! May I say that I shall be assisted by H. D. Thoreau of Concord? Pray let me hear at once.

Your friend,
M. D. Conway.

  Let me thank you for your earthy and [word] of Capt. Brown. As for your new Dial I do not think of any Thing which I have available for your purpose & other engagements prevent my preparing it. While I wish you success I know at [word] your assistance knowing myself so well.

  I can only say that if I [word] [word] on any & the [word] I will remember your magazine.

  To follow out your simile I find in my sea some mother o’ pearl—it may be but very few pearls as yet—may I now good wishes & more [word] and [word] [word?] ment—

  But this will not be worth an advertisement

  The lectures which you refer to were reported in the newspapers, after a fashion, the last one in some half dozen of them, and if I possessed one, or all, of those reports I would send them to you, bad as they are. The best, or at least longest one of the Brown Lecture was in the Boston “Atlas & Bee” of Nov 2nd. Maybe half the whole. There were others in the Traveller – the Journal &c of the same date.

  I am glad to know that you are interested to see my things. & I wish that I had them in a printed form to send to you. I exerted myself considerably to get the last discourse printed & sold for the benefit of Brown’s family – but the publishers are afraid of pamphlets & it is now too late.

  I return the stamps which I have not used.

  I shall be glad to see you if I ever came your way

Yours truly
Henry D. Thoreau

  Landing at the ash tree above the railroad, I thought I heard the peculiar not of grackles toward the willow-row across the field, and made a memorandum of it, never doubting; but soon after I saw some farmers at work there, and found that it was the squeaking of the wheel that rolled before their plow… We hear the clattering sound of two ducks – which rise and fly low at first – before we can see them though quite far off by the side of the pond . . .

  The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy, or in any, day, you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season it is almost their sole inhabitant.

  I see here to-day one brown creeper busily inspecting the pitch pines. It begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course . . .

  The Greeks and Romans made much of honey because they had no sugar; olive oil also was very important. Our poets (?) still sing of honey, though we have sugar, and oil, though we do not produce and scarcely use it . . .

  Saw Abel Brooks there [Hubbard’s Wood] with a half-bushel basket on his arm . . .

  Saw quite a flock of snow buntings not yet very white. They rose from the midst of a stubble-field unexpectedly. The moment they settled after wheeling around, they were perfectly concealed . . .

  When I hear of John Brown and his wife weeping at length, it is as if the rocks sweated.

  Returning from the post-office at early candle-light, I noticed for the first time this season the peculiar effect of lights in offices and shops seen over the snowy streets, suggesting how withdrawn and inward the life in the former, how exposed and outward in the latter . . .

  It is somewhat of a lichen day. The bright-yellow sulphur lichens on the walls of the Walden road look novel, as if I had not seen them for a long time. Do they not require cold as much as moisture to enliven them? What surprising forms and colors! Designed on every natural surface of rock or tree . . .

  Returning up the railroad, I see the great tufts of sedge in Heywood’s meadow curving over like locks of the meadow’s hair, above the snow . . . The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, goes almost unobserved . . .

  I go to Pleasant Meadow,—or rather toward the sun, for the glaze shows best so . . .

  When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I am not surprised that certain of my neighbors speak of John Brown as an ordinary felon. Who are they? They have much flesh, or at least much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures, or the dark qualities predominate in them, or they have much office. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their sight, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind . . .

  Certain persons disgraced themselves by hanging Brown in effigy in this town on the 2d. I was glad to know that the only four whose names I heard mentioned in connection with it had not been long resident here, and had done nothing to secure the respect of the town . . .

  As I talked with the woodchopper who had just cleared the top of Emerson’s [Ralph Waldo Emerson] I got a new view of the mountains over his pile of wood in the foreground. They were very grand in their snowy mantle, which had a slight tinge of purple . . .

  My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. It is the walk peculiar to winter . . .

  There is now, at 2.30 P.M., the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds. Really parallel columns of fine mackerel sky, reaching quite across the heavens from west to east, with clear intervals of blue sky, and a fine-grained vapor like spun glass extending in the same direction beneath the former. In half an hour all this mackerel sky is gone . . .

  Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also. Going over black ice three or four inches thick, only reassured by seeing the thickness at the cracks, I see it richly marked internally with large whitish figures suggesting rosettes of ostrich-feathers or coral . . .

  Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face, almost as much so as sand. It is cold also. It is drifting but not accumulating fast. I can see the woods about a quarter of a mile distant . . .

  Bought a book at Little & Brown’s, paying a nine-pence more on a volume than it was offered me for elsewhere . . . (Journal, 13:29-30).

  The snow being some three or four inches deep, I see rising above it, generally, at my old bean-field, only my little white pines set last spring in the midst of an immense field of Solidago nemoralis, with a little sweet-fern (i.e. a large patch of it on the north side). What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines! . . .

  P.M.—To Assabet opposite Tarbell’s, via Abel Hosmer’s . . .

  The thick, low cloud or mist makes novel prospects for us. In the southwest horizon I see a darker mass of it stretched along, seen against itself . . . (Journal, 13:33-34).

  Snows very fast, large flakes, a very lodging snow, quite moist; turns to rain in afternoon. If we leave the sleigh for a moment, it whitens the seat, which must be turned over. We are soon thickly covered, and it lodges on the twigs of the trees and bushes,—there being but little wind,—giving them a very white and soft, spiritual look. Gives them a still, soft, and light look . . .

  P.M.—To Flint’s Pond. C. [William Ellery Channing] is inclined to walk in the road, it being better walking there, and says: “You don’t wish to see anything but the sky to-day and breathe this air” . . . Three men are fishing on Flint’s Pond, where the ice is seven or eight inches thick . . .

  The gardener at Sleepy Hollow says that they caught many small pouts and some pickerel that weighed half a pound (!) in the little pond lately dug there . . .

  I ascended Ball’s Hill to see the sun set. How red its light at this hour! I covered its orb with my hand, and let its rays light up the fine woollen fibres of my glove. They were a dazzling rose-color . . .

  I saw the tracks of a partridge more than half an inch deep in the ice, extending from this island to the shore, she having walked there in the slosh. They were quite perfect and reminded me of bird-tracks in stone . . .

  P.M.—To Carlisle Bridge on river and meadow . . .

  Standing by the side of the river at Eleazer Davis’s Hill,—prepared to pace across it,—I hear a sharp fine screep from some bird, which at length I detect amid the button-bushes and willows. The screep was a note of recognition meant for me. I saw that it was a novel bird to me. Watching it a long time, with my glass and without it . . .

  It was evidently the golden-crested wren, which I have not made out before. This little creature was contentedly seeking its food here alone this cold winter day on the shore of our frozen river . . .

  The places where the river was certainly (i.e. except 4th) open yesterday were all only five feet or less in depth, according to my map, and all except 8th at bends or else below the mouth of a brook . . .

  Hence, I should say, if you wish to ascertain where the river is five feet, or less than five feet, deep in Concord, wait till it is open for not more than half a dozen rods below Nut Meadow . . .

  I went to the river immediately after sunrise I could [see] a little greenness in the ice, and also a little rose-color from the snow, but far less than before the sun set . . .

  P.M.—To Ball’s Hill, skating . . .

  To-night I notice the rose-color in the snow and the green in the ice at the same time, having been looking out for them.

  The clouds were very remarkable this cold afternoon, about twenty minutes before sunset, consisting of very long and narrow white clouds converging in the horizon (melon-rind-wise) both in the west and east. They looked like the skeletons and backbones of celestial sloths . . .

  P.M.—Going by Dodd’s, I see a shrike perched on the tip-top of the topmost upright twig of an English cherry tree before his house, standing square on the topmost bud, balancing himself by a slight motion of his tail from time to time . . .

  I spoke to the barber to-day about that whirl of hair on the occiput of most (if not all) men’s heads. He said it was called the crown, and was of a spiral form, a beginning spiral, when cut short; that some had two, one on the right, the other on the left, close together. I said that they were in a sense double-headed. He said that it was an old saying that such were bred under two crowns . . .

  At 10 A.M., thermometer 18º . . .

  P.M.—To the sweet-gale meadow or swamp up Assabet . . .

  A man may be old and infirm. What, then, are the thoughts he thinks? what the life he lives? They and it are, like himself, infirm. But a man may be young, athletic, active, beautiful. Then, too, his thoughts will be like his person. They will wander in a living and beautiful world. If you are well, then how brave you are! How you hope! You are conversant with joy! A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain . . .