THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

July 26, 1857

Sunday. I distinguished more plainly than formerly the very sharp and regular dark tops of the fir trees, shaped like the points of bodkins. These give a peculiarly dark and sombre look to the forest. The spruce-top has a more ragged outline. . .

Here were many raspberries on the site of an old logging-camp, but not yet ripe. . . .

In the meanwhile I observed the plants on the shore: white and black spruce, Hypericum ellipticum, Smilax herbacea, sium, and a strange-looking polygonum. . .

As we sat on the bank, two canoes, containing men, women and children, probably from Chesuncook, returned down the stream. We supposed that they had been a-berrying this Sunday morning. . . .

The canoe implies a long antiquity in which its manufacture has been gradually perfected. It will ere long, perhaps, be ranked among the lost arts. . . .

July 16, 1857

I hear of the first early blueberries brought to market. What a variety of rich blues their berries present, i. e. the earliest kind! Some are quite black and without bloom. What innocent flavors!

July 14, 1857

P. M. - Up Assabet with Loomis and Wilde.

Set fire to the carburetted hydrogen from the sawdust shoal with matches, and heard it flash. It must be an interesting sight by night.

June 18, 1857

In Newcomb’s Hollow I had already entered a Humane house. A sign over the door said “For Cases of Distress only,” and directed where the key of the lifeboat was to be obtained. Mine was a case of distress. Within was a simple apartment containing the boat, a bench, a fireplace and chimney, an india-rubber bucket, a few armfuls of wood, a keg of rags, a tin case with matches and two candles and a candlestick over the fireplace, etc. Also an extract from the laws of the State to protect the property of the Humane Society. I did not look closely for oil or food. I actually sought the Humane house for shelter. It was with peculiar reflections that I contemplated these two candles and those matches prepared to keep the spark of life in some suffering fellow-creature.

June 17, 1857

I go along the settled road, where the houses are interspersed with woods, in an unaccountably desponding mood, but when I come out upon a bare and solitary heath am at once exhilarated. This is a common experience in my travelling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

March 3, 1857

I go along below the north end of the Cliffs. The rocks in the usual place are buttressed with icy columns, for water in almost imperceptible quantity is trickling down the rocks. It is interesting to see how the dry back or ash-colored umbilicaria, which get a little moisture when the snow melts and trickles down along a seam or shallow channel of the rock, become relaxed and turn olive-green and enjoy their spring, while a few inches on each side of this gutter or depression in the face of the rock they are dry and crisp as ever. Perhaps the greater part of this puny rill is drunk up by the herbage on its brink.

February 10, 1857

Burton, the traveller, quotes an Arab saying, “Voyaging is a victory,” which he refers to the feeling of independence on overcoming the difficulties and dangers of the desert. But I think that commonly voyaging is a defeat, a rout, to which the traveller is compelled by want of valor. The traveller’s peculiar valor is commonly a bill of exchange. He is at home anywhere but where he was born and bred. Petitioning some Sir Joseph Banks or other representative of a Geographical Society to avail himself of his restlessness, and, if not receiving a favorable answer, necessarily going off somewhere next morning. It is a prevalent disease, which attacks Americans especially, both men and women, the opposite to nostalgia. yYet it does not differ much from nostalgia. I read the story of one voyageress round the world, who, it seemed to me, having started, had no other object but to get home again, only she took the longest way round. Snatching at a fact or two in behalf of science as he goes, just as a panther in his leap will take off a man’s sleeve and land twenty feet beyond him when travelling down-hill, being fitted out by some Sir Joseph Banks.

February 8, 1857

Riordan’s solitary cock, standing on such an icy snow-heap, feels the influence of the softened air, and the steam from patches of bare ground here and there, and has found his voice again. The warm air has thawed the music in his throat, and he crows lustily and unweariedly, his voice rising to the last. Yesterday morning our feline Thomas, also feeling the springlike influence, stole away along the fences and walls, which raise him above the water, and only returned this morning reeking with wet. Having got his breakfast, he already stands on his hind legs, looking wishfully through the window, and, the door being opened a little, he is at once off again in spite of the rain.

February 7, 1857

Hayden the elder tells me that the quails have come to his yard every day for almost a month and are just as tame as chickens. They come about his wood-shed, he supposes to pick up the worms that have dropped out of the wood, and when it storms hard gather together in the corner of the shed. He walks within, say, three or four feet of them without disturbing them. They come out of the woods by the graveyard, and sometimes they go down toward the river. They will be about his yard the greater part of the day; were there yesterday, though it was so warm, but now probably they can get food enough elsewhere. They go just the same to Poland’s, across the road. About ten years ago there was a bevy of fifteen that used to ccome from the same woods, and one day, they being in the barn and scared by the cat, four ran into the hay and died there. The former do not go to the houses further from the woods. Thus it seems in severe winters the quails venture out of the woods and join the poultry of the farmer’s yard, if it be near the edge of the wood. It is remarkable that this bird, which thus half domesticates itself, should not be found wholly domesticated before this.

February 6, 1857

The ground is encased in a thin black glaze (where it chances to be bare) and the iron rails and the telegraph wire. Insignificant weeds and stubble along the railroad causeway and elsewhere are now made very conspicuous, both by their increased size and bristling stiffness and their whiteness. Each wiry grass stem is become a stiff wand. The wind that begins to rise does not stir them; you only hear a fine crackling sound when it blows hardest. Behind each withered vegetable plant stands a stout ice plant, overlapping and concealing it. Stem answers to stem, and fruit to fruit. The heads of tansy are converted into confectionery somewhat like sugared almonds and regularly roughened (like orange-peel), and those of evening-primrose, and mullein, and hardhack, and lespedeza bear a still coarser kind. The wild carrot’s bird’s-nest umbel, now contracted above, is converted into almost a perfect hollow sphere, composed of contiguous thickened meridional ribs, which remind me of the fingers of a starfish (or five-finger). Each plant preserves its character, though exaggerated. Pigweed and Roman wormwood are ragged as ever on a larger scale, and the butterweed as stiffly upright. Tall goldenrod still more recurved. You naturally avoid running against the plant which you did not notice before. Standing on the southeast side, I see the fine dark cores which the stems make. On the opposite side, only the pure white ice plant is seen.