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October 1, 1854

The young black birches about Walden, next the south shore, are now commonly clear pale-yellow, very distinct at distance, like bright-yellow white birches, so slender amid the dense growth of oaks and evergreens on the steep shores. The black birches and red maples are the conspicuous trees changed about the pond. Not yet the oaks.

September 30, 1854

The conventional acorn of art is of course of no particular species, but the artist might find it worth his while to study Nature’s varieties again.

September 29, 1854

When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have said attaches to them, they are so simple and remote. Their knowledge is felt to be all terrestrial and to concern the earth alone. It suggests that the same is the case with every object, however familiar; our so-called knowledge of it is equally vulgar and remote.

One might say that all views through a telescope or microscope were purely visionary, for it is only by his eye and not by any other sense - not by his whole man - that the beholder is there where he is presumed to be. It is a disruptive mode of viewing as far as the beholder is concerned.

September 28, 1854

R. W. E.’s pines are parti-colored, preparing to fall, some of them. The sassafras trees on the hill are now wholly a bright orange scarlet as seen from my window, and the small ones elsewhere are also changed. Sweet-briar hips ripe.

As I complain that the voyager to arctic regions, in his description of the scenery, does not enough remind the reader directly or indirectly of the peculiar dreariness of the scene or of the perpetual twilight of the arctic night, so he whose theme is moonlight will find it difficult to illustrate it with the light of the moon alone.

September 21, 1860

Hard rain last night. About one and seven eighths inches fallen since yesterday morning, and river rising again.

See, at Reynolds’s, Hungarian millet raised by Everett. It is smaller and more purple than what is commonly raised here.

P. M. - To Easterbrooks Country.

The fever-bush berries have begun some time, - say one week; are not yet in prime. Taste almost exactly like lemon-peel. But few bushes bear any.

The bayberries are perhaps ripe, but not so light a gray and so rough, or wrinkled, as they will be.

The pods of the broom are nearly half of them open. I perceive that one, just ready to open, opens with a slight spring on being touched, and the pods at once twist and curl a little. I suspect that such seeds as these, which the winds do not transport, will turn out to be more sought after by birds, etc., and so transported by them than those lighter ones which are furnished with a pappus and are accordingly transported by the wind; i. e., that those which the wind takes are less generally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds.

Muhlenbergia Mexicana by wall between E. Hosmer and Simon Brown, some time. Some large thorn bushes quite bare.

September 18, 1860

This is a beautiful day, warm but not too warm, a harvest day (I am going down the railroad causeway), the first unquestionable and conspicuous autumnal day, when the willows and button-bushes are a yellowed bower in parallel lines along the swollen and shining stream. The first autumnal tints (of red maples) are now generally noticed. The shrilling of the alder locust fills the air. A brightness as of spring is reflected from the green shorn fields. Both sky and earth are bright. The first clear blue and shining white (of clouds). Cornstalk-tops are stacked about the fields; potatoes are being dug; smokes are seen in the horizon. It is the season of agricultural fairs. If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.

September 17, 1860

6:30 A. M. - River thirty-four and an eighth above summer level, or fallen about four inches since evening of 15th. It flows now (a sunk bottle) one hundred feet in two minutes at boat’s place, there being no wind.

P. M. - Up river.

Pontederia seeds falling.

See a flock of eight or ten wood ducks on the Grindstone Meadow, with glass, some twenty-five rods off, - several drakes very handsome. They utter a creaking scream as they sail there, - being alarmed, - from time to time, shrill and loud, very unlike the black duck. At last one sails off, calling the others by a short creaking note.