2 June 1851 – 8 June 1851

Lectured in Worcester last Saturday, and walked to As- or Hasnebumskit Hill in Paxton the next day. Said to be the highest land in Worcester County except Wachusett. Met Mr. Blake, Brown, Chamberlin, Hinsdale, Miss Butman (?), Wyman, Conant. Returned to Boston yesterday. Conversed with John Downes, who is connected with the Coast Survey, is printing tables for astronomical, geodesic, and other uses. He tells me that he once saw the common sucker in numbers piling up stones as big as his fist (like the piles which I have seen), taking them up or moving them with their mouths. Dr. Harris suggests that the mountain cranberry which I saw at Ktaadn was the Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa, cow-berry, because it was edible and not the Uva-Ursi, or bear-berry, which we have in Concord. Saw the Uvularia perfoliata, perfoliate bellwort, in Worcester near the hill; an abundance of mountain laurel on the hills, now budded to blossom and the fresh lighter growth contrasting with the dark green; an abundance of very large checkerberries, or partridge-berries, as Bigelow calls them, on Hasnebumskit. Sugar maples about there. A very extensive view, but the western view not so much wilder as I expected. See Barre, about fifteen miles off, and Rutland, etc., etc. Not so much forest as in our neighborhood; high, swelling hills, but less shade for the walker. The hills are green, the soil springier; and it is written that water is more easily obtained on the hill than in the valleys. Saw a Scotch fir, the pine so valued for tar and naval uses in the north of Europe. Mr. Chamberlin told me that there was no corporation in Worcester except the banks (which I suspect may not be literally true), and hence their freedom and independence. I think it likely there is a gas company to light the streets at least. John Mactaggart finds the ice thickest not in the largest lakes in Canada, nor in the smallest, where the surrounding forests melt it. He says that the surveyor of the boundary-line between England and United States on the Columbia River saw pine trees which would require sixteen feet in the blade to a cross-cut saw to do anything with them. I examined to-day a large swamp white oak in Hubbard’s meadow, which was blown down by the same storm which destroyed the lighthouse. At five feet from the ground it was nine and three fourths feet in circumference; the first branch at eleven and a half feet from ground; and it held its size up to twenty-three feet from the ground. Its whole height, measured on the ground, was eighty feet, and its breadth about sixty-six feet. The roots on one side were turned up with the soil on them, making an object very conspicuous a great distance off, the highest root being eighteen feet from the ground and fourteen feet above centre of trunk. The roots, which were small and thickly interlaced, were from three to nine inches beneath the surface (in other trees I saw them level with the surface) and thence extended fifteen to eighteen inches in depth (i. e. to this depth they occupied the ground). They were broken off at about eleven feet from the centre of the trunk and were there on an average one inch in diameter, the largest being three inches in diameter. The longest root was broken off at twenty feet from the centre, and was there three quarters of an inch in diameter. The tree was rotten within. The lower side of the soil (what was originally the lower), which clothed the roots for nine feet from the centre of the tree, was white and clayey to appearance, and a sparrow was sitting on three eggs within the mass. Directly under where the massive trunk had stood, and within a foot of the surface, you could apparently strike in a spade and meet with no obstruction to a free cultivation. There was no taproot to be seen. The roots were encircled with dark, nubby rings. The tree, which still had a portion of its roots in the ground and held to them by a sliver on the leeward side, was alive and had leaved out, though on many branches the leaves were shrivelled again. Quercus bicolor of Bigelow, Q. Prinus discolor Mx. f. [Illustration] I observed the grass waving to-day for the first time,—the swift Camilla on it. It might have been noticed before. You might have seen it now for a week past on grain-fields. Clover has blossomed. I noticed the indigo-weed a week or two ago pushing up like asparagus. Methinks it must be the small andromeda (?), that dull red mass of leaves in the swamp, mixed perchance with the rhodora, with its dry fruitlike appendages, as well as the Andromeda paniculata, else called ligustrina, and the clethra. It was the golden senecio (Senecio aureus) which I plucked a week ago in a meadow in Wayland. The earliest, methinks, of the aster and autumnal-looking yellow flowers. Its bruised stems enchanted me with their indescribable sweet odor, like I cannot think what. The Phaseolus vulgaris includes several kinds of bush beans, of which those I raised were one.

Gathered last night the strong, rank, penetrating-scented angelica. Under the head of the Cicuta maculata, or American hemlock,—“It is a rule sanctioned by the observations of medical botanists, that umbelliferous plants, which grow in or about the water, are of a poisonous nature.” He does not say that the angelica is poisonous, but I suppose that it is. It has such a rank, offensive, and killing odor as makes me think of the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron. It did not leave my hands, which had carried it, long after I had washed them. A strong, penetrating, lasting, and sickening odor. Gathered to-night the Cicuta maculata, American hemlock, the veins of the leaflets ending in the notches and the root fasciculated. Bigelow says, “The leaves of the Solidago odora have a delightfully fragrant odor, partaking of that of anise and sassafras, but different from either.”

My practicalness is not to be trusted to the last. To be sure, I go upon my legs for the most part, but, being hard-pushed and dogged by a superficial common sense which is bound to near objects by beaten paths, I am off the handle, as the phrase is,—I begin to be transcendental and show where my heart is. I am like those guinea-fowl which Charles Darwin saw at the Cape de Verd Islands. He says, “They avoided us like partridges on a rainy day in September, running with their heads cocked up; and if pursued, they readily took to the wing.” Keep your distance, do not infringe on the interval between us, and I will pick up lime and lay real terrestrial eggs for you, and let you know by cackling when I have done it. When I have been asked to speak at a temperance meeting, my answer has been, “I am too transcendental to serve you in your way.” They would fain confine me to the rum-sellers and rum-drinkers, of whom I am not one, and whom I know little about. It is a certain faeryland where we live. You may walk out in any direction over the earth’s surface, lifting your horizon, and everywhere your path, climbing the convexity of the globe, leads you between heaven and earth, not away from the light of the sun and stars and the habitations of men. I wonder that I ever get five miles on my way, the walk is so crowded with events and phenomena. How many questions there are which I have not put to the inhabitants! But how far can you carry your practicalness? How far does your knowledge really extend? When I have read in deeds only a hundred years old the words “to enjoy and possess, he and his assigns, forever,” I have seen how short-sighted is the sense which conducts from day to day. When I read the epitaphs of those who died a century ago, they seem deader even than they expected. A day seems proportionally a long part of your “forever and a day.” There are few so temperate and chaste that they can afford to remind us even at table that they have a palate and a stomach. We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten. Perchance there are revolutions which create an interval impassable to the memory. With reference to the near past, we all occupy the region of common sense, but in the prospect of the future we are, by instinct, transcendentalists. We affirm that all things are possible, but only these things have been to our knowledge. I do not even infer the future from what I know of the past. I am hardly better acquainted with the past than with the future. What is new to the individual may be familiar to the experience of his race. It must be rare indeed that the experience of the individual transcends that of his race. It will be perceived that there are two kinds of change,—that of the race, and that of the individual within the limits of the former.

In F. A. Michaux’s, i. e. the younger Michaux’s, “Voyage à l’ouest des Monts Alléghanys, 1802,” printed at Paris, 1808:— He says the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the point of union (réunion, meeting) and the common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.” The current of the Ohio is so swift in the spring that it is not necessary to row. Indeed rowing would do more harm than good, since it would tend to turn the ark out of the current on to some isle or sand-bar, where it would be entangled amid floating trees. This has determined the form of the bateaux, which are not the best calculated for swiftness but to obey the current. They are from fifteen to fifty feet long by ten to twelve and fifteen, with square ends, and roof of boards like a house at one end. The sides are about four and a half feet above the water. “I was alone on the shore of the Monongahela, when I perceived, for the first time, in the distance, five or six of these bateaux which were descending this river. I could not conceive what those great square boxes were, which, abandoned to the current, presented alternately their ends, their sides, and even (or also (?), et même) their angles. As they came nearer, I heard a confused noise but without distinguishing anything, on account of the elevation of the sides. It was only on ascending the bank of the river that I perceived, in these bateaux, many families carrying with them their horses, cows, poultry, dismounted carts (charrettes), plows, harnesses, beds, agricultural implements, in short all that constitute the movables of a household (ménage) and the carrying on (exploitation) of a farm.” But he was obliged to paddle his log canoe “sans cesse” because of the sluggishness of the current of the Ohio in April, 1802. A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his State was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees which were burnt, and sometimes people took land to clear on condition that they should have what potash they could make. After travelling more than three thousand miles in North America, he says that no part is to be compared for the “force végétative des forêts” to the region of the Ohio between Wheeling and Marietta. Thirty-six miles above the last place he measured a plane tree on the bank of the Ohio which, at four feet from the ground, was forty-seven in circumference. It is true it was “renflé d’une manière prodigieuse.” Tulip and plane trees, his father had said, attained the greatest diameter of North American trees. Ginseng was then the only “territorial” production of Kentucky which would pay the expense of transportation by land to Philadelphia. They collected it from spring to the first frosts. Even hunters carried for this purpose, beside their guns, a bag and a little “pioche.” From twenty-five to thirty “milliers pesant” were then transported annually, and this commerce was on the increase. Some transported it themselves from Kentucky to China, i. e. without selling it [to] the merchants of the seaboard. Traders in Kentucky gave twenty to twenty-four “sous” the pound for it. They habituated their wild hogs to return to the house from time to time by distributing corn for them once or twice a week. So I read that in Buenos Ayres they collect the horses into the corral twice a week to keep them tame in a degree.