15 September 1851 – 21 September 1851

Ice in the pail under the pump, and quite a frost. Commenced perambulating the town bounds. At 7.30 A. M. rode in company with —— and Mr. —— to the bound between Acton and Concord near Paul Dudley’s. Mr. —— told a story of his wife walking in the fields somewhere, and, to keep the rain off, throwing her gown over her head and holding it in her mouth, and so being poisoned about her mouth from the skirts of her dress having come in contact with poisonous plants. At Dudley’s, which house is handsomely situated, with five large elms in front, we met the selectmen of Acton, —— —— and —— ——. Here were five of us. It appeared that we weighed, — —— I think about 160, —— 155, —— about 140, —— 130, myself 127. —— described the wall about or at Forest Hills Cemetery in Roxbury as being made of stones upon which they were careful to preserve the moss, so that it cannot be distinguished from a very old wall. Found one intermediate bound-stone near the powder-mill drying-house on the bank of the river. The workmen there wore shoes without iron tacks. He said that the kernel-house was the most dangerous, the drying-house next, the press-house next. One of the powder-mill buildings in Concord? The potato vines and the beans which were still green are now blackened and flattened by the frost.

Met the selectmen of Sudbury, and . I trust that towns will remember that they are supposed to be fairly represented by their select men. From the specimen which Acton sent, I should judge that the inhabitants of that town were made up of a mixture of quiet, respectable, and even gentlemanly farmer people, well to do in the world, with a rather boisterous, coarse, and a little self-willed class; that the inhabitants of Sudbury are farmers almost exclu- sively, exceedingly rough and countrified and more illiterate than usual, very tenacious of their rights and dignities and difficult to deal with; that the inhabitants of Lincoln yield sooner than usual to the influence of the rising generation, and are a mixture of rather sim- ple but clever with a well-informed and trustworthy people; that the inhabitants of Bedford are mechanics, who aspire to keep up with the age, with some of the polish of society, mingled with substantial and rather intelligent farmers. of Sudbury thinks the river would be still lower now if it were not for the water in the reservoir pond in Hopkinton running into it.

Perambulated the Lincoln line. Was it the small rough sunflower which I saw this morning at the brook near Lee’s Bridge ?? Saw at James Baker’s a buttonwood tree with a swarm of bees now three years In it, but honey and all inaccessible. John W. Farrar tells of sugar maples behind Miles’s in the Corner. Did I see privet in the swamp at the Bedford stone near Giles’s house ? Swamp all dry now; could not wash my hands.

Perambulated Bedford line.

Perambulated Carlisle line. Large-flowered bidens, or beggar-ticks, or bur-mari- gold, now abundant by riverside. Found the bound- stones on Carlisle by the river all or mostly tipped over by the ice and water, like the pitch pines about Walden Pond. Grapes very abundant along that line. The soapwort gentian now. In an old pasture, now grown up to birches and other trees, followed the cow-paths to the old apple trees. Mr. Isaiah Green of Carlisle, who lives nearest to the Kibbe Place, can remember when there were three or four houses around him (he is nearly eighty years old ~,4 and has always lived there and was born there); now he is quite retired, and the nearest road is scarcely used at all. He spoke of one old field, now grown up, which [we] were going through, as the “ hog-pasture,”’ formerly. He found the meadows so dry that it was thought to be a good time to burn out the moss.

3 p. mM. —To Cliffs via Bear Hill. As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all the week, and dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus, its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed. My Pegasus has lost his wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life. The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him perambulate the bounds of Imagination’s provinces, the realms of faery, and not the insignificant boundaries of towns. The excursions of the imagina- tion are so boundless, the limits of towns are so petty. I scare up the great bittern in meadow by the Hey- wood Brook near the ivy. He rises buoyantly as he flies against the wind, and sweeps south over the willow with outstretched neck, surveying. The ivy here is reddened. The dogwood, or poison sumach, by Hubbard’s meadow is also turned reddish. Here are late buttercups and dwarf tree-primroses still. Methinks there are not many goldenrods this year. The river is remarkably low. There is a rod wide of bare shore beneath the Cliff Hill. Last week was the warmest perhaps in the year. On Monday of the present week water was frozen in a pail under the pump. Yet to-day I hear the locust sing as in August. ‘This week we have had most glorious autumnal weather, — cool and cloudless, bright days, filled with the fragrance of ripe grapes, preceded by frosty mornings. All tender herbs are flat in gardens and meadows. ‘The cranberries, too, are touched. To-day it is warmer and hazier, and there is, no doubt, some smoke in the air, from the burning of the turf and moss in low lands, where the smoke, seen at sunset, looks like a rising fog. I fear that the autumnal tints will not be brilliant this season, the frosts have commenced so early. Butter-and-eggs on Fair Haven. The cleared plateau beneath the Cliff, now covered with sprouts, shows red, green, and yellow tints, like a rich rug. I see ducks or teal flying silent, swift, and straight, the wild creatures. White pines on Fair Haven Hill begin to look parti-colored with the falling leaves, but not at a distance.

Sunday. It is remarkably dry weather. The neighbors’ wells are failing. The watering-places for cattle in pastures, though they have been freshly scooped out, are dry. People have to go far for water to drink, and then drink it warm. The river is so low that rocks which are rarely seen show their black heads in mid-channel. I saw one which a year or two ago upset a boat and drowned a girl. You see the nests of the bream on the dry shore. I perceive that many of the leaves of shrub oaks and other bushes have been killed by the severe frosts of last week, before they have got ripe and acquired the tints of autumn, and they now look as [if] a fire had run through them, dry and crispy and brown. So far from the frost painting them, it has withered them. I notice new cabins of the muskrats in solitary swamps. The chestnut trees have suffered severely from the drought; already their leaves look withered. Moonlight is peculiarly favorable to reflection. It is a cold and dewy light in which the vapors of the day are condensed, and though the air is obscured by darkness, it is more clear. Lunacy must be a cold excitement, not such insanity as a torrid sun on the brain would pro- duce. In Rees’s Cyclopedia it is said, “The light of the moon, condensed by the best mirrors, pelea no sensible heat upon the thermometer.” I see some cows on the new Wheeler’s Meadow, which a man is trying to drive to certain green parts of the meadow next to the river to feed, the hill being dried up, but they seem disinclined and not to like the coarse grass there, though it is green. And now one cow is steering for the edge of the hill, where is some green- ness. I suppose that herds are attracted by a distant greenness, though it may be a mile or more off. I doubt if a man can drive his cows to that part of their pasture where is the best feed for them, so soon as they will find it for themselves. The man tries in vain to drive them to the best part of the meadow. As soon as he is gone, they seek their own parts. The light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very inferior in quantity and intensity to that of the sun.! The Cyclopedia says that Dr. Hooke has calculated that “it would require 104,368 full moons to give a light and heat equal to that of the sun at noon,” and Dr. Smith says, “The light of the full moon is but equal to a 90,900th part of the common light of the day, when the sun is hidden by a cloud.” ? But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. “The moon gravitates towards the earth, and the earth reciprocally towards the moon.” This statement of the astronomer would be bald and meaningless, if it were not in fact a symbolical expression of the value of all lunar influence on man. Even the astronomer admits that “the notion of the moon’s influence on ter- restrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean,” but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him over- flows its shores and bathes the dry land?! Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former some- times combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages, when all Broad Street is sub- merged, and incalculable damage is done to the ordi- nary shipping of the mind ? Burritt in his “Geography of the Heavens” says, “The quantity of light which we derive from the Moon when full, is at least three hundred thousand times less than that of the Sun.” This is M. Bouguer’s inference as stated by Laplace. Professor Leslie makes it one hundred and fifty thousand times less, older astronomers less still. Rees says: “It is remarkable, that the moon during the week in which she is full in harvest, rises sooner after sun-setting than she does in any other full moon week inthe year. By doing so she affords an immediate sup- ply of light after sunset, which is very beneficial to the farmers for reaping and gathering in the fruits of the earth; and therefore they distinguish this full moon from all the others in the year, by calling it the harvest moon.” Howitt places the Harvest Moon in August. The retirement in which Green has lived for nearly eighty years in Carlisle is a retirement very different from and much greater than that in which the pioneer dwells at the West; for the latter dwells within sound of the surf of those billows of migration which are break- ing on the shores around him, or near him, of the West, but those billows have long since swept over the spot which Green inhabits, and left him in the calm sea. There is somewhat exceedingly pathetic to think of in such a life as he must have lived, — with no more to re- deem it, — such a life as an average Carlisle man may be supposed to live drawn out to eighty years. And he has died, perchance, and there is nothing but the mark of his cider-mill left. Here was the cider-mill, and there the orchard, and there the hog-pasture; and so men lived, and ate, and drank, and passed away, — like ver- min. Their long life was mere duration. As respectable is the life of the woodchucks, which perpetuate their race in the orchard still. ‘That is the life of these select- men (!) spun out. They will be forgotten in a few years, even by such as themselves, like vermin. They will be known only like Kibbe, who is said to have been a large man who weighed two hundred and fifty, who had five or six heavy daughters who rode to Concord meeting- house on horseback, taking turns, — they were so heavy that only one could ride at once. What, then, would redeem such a life? We only know that they ate, and drank, and built barns, and died and were buried, and still, perchance, their tombstones cumber the ground.’ But if I could know that there was ever entertained over their cellar-hole some divine thought, which came as a messenger of the gods, that he who resided here acted once in his life from a noble impulse, rising superior to his grovelling and penurious life, if only a single verse of poetry or of poetic prose had ever been written or spoken or conceived here beyond a doubt, I should not think it in vain that man had lived here. It would to some extent be true then that God had lived here. That all his life he lived only as a farmer — as the most valu- able stock only on a farm — and in no moments as a man!