10 November 1851 – 16 November 1851

This morning the ground is once more whit- ened with snow, but it will apparently be gone in an hour or two. I live where the Pinus rigida grows, with its firm cones, almost as hard as iron, armed with re- curved spines.

When, pointing toward Cap Tourmente, I asked the name of a habitant whom we met, he haz- arded[?] the name of Belange, or fair angel, — or per- chance he referred to some other sort. At any rate, my interrogations of this nature gave vent to such a musi- cal catalogue of sweet names —though I did not know which one to fix on — that I continued to put them to every habitant 1 met, if only for this pleasure. Living much out-of-doors in the air, in the sun and wind, will, no doubt, produce a certain roughness of character, will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer sensibilities of a man’s nature, as on his face and hands, or those parts of his body which are exposed to the weather; as staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness, of skin, accompanied by an increased sensi- bility to certain impressions. And no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influ- ences important to our intellectual growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less. As too much manual labor callouses the hand and deprives it of the exquisiteness of the touch. But then methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, etc., thought to experience.’ 2p. m.—A bright, but cold day, finger-cold. One must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J. P. Brown’s field near Jenny Dugan’s. I am glad of the shelter of the thick pine wood on the Mar!- borough road, on the plain. The roar of the wind over the pines sounds like the surf on countless beaches, an endless shore; and at intervals it sounds like a gong re- sounding through halls and entries, 2. ¢. there is a cer- tain resounding woodiness in the tone. How the wind roars among the shrouds of the wood! The sky looks mild and fair enough from this shelter. Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light. The lately dark woods are open and light; the sun shines in upon the stems of trees which it has not shone on since spring. Around the edges of ponds the weeds are dead, and there, too, the light penetrates. ‘The atmosphere is less moist and gross, and light is univer- sally dispersed. We are greatly indebted to these transi- tion seasons or states of the atmosphere, which show us thus phenomena which belong not to the summer or the winter of any climate. The brilliancy of the autumn is wonderful, this flashing brilliancy, as if the atmosphere were phosphoric. When I have been confined to my chamber for the greater part of several days by some employment, or perchance by the ague, till I felt weary and house-worn, I have been conscious of a certain softness to which I am otherwise and commonly a stranger, in which the gates were loosened to some emotions; and if I were to be- come a confirmed invalid, I see how some sympathy with mankind and society might spring up. Yet what is my softness good for, even to tears. It is not I, but na- ture in me. I laughed at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic story. I was no more affected in spirit than I frequently am, methinks. The tears were merely a phenomenon of the bowels, and I felt that that expression of my sympathy, so unusual with me, was something mean, and such as I should be ashamed to have the subject of it understand. I had a cold in my head withal, about those days. I found that I had some bowels, but then it was because my bowels were out of order. The fall of the year is over, and now let us see if we shall have any Indian summer. White Pond is prepared for winter. Now that most other trees have lost their leaves, the evergreens are more conspicuous about its shores and on its capes. The view of the southern horizon from the lane this side still attracts me, but not so much as before I had explored those Wayland hills, which look so much fairer, perhaps, than they are. To-day you may write a chapter on the advantages of travelling, and to-morrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not travelling. The horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and mountains in it, and another, I fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has. ‘That blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. But only our horizon is moved thus further off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still. “Says I to myself” should be the motto of my jour- nal. It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thought. Things must lie a little remote to be described.

Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersets in the air, — and so come down upon your head at last. Antzeus-like, be not long absent from the ground. Those sentences are good and well dis- charged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, — a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma. Let there be as many distinct plants as the soil and the light can sustain. Take as many bounds in a day as possible. Sentences uttered with your back to the wall. Those are the admirable bounds when the performer has lately touched the spring- board. A good bound into the air from the air [sic] is a good and wholesome experience, but what shall we say to a man’s leaping off precipices in the attempt to fly? He comes down like lead. In the meanwhile, you have got your feet planted upon the rock, with the rock also at your back, and, as in the case of King James and Roderick Dhu, can say, — “Come one, come all! this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.” Such, uttered or not, is the strength of your sentence. Sentences in which there is no strain. A fluttering and inconstant and quasi inspiration, and ever memorable Icarian fall, in which your helpless wings are expanded merely by your swift descent into the pelagos beneath. C. is one who will not stoop to rise (to change the sub- ject). He wants something for which he will not pay the going price. He will only learn slowly by failure, — not a noble, but disgraceful, failure.! This is not a noble method of learning, to be educated by inevitable suffering, like De Quincey, for instance. Better dive like a musk- rat into the mud, and pile up a few weeds to sit on during the floods, a foundation of your own laying, a house of your own building, however cold and cheerless. Methinks the hawk that soars so loftily and circles so steadily and apparently without effort has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a reptile in a former state of existence. You must creep before you can run; you must run before you can fly. Better one effective bound upward with elastic limbs from the valley than a jumping from the mountain-tops in the attempt to fly. The observatories are not built high but deep; the foundation is equal to the superstructure. It is more important to a distinct vision that it be steady than that it be from an elevated point of view. Walking through Ebby Hubbard’s wood this after- noon, with Minott, who was actually taking a walk for amusement and exercise, he said, on seeing some white pines blown down, that you might know that ground had been cultivated, by the trees being torn up so, for otherwise they would have rooted themselves more strongly. Saw some very handsome canoe birches there, the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high. ‘The large ones have a reddish cast, perhaps from some small lichen. Their fringes and curls give them an agreeable appearance. Observed a peculiarity in some white oaks. Though they had a firm and close bark near the ground, the bark was very coarse and scaly, in loose flakes, above. Much coarser than the swamp white oak. Minott has a story for every wood- land path. He has hunted in them all. Where we walked last, he had once caught a partridge by the wing! A still, cold night. The light of the rising moon in the east. Moonrise is a faint sunrise. And what shall we name the faint aurora that precedes the moonrise? The ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. There are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. They are heard, then, till the ground freezes. To-day I heard for the first time this season the crackling, vibrating sound which resounds from thin ice when a stone is cast upon it. So far have we got toward winter. It is doubtful if they who have not pulled their turnips will have a chance to get them. It is not of much use to drive the cows to pasture. I can fancy that I hear the booming of ice in the ponds. I hearno sound of any bird now at night, but sometimes some creature stirring, — a rabbit, or skunk, or fox, — betrayed now by the dry leaves which lie so thick and light. The openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight; they are nearly as bright as the open field. It is worth the while always to go to the waterside when there is but little light in the heavens and see the heavens and the stars reflected. There is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion. There is no fog now o’ nights. I thought to-night that I saw glow-worms in the grass, on the side of the hill; was almost certain of it, and tried to lay my hand on them, but found it was the moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine frost crystals on the withered grass, and they were so fine that they went and came like glow-worms. It had pre- cisely the effect of twinkling glow-worms. They gleamed just long enough for glow-worms.

To Fair Haven Hill. A coldand dark afternoon, thesun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety. Such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart. A day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. You can hardly ruck up any skin on Nature’s bones. The sap is down; she won’t peel. Now is the © time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leaving the tough bark on, — yokes for your own neck. Finding yourself yoked to Matter and to Time. Truly a hard day, hard times these! Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground, with your hands in your pockets. Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires? And will not your green hickory and white oak burn clear in this frosty air? Now is not your manhood taxed by the great Assessor? ‘Taxed for having a soul, a ratable soul. A day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground! What do the thoughts find to live on? What avails you now the fire you stole from heaven? Does not each thought become a vulture to gnaw your vitals? No Indian summer have we had this November. I see but few traces of the per- ennial spring. Now is there nothing, not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture, nothing but the echo of your steps over the frozen ground, no voice of birds nor frogs. You are dry as a farrow cow. The earth will not admit a spade. All fields lie fallow. Shall not your mind? True, the freezing ground is being prepared for immeasurable snows, but there are brave thoughts within you that shall remain to rustle the win- ter through like white oak leaves upon your boughs, or like scrub oaks that remind the traveller of a fire upon the hillsides; or evergreen thoughts, cold even in mid- summer, by their nature shall contrast the more fairly with the snow. Some warm springs shall still tinkle and fume, and send their column of vapor to the skies. The walker now fares like cows in the pastures, where is no grass but hay; he gets nothing but an appetite. If we must return to hay, pray let us have that which has been stored in barns, which has not lost its sweetness. The poet needs to have more stomachs than the cow, for for him no fodder is stored in barns. He relies upon his instinct, which teaches him to paw away the snow to come at the withered grass. Methinks man came very near being made a dormant creature, just as some of these animals. The ground squirrel, for instance, which lays up vast stores, is yet found to be half dormant, if you dig him out. Now for the oily nuts of thought which you have stored up. The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. Perhaps this 1s owing, not only to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer, but to the absence of the leaves! They are many miles nearer for it. A little mistiness occasioned by warmth would set them further off and make them fainter. I see snow on the Peterboro hills, reflecting the sun. It is pleasant thus to look from afar into winter. We look at a condition which we have not reached. Not- withstanding the poverty of the immediate landscape, in the horizon it is simplicity and grandeur. I look into valleys white with snow and now lit up by the sun, while all this country is in shade. This accounts for the cold northwest wind. | There is a great gap in the mountain range just south of the two Peterboro hills. Methinks I have been through it, and that a road runs there. At any rate, humble as these mountains are compared with some, yet at this distance I am convinced that they answer the purpose of Andes; and, seen in the horizon, I know of nothing more grand and stupendous than this great mountain gate or pass, a great cleft or sinus in the blue banks, as in a dark evening cloud, fit portal to lead from one country, from one quarter of the earth, to another, where the children of the Israelites may file through. Little does the New Hampshire farmer who drives over that road realize through what a sublime gap he is passing. You would almost as soon think of a road to wind through and over a dark evening cloud. This prospect of the mountains from our low hills is what I would rather have than pastures on the mountain- sides such as my neighbors own, aye, than townships at their base. Instead that I drive my cattle up in May, I turn my eyes that way. My eyes pasture there, and straightway the yearling thoughts come back. The grass they feed on never withers, for though they are not evergreen, they ’re ever blue to me. For though not evergreen to you, to me they ’re ever blue. I do not fear my thoughts will die, For never yet it was so dry As to scorch the azure of the sky. It knows no withering and no drought, Though all eyes crop, it ne’er gives out. My eyes my flocks are; Mountains my crops are. I do not fear my flocks will stray, For they were made to roam the day, For they can wander with the latest light, Yet be at home at night. Just spent a couple of hours (eight to ten) with Miss Mary Emerson at Holbrook’s. The wittiest and most vivacious woman that I know, certainly that woman among my acquaintance whom it is most profitable to meet, the least frivolous, who will most surely provoke to good conversation and the expression of what is in you. She is singular, among women at least, in being really and perseveringly interested to know what thinkers think. She relates herself surely to the intellectual where she goes. It is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiar- ity that she, more surely than any other woman, gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality, and is not prevented by any intellectu- ality in it, as women commonly are. In short, she is a genius, as woman seldom is, reminding you less often of her sex than any woman whom I know. In that sense she is capable of a masculine appreciation of poetry and philosophy. I never talked with any other woman who I thought accompanied me so far in describing a poetic experience. Miss Fuller is the only woman I think of in this connection, and of her rather from her fame than from any knowledge of her. Miss Emerson expressed to-night a singular want of respect for her own sex, say- ing that they were frivolous almost without exception, that woman was the weaker vessel, etc.; that into what- ever family she might go, she depended more upon the “clown” for society than upon the lady of the house. Men are more likely to have opinions of their own. The cattle-train came down last night from Vermont with snow nearly a foot thick upon it. It is as if, in the fall of the year, a swift traveller should come out of the north with snow upon his coat. So it snows. Such, some years, may be our first snow. Just in proportion to the outward poverty is the in- ward wealth. In cold weather fire burns with a clearer flame.

Friday. Surveying the Ministerial Lot in the southwestern part of the town. Unexpectedly find Hey- wood’s Pond frozen over thinly, it being shallow and coldly placed. In the evening went to a party. It is a bad place to go to, — thirty or forty persons, mostly young women, in a small room, warm and noisy. Was introduced to two young women. The first one was as lively and loquacious as a chickadee; had been accustomed to the society of watering-places, and therefore could get no refreshment out of such a dry fellow as I. The other was said to be pretty-looking, but I rarely look people in their faces, and, moreover, I could not hear what she said, there was such a clacking, — could only see the motion of her lips when I looked that way. I could imagine better places for conversation, where there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you, and less than forty talking at once. Why, this afternoon, even, I did better. There was old Mr. Joseph Hosmer and I ate our luncheon of cracker and cheese together in the woods. I heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me. And then he talked out of such a glorious re- pose, taking a leisurely bite at the cracker and cheese between his words; and so some of him was communi- cated to me, and some of me to him, I trust. These parties, I think, are a part of the machinery of modern society, that young people may be brought to- gether to form marriage connections. What is the use of going to see people whom yet you never see, and who never see you? I begin to suspect that it is not necessary that we should see one another. Some of my friends make singular blunders. They go out of their way to talk with certain young women of whom they think, or have heard, that they are pretty, and take pains to introduce me to them. That may bea reason why they should look at them, but it is not a rea- son why they should talk with them. I confess that Iam lacking a sense, perchance, in this respect, and I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman half an hour simply because she has regular features. ‘The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not there. 1 prefer to talk with the more staid and settled, settled for life, in every sense. I met a man yesterday afternoon in the road who be- haved as if he was deaf, and I talked with him in the cold in a loud tone for fifteen minutes, but that uncertainty about his ears, and the necessity I felt to talk loudly, took off the fine edge of what I had to say and prevented my saying anything satisfactory. It is bad enough when your neighbor does not understarfd you, but if there is any uncertainty as to whether he hears you, so that you are obliged to become your own auditor, you are so much the poorer speaker, and so there is a double failure.

Here is a rainy day, which keeps me in the house. Asked Therien this afternoon if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord!” says he, “‘a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man you work with is in- clined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.”’* I am pleased to read in Stoever’s Life of Linnzeus (Trapp’s translation) that his father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name and borrowed that of Linnzus (Linden-tree-man) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his native place, — “a custom,” he says, “not unfrequent in Sweden, to take fresh appellations from natural objects.”” What more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it, and transmit to his posterity, a new patro- nymic? Such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primi- tive times when men did, indeed, acquire a name, as memorable and distinct as their characters. It is refresh- ing to get to a man whom you will not be satisfied to call John’s son or Johnson’s son, but a new name applicable to himself alone, he being the first of his kind. We may say there have been but so many men as there are sur- names, and of all the John-Smiths there has been but one true John Smith, and he of course is dead. Get yourself therefore a name, and better a nickname than none at all. There was one enterprising boy came to school to me whose name was “ Buster,” and an honor- able name it was. He was the only boy in the school, to my knowledge, who was named.’ * (Excursions, pp. 236, 237; Riv. 290. See also Journal, vol. ii, p. 407] What shall we say of the comparative intellectual vigor of the ancients and moderns, when we read of Theophrastus, the father of botany, that he composed more than two hundred treatises in the third century before Christ and the seventeenth before printing, about twenty of which remain, and that these fill six volumes in folio printed at Venice? Among the last are two works on natural history and the generation of plants. What a stimulus to a literary man to read his works! They were opera, not an essay or two, which you can carry between your thumb and finger. Dioscorides (according to Stoever), who lived in the first century after Christ, was the first to inquire into the medicinal properties of plants, “the literary father of the materia medica.” His work remains. And next comes Pliny the Elder, and “‘by his own avowal (?), his natural history is a compilation from about twenty- five hundred (?) different authors.”’ Conrad Gesner, of the Sixteenth Century, the first botanist of note among the moderns; also a naturalist generally. In this century botany first “became a regular academical study.” I think it would be a good discipline for Channing, who writes poetry in a sublimo-slipshod style, to write Latin, for then he would be compelled to say something always, and frequently have recourse to his grammar and dictionary. Methinks that what a man might write in a dead language could be more surely translated into good sense in his own language, than his own language could be translated into good Latin, or the dead lan- guage.

Sunday. It is remarkable that the highest intellectual mood which the world tolerates is the per- ception of the truth of the most ancient revelations, now in some respects out of date; but any direct revelation, any original thoughts, it hates like virtue. The fathers and the mothers of the town would rather hear the young man or young woman at their tables express reverence for some old statement of the truth than utter a direct revelation themselves. They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families, — damn them! So far as thinking is concerned, surely original thinking is the divinest thing. Rather we should -reverently watch for the least motions, the least scintillations, of thought in this sluggish world, and men should run to and fro on the occasion more than at an earthquake. We check and repress the divinity that stirs within us, to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us. I go to see many a good man or good woman, so called, and utter freely that thought which alone it was given to me to utter; but there was a man who lived a long, long time ago, and his name was Moses, and another whose name was Christ, and if your thought does not, or does not appear to, coincide with what they said, the good man or the good woman has no ears to hear you. They think they love God! It is only his old clothes, of which they make scarecrows for the children. Where will they come nearer to God than in those very children? A man lately preached here against the abuse of the Sabbath and recommended to walk in the fields and dance on that [day], — good advice enough, which may take effect after awhile. But with the mass of men the reason is convinced long before the life is. They may see the Church and the Sabbath to be false, but nothing else to be true. One woman in the neighborhood says, “ No- body can hear Mr. preach, — hear him through, — without seeing that he is a good man.” “ Well, is there any truth in what he says?” asks another. “Oh, yes, it’s true enough, but then it won’t do; you know it won’t do. Now there ’s our George, he’s got the whole of it; and when I say, ‘Come, George, put on your things and go along to meeting,’ he says, ‘No, Mother, I ’m going out into the fields.’ It won’t do.’’ The fact is, this woman has not character and religion enough to exert a con- trolling influence over her children by her example, and knows of no such police as the Church and the minister. If it were not for death and funerals, I think the insti- tution of the Church would not stand longer. The ne- cessity that men be decently buried — our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and children (notwith- standing the danger that they be buried alive) — will long, if not forever, prevent our laying violent hands on it. If salaries were stopped off, and men walked out of this world bodily at last, the minister and his vocation would be gone. What is the churchyard but a grave- yard? Imagine a church at the other end of the town, without any carrion beneath or beside it, but all the dead regularly carried to the bone-mill! The cry that comes up from the churches in all the great cities in the world is, “ How they stink!” What more fatal vengeance could Linneus have taken than to give the names of his enemies to pernicious and unsightly plants, thus simply putting upon record for as long as the Linnean system shall prevail who were his friends and foes? It was enough to record the fact that they were opposed to him. To this they could not themselves have objected, nor could he have taken a more fatal vengeance. (Vide Scraps.) Noticed this afternoon that where a pitch pine three inches in diameter had been cut down last winter, it had sent out more than a hundred horizontal plumes about a foot long close together and on every side. Plenty of ripe checkerberries now. Do they blossom again in the spring?! The ferns, which are almost the only green things left now, love the crevices and seams of moist cliffs and boulders and adorn them very much. They become more conspicuous now than at any season. I had a thought this morning before I awoke. I en- deavored to retain it in my mind’s grasp after I became conscious, yet I doubted, while I lay on my back, whether my mind could apprehend it when I should stand erect. It is a far more difficult feat to get up with- out spilling your morning thought, than that which is often practiced of taking a cup of water from behind your head as you lie on your back and drinking from it. It was the thought I endeavored to express on the first page of to-day. Thinkers and writers are in foolish haste to come be- fore the world with crude works. Young men are per- suaded by their friends, or by their own restless ambi- tion, to write a course of lectures in a summer against the ensuing winter; and what it took the lecturer a sum- mer to write, it will take his audience but an hour to forget. If time is short, then you have no time to waste. That sounds like a fine mode of expressing gratitude referred to by Linneus. Hermann was a botanist who gave up his place to Tournefort, who was unprovided for. “Hermann,” says Linneus, “came afterwards to Paris, and Tournefort in honor of him ordered the fountains to play in the royal garden.”