17 November 1851 – 23 November 1851

All things tend to flow to him who can make the best use of them, even away from their legal owner. A thief, finding with the property of the Italian natural- ist Donati, whom he had robbed abroad, a collection of rare African seeds, forwarded them to Linneus from Marseilles. Donati suffered shipwreck and never re- turned.

Surveying these days the Ministerial Lot. Now at sundown I hear the hooting of anowl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo.* It sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. This is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were the echo, 2. e. so far as the succession is concerned. This is my music each evening. I heard it last evening. The men who help me call it the “ hooting owl” and think it is the cat owl. It is a sound admirably suited [to] the swamp and to the twilight woods, sug- . gesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized nor satisfied. I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts Ihave. Let owls do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. ‘’his sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. Yet how few are seen, even by the hunters! The sun has shone for a day over this savage swamp, where the single spruce stands covered with usnea moss, which a Con- cord merchant mortgaged once to the trustees of the ’ ministerial fund and lost, but now for a different race of creatures a new day dawns over this wilderness, which one would have thought was sufficiently dismal before. Here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound.’ The chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. He is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He is not lia- ble to exaggerate insignificant features. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows.that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (Mem. Wordsworth’s observations on relaxed attention. ) You must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them, like the moss which has hung from the spruce, and as the partridge and the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets and at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent. If the man of sci- ence can put all his knowledge into propositions, the woodman has a great deal of incommunicable know- ledge. Deacon Brown told me to-day of a tall, raw-boned fellow by the name of Hosmer who used to help draw the seine behind the Jones house, who once, when he had hauled it without getting a single shad, held up a little perch in sport above his face, to show what he had got. At that moment the perch wiggled and dropped right down his throat head foremost, and nearly suffo- cated him; and it was only after considerable time, dur- ing which the man suffered much, that he was extracted or forced down. He was in a worse predicament than a fish hawk would have been. In the woods south of the swamp are many great holes made by digging for foxes.

Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who helped me to-day, said that he used to know all about the lots, but since they ’ve chopped off so much, and the woods have grown up, he finds himself lost. Thirty or forty years ago, when he went to meeting, he knew every face in the meeting-house, even the boys and girls, they looked so much like their parents; but after ten or twelve years they would have outgrown his knowledge entirely (they would have altered so), but he knew the old folks still, because they held their own and did n’t alter. Just so he could tell the boundaries of the old wood which had n’t been cut down, but the young wood altered so much in a few years that he could n’t tell anything about it. When I asked him why the old road which went by this swamp was so roundabout, he said he would answer me as Mr. did him in a similar case once, — “‘ Why, if they had made it straight, they would n’t have left any room for improvement.” Standing by Harrington’s pond-hole in the swamp, which had skimmed over, we saw that there were many holes through the thin black ice, of various sizes, from a few inches to more than a foot in diameter, all of which were perfectly circular. Mr. H. asked me if I could ac- count for it. As we stood considering, we jarred the boggy ground and made a dimple in the water, and this acci- dent, we thought, betrayed the cause of it; 2. e. the cir- cular wavelets so wore off the edges of the ice when once a hole was made. The ice was very thin, and the holes were perfect disks. But what jarred the ground and shook the water? Perhaps the wind which shook the spruce and pine trees which stood in the quaking ground, as well as the little life in the water itself, and the wind on the ice and water itself. There was a more permanent form created by the dimple, but not yet a shellfish.

It is often said that melody can be heard farther than noise, and the finest melody farther than the coarsest. I think there is truth in this, and that ac- cordingly those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more than the sounds which [ should hear if I were below in the parlor, because they are so much purer and diviner melody. They who sit farthest off from the noisy and bustling world are not at pains to distinguish what is sweet and musical, for that alone can reach them; that chiefly comes down to pos- - terity. Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, 1s invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly. Here I have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when I get home at even- ing, somewhat weary at last, and beginning to feel that I have nerves, I find myself more susceptible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. ‘The very air can intoxicate me, or the least sight or sound, as if my finer senses had acquired an appetite by their fast. As I was riding to the Ministerial Lot this morning, about 8.30 a. m., I observed that the white clouds were disposed raywise in the west and also in the east, — as if the sun’s rays had split and so arranged them? A striking symmetry in the heavens. What its law? Mr. J. Hosmer tells me that one spring he saw a red squirrel gnaw the bark of a maple and then suck the juice, and this he repeated many times. What is the bush where we dined in Poplar Hollow? Hosmer tells of finding a kind of apple, with an apple seed (?) to it, on scabish which had been injured or cut off. Thinks plowed ground more moist than grass ground. That there are more leaves on the ground on the north side of a hill than on the other sides, and that the trees thrive more there, perhaps because the winds cause the leaves to fall there. Nov. 21. My mother says that, visiting once at Captain Pulsifer’s at the North End, two sea-captains’ wives told the girl, when the things were carried out to be replenished, not to turn out their slops, as it would drown their husbands who were at sea. Frank Brown showed me to-day the velvet duck (white- winged coot) and the surf duck. These two, as well as the scaup (?) duck, he says are called coots. Saw also a fine brant, a shore lark, a pine grosbeak, kittiwake gull and Bonaparte’s ditto (the last very like the first but smaller), all shot at Clark’s Island; also a little brown creeper with a woodpecker tail and curved bill, killed here. Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who lives where Hadley did, remembers when there were two or three times as many inhabitants in that part of the town as there are now: a blacksmith with his shop in front where he now lives, a goldsmith (Oliver Wheeler?) at the fork in the road just beyond him, one in front of Tarbell’s, one in the orchard on the south side of the lane in front of Tarbell’s, one, Nathan Wheeler, further on the right of the old road by the balm-of-Gilead, three between Tarbell’s and J. P. Brown’s, a tavern at Loring’s, a store at the Dodge cottage that was burnt, also at Derby’s (?), etc., etc. The farms were smaller then. One man now often holds two or three old farms. We walk in a de- serted country. The Major Heywood and mill roads together turn out of the Marlborough road just beyond the Desert. The former keeps the left to the powder-mills, the latter the right to the sawmill. The main road beyond Loring’s used to be called Law’s Path, where is Law’s Brook (south branch of Nagog, 2. e. Fort Pond?). The oldroads furrow the Second Division woods like trenches.

The milkweed pods by the roadside are yet but half emptied of their silky contents. For months the gales are dispersing their seeds, though we have had snow. Saw E. Hosmer this afternoon making a road for himself along a hillside (I being on my way to Saw Mill Brook). He turned over a stone, and I saw under it many crickets and ants still lively, which had gone into winter quarters there apparently. There were many little galleries leading under the stone, indenting the hardened earth like veins. (Afem. Turn over a rock in midwinter and see if you can find them.) That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately. I have frequently seen them lurking under the eaves or portico of a stone, even in midsummer. At the brook the partridge-berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries. The cress at the bottom of the brook is doubly beautiful now, because it is green while most other plants are sere. -It rises and falls and waves with the current. There are many young hornbeams there which still retain their withered leaves. As I returned through Hosmer’s field, the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold and windy afternoon, its light, which fell suddenly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shim- mering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance. It was from the con- trast between the dark and comfortless afternoon and this bright and cheerful light, almost fire. The eastern hills and woods, too, were clothed in a still golden light. The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the nee- dles of the white pine between you and it, after a raw and louring afternoon near the beginning of winter, is a memorable phenomenon. A sort of Indian summer in the day, which thus far has been denied to the year. After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.

Sunday. The trees (counting all three inches in diameter) in Conantum Swamp are: — OSs .. yaaa cee 6 Black ash .......... 8 as 16 (See if all are really elms.) Red (?) oak........ Q irs Q Ch a 3 a aes 5 BAC . octiss . . Sau 9 Hornbeam.......... Q Swamp white (?) oak 1 Dogwood also there is, and cone-bearing willow, and what kind of winterberry with a light-colored bark ? Another such a sunset to-night as the last, while I was on Conantum.