12 July 1852 – 18 July 1852

I observed this morning a row of several dozen swallows perched on the telegraph-wire by the bridge, and ever and anon a part of them would launch forth as with one consent, circle a few moments over the water or meadow, and return to the wire again. 2 p. M.— To the Assabet. Still no rain. The clouds, cumuli, lie in high piles along the southern horizon, glowing, downy, or cream- colored, broken into irregular summits in the form of - bears erect, or demigods, or rocking stones, infant Her- culeses; and still we think that from their darker bases a thunder-shower may issue. In other parts of the heavens are long stratified whitish clouds, and in the northwest floating isles, white above and darker be- neath. The kingbird is active over the causeway, not- withstanding the heat, and near the woods I hear the huckleberry-bird and the song sparrow. The turtle- dove flutters before you in shady wood-paths, or looks out with extended neck, losing its balance, slow to leave its perch. Now for another fluvial walk. There is always a current of air above the water, blowing up or down the course of the river, so that this is the coolest highway. Divesting yourself of all clothing but your shirt and hat, which are to protect your exposed parts from the sun, you are prepared for the fluvial excursion. You choose what depths you like, tucking your toga higher or lower, as you take the deep middle of the road or the shallow sidewalks. Here is a road where no dust was ever known, no intolerable drouth. Now your feet expand on a smooth sandy bottom, now contract timidly on pebbles, now slump in genial fatty mud — greasy, saponaceous — amid the pads. You scare out whole schools of small breams and perch, and some- times a pickerel, which have taken shelter from the sun under the pads. This river is so clear compared with the South Branch, or main stream, that all their secrets are betrayed to you. Or you meet with and interrupt a turtle taking a more leisurely walk up the stream. Ever and anon you cross some furrow in the sand, made by a muskrat, leading off to right or left to their galleries in the bank, and you thrust your foot into the entrance, which is just below the surface of the water and is strewn with grass and rushes, of which they make their nests. In shallow water near the shore, your feet at once detect the presence of springs in the bank emptying in, by the sudden coldness of the water, and there, if you are thirsty, you dig a little well in the sand with your hands, and when you return, after it has settled and clarified itself, get a draught of pure cold water there. ‘The fishes are very forward to find out such places, and I have observed that a frog will occupy a cool spring, however small.

A journal, a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy. 4 p.mM.— To R. W. E.’s wood-lot south of Walden.

A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as ‘‘ humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails. Is it not more attractive to be a sailor than a farmer? The farmer’s son is restless and wants to go to sea. Is it not better to plow the ocean than the land? In the former case the plow runs further in its furrow before it turns. You may go round the world before the mast, but not behind the plow. Morton quotes Wafer as saying of some albinos among the Indians of Darien that “they are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale European, as they have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complex- ion. . . . Their eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very fine, inclining to a curl, and growing to the length of six or eight inches... . They seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially if it shines to- wards them; yet they see very well by moonlight, from which we call them moon-eyed.” In Drake’s “ Collec- tion of Voyages.” Neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there “the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion,” but we are, per- chance, intellectually and morally albinos, children of Endymion whose parents have walked much by moon- light. Walking much by moonlight, conversing with the moon, makes us, then, albinos. Methinks we should rather represent Endymion in colorless marble, or in the whiteness of marble, than painted of the ruddy color of ordinary youths.' Saw to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies dispersing before us, [as] we rode along berrying on the Walden road. Their yellow fleets are in the offing. Do I ever see them in numbers off the road? They are a yellow flower that blossoms generally about this time. Like a mackerel fleet, with their small hulls and great sails. Collected now in com- pact but gorgeous assembly in the road, like schooners in a harbor, a haven; now suddenly dispersing on our approach and filling the air with yellow snowflakes in their zigzag flight, or as when a fair wind calls those schooners out and disperses them over the broad ocean. How deep or perhaps slaty sky-blue are those blue- berries that grow in the shade! It is an unexpected and thrilling discovery to find such ethereal fruits in dense drooping clusters under the fresh green of oak and hickory sprouts. Those that grow in the sun appear to be the same species, only to have lost their bloom and freshness, and hence are darker.! The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

Chenopodium album, pigweed. The com- mon form of the arrowhead, with larger, clear- white flowers. Also an- other arrowhead, with a leaf shaped f -\ not Zp not in flower. Xyris, yellow-eyed \ grass, with three pretty yellow pet- als atop. The for- get-me-not is still abundant. There is sport in the boy’s water-mill, which grinds no corn and saws no logs and yields no money, but not in the man’s. Pyrus arbutijolia melanocarpa fruit begins to be black. Cephalanthus occidentalis, button-bush. The bass on Conantum is a very rich sight now, though the flowers are somewhat stale; a solid mass of verdure and of flowers with its massed and rounded outline. Its twigs are drooping, weighed down with pendulous flowers, so that, when you stand directly under it and look up, you see one mass of flowers, a flowery canopy. Its conspicuous leaf-like bracts, too, have the effect of flowers. The tree resounds with the hum of bees, — bumblebees and honey-bees; rose-bugs and butterflies, also, are here, —a perfect susurrus, a sound, as C. says, unlike any other in nature, —not like the wind, as that is like the sea. The bees abound on the flowers of the smooth sumach now. The branches of this tree touch the ground, and it has some- what the appearance of being weighed down with flowers. The air is full of sweetness. The tree is full of poetry. I observe the yellow butterflies everywhere in the fields and on the pontederias, which now give a faint blue tinge to the sides of the rivers. I hear the link link, fall-like note of the bobolink (? ) in the meadows; he has lost the bobo off. Is it the goldfinch that goes twit- tering over, but which I cannot see? This is a still, thoughtful day, the air full of vapors which shade the earth, preparing rain for the morrow. The sarsapa- rilla berries are black. The weeds begin to be high in low grounds and low wood-paths, — the Eupatorium purpureum and goldenrods, etc., — suggesting a cer- tain fecundity and vigor in nature, so that we love to wade through their ranks. The Rhexia Virginica, the meadow-beauty, high-colored, more beautiful than you remembered. The Stachys aspera, or hedge-nettle, looking like a white prunella with a long spike, in the meadows. The Platanthera lacera, ragged orchis, an unpainted flower. Is that delicate rose-purple flower in the Miles Swamp, with a long slender panicle and large leaves ina sort of whorl with long petioles, the Desmo- dium acuminatum, pointed-leaved tick-trefoil or hedy- sarum? The Lechea major, larger pinweed, everywhere in dry fields. Is it open?

Saturday. Cooler weather; a gentle steady rain, not shower; such coolness as rain makes; not sharp and invigorating, exhilarating, as in the spring, but thoughtful, reminding of the fall; still, moist, un- oppressive weather, in which corn and potatoes grow; not a vein of the northwest wind or the northeast. The coolness of the west tempered with rain and mist. As I walked by the river last evening, I heard no toads. A coolness as from an earth covered with vegetation, such as the toad finds in the high grass. A verdurous coolness, not a snowy or icy one, in the shadow of the vapors which the heat makes rise from the earth. Can this be dog-dayish? P. M.—A summer rain. A gentle steady rain, long a-gathering, without thunder or lightning, — such as we have not, and, methinks, could not have had, ear- lier than this. To Beck Stow’s. I pick raspberries dripping with rain beyond Sleepy Hollow. This weather is rather favorable to thought. On all sides is heard a gentle dripping of the rain on the leaves, yet it is perfectly warm. It is a day of comparative leisure to many farmers. Some go to the mill-dam and the shops; some go a-fishing. The An- tennaria margaritacea, pearly everlasting, is out; and the thoroughworts, red and white, begin (?) to show their colors. Notwithstanding the rain, some children still pursue their blackberrying on the Great Fields. Swamp-pink lingers still. Roses are not so numerous as they were. Some which I examine now have short, stout hooked thorns and narrow bracts. Is it the Rosa Carolina? I love to see a clear crystalline water flow- ing out of a swamp over white sand and decayed wood, spring-like. The year begins to have a husky look or scent in some quarters. I remark the green coats of the hazelnuts, and hear the permanent jay. Some fields are covered now with tufts or clumps of indigo- weed, yellow with blossoms, with a few dead leaves turned black here and there. Beck Stow’s Swamp! What an incredible spot to think of in town or city! When life looks sandy and barren, is reduced to its lowest terms, we have no ap- petite, and it has no flavor, then let me visit such a swamp as this, deep and impenetrable, where the earth quakes for a rod around you at every step, with its open water where the swallows skim and twitter, its meadow and cotton-grass, its dense patches of dwarf? andromeda, now brownish-green, with clumps of blue- berry bushes, its spruces and its verdurous border of woods imbowering it on every side. The trees now in the rain look heavy and rich all day, as commonly at twilight, drooping with the weight of wet leaves.

Sunday. 8.30 a. mM. —To the Sudbury meadows in boat. Peter Robbins says that the rain of yesterday has not reached the potatoes, after all. Exorbitant pota- toes! It takes a good deal to reach them, — serious preaching to convert them. The white lilies and the floating-heart are both well open at this hour, and more abundant than I have noticed them before. Like ducks, the former sit on the water as far as I can see on both sides. As we push away from Monroe’s shore, the rob- ins are singing and the swallows twittering. There is hardly a cloud in the sky. There are dewy cob- webs on the grass; so this is a fit morning for any adventure. It is one of those everlasting mornings, with cobwebs on the grass, which are provided for long enterprises. It is a sabbath within the water as well as in the air and on the land, and even the little pick- erels not half so long as your finger appear to be keep- ing it holy amid the pads. There is a sort of dusty or mealy light in the bream’s tail and fins waving in clear water. The river is now in all its glory, adorned with water-lilies on both sides. Walkers and sailers ordi- narily come hither in the afternoon, when the lilies are shut, and so never see the river in its pride. They come after the exhibition is over for the day, and do not suspect it. We are gliding swiftly up the river by Barrett’s Bend. The surface of the water is the place to see the pontederia from, for now the spikes of flowers are all brought into a dense line, — a heavy - line of blue, a foot or more in width, on one or both sides of the river. The pontederias are now in their prime, there being no withered heads. They are very freshly blue. In the sun, when you are looking west, they are of a violaceous blue. The lilies are in greater profusion than when we came to see them be- fore. They appear to be too many for the insects, and we find enough untouched. Horsemint (Mentha Cana- densis) 1s now out. We take a bath at Hubbard’s Bend. The water seems fresher, as the air, in the morning. Again under weigh, we scare up the great bittern amid the ponte- deria, and, rowing to where he alights, come within three feet of him and scare him up again. He flies sluggishly away plowing the air with the coulter of his breast-bone, and alighting ever higher up the stream.