2 August 1852 – 8 August 1852

At 5.30 this morning, saw from Nawshaw- tuct the trees on the Great Meadows against and rising out of the dispersing wreaths of fog, on which the sun was shining.

The Hypericum Sarothra appears to be out. 12 m. At the east window. —A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. Themusic reminds me of imagined heroic ages; it suggests such ideas of human life and the field which the earth affords as the few noblest passages of poetry. Those few interrupted strains which reach me through the trees suggest the same thoughts and aspir- ations that all melody, by whatever sense appreciated, has ever done. I am affected. What coloring variously fair and intense our life admits of! How a thought will mould and paint it! Impressed by some vague vision, 1852) THE ENCHANTMENT OF MUSIC 275 as it were, elevated into a more glorious sphere of life, we no longer know this, we can deny its existence. We say we are enchanted, perhaps. But what I am impressed by is the fact that this enchantment is no delusion. So far as truth is concerned, it is a fact such as what we call our actual existence, but it is a far higher and more glorious fact. It is evidence of such a sphere, of such possibilities. It is its truth and reality that affect me. A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and im- agination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood. It is pos- sible to live a grander life here; already the steed is stamping, the knights are prancing; already our thoughts bid a proud farewell to the so-called actual life and its humble glories. Now this is the verdict of a soul in health. But the soul diseased says that its own vision and life alone is true and sane. What a different aspect will courage put upon the face of things! This sug- gests what a perpetual flow of spirit would produce. Of course, no man was ever made so truly generous, was so expanded by any vile draught, but that he might be equally and more expanded by imbibing a saner and wholesomer draught than ever he has swallowed. There is a wine that does not intoxicate; there is a pure juice of the grape, and unfermented. What kind of draught is that which the aspirant soul imbibes ?

'To Walden by poorhouse road. Have had a gentle rain, and now with a lowering sky, but still I hear the cricket. He seems to chirp from a new depth toward autumn, new leferungs of the fall. The singular thought-inducing stillness after a gentle rain like this. It has allayed all excitement. I hear the singular watery twitter of the goldfinch, ter tweeter e et or e ee, as it ricochets over, he and his russet (?) female. The chirp of the constant chip-bird and the plaintive strain of the lark, also. I must make a list of those birds which, like the lark and the robin, if they do not stay all the year, are heard to sing longest of those that migrate. The bobolink and thrasher, etc., are silent. English-haying is long since done, only meadow-haying going on now. I smell the fragrant life-everlasting, now almost out; another scent that reminds me of the autumn. The little bees have gone to sleep amid the clethra blossoms in the rain and are not yet aroused. What is that weed somewhat like wormwood and amaranth on the ditch by roadside here ?* What the vine now budded like clematis in the wall? Most huckleberries and blueberries and low blackberries are in their prime now. A pleasant time to behold a small lake in the woods is in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm at this season, when the air and water are perfectly still, but the sky still overcast; first, because the lake is very smooth at such a time, second, as the atmosphere is so shallow and contracted, being low-roofed with clouds, the lake as a lower heaven is much larger in proportion to it. With its glassy reflecting surface, it is somewhat more heavenly and more full of light than the regions of the air above it. There is a pleasing vista southward over and through a wide indentation in the hills which form its shore, where their opposite sides slope to each other so as to suggest a stream flowing from it in that direc- tion through a wooded valley, toward some distant blue hills in Sudbury and Framingham, Goodman’s and Nobscot; that is, you look over and between the low near and green hills to the distant, which are tinged with blue, the heavenly color. Such is what is fair to mortal eyes. In the meanwhile the wood thrush sings in the woods around the lake.? Pycnanthemum lanceolatum, probably as early as the other variety, Hypericum corymbosum. Spotted St. John’s-wort, some time in July.

I can tell the extent to which a man has heard music by the faith he retains in the trivial and mean, even by the importance he attaches to what is called the actual world. Any memorable strains will have unsettled so low a faith and substituted a higher. Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them nar- row-minded and bigoted. Hearing that one with whom I was acquainted had committed suicide, I said I did not know when I had planted the seed of that fact that I should hear of it. P. M.— To C. Miles’s blueberry swamp.

5 a. mM.—I do not hear this morning the breathing of chip-birds nor the song of robins. Are the mornings now thus ushered in? Are they as spring- like? Has not the year grown old? Methinks we do ourselves, at any rate, somewhat tire of the season and observe less attentively and with less interest the open- ing of new flowers and the song of the birds. It is the signs of the fall that affect us most. It is hard to live in the summer content with it. To Cliffs. How different the feeble twittering of the birds here at sunrise from the full quire of the spring! Only the wood thrush, a huckleberry-bird or two, or chickadee, the scream of a flicker or a jay, or the caw of a crow, and commonly only an alarmed note of a robin. A solitary peawai may be heard, perchance, or a red-eye, but no thrashers, or catbirds, or oven-birds, or the jin- gle of the chewink. I hear the ominous twittering of the goldfinch over all. The village is seen through a thin veil of fog. I just distinguish the tree-tops beneath me in the southwest, and the light-colored river through the mist, which is gathering and preparing to retreat before the sun. From a tree-top I see the surface of Walden, whose shores are laid bare, the sun being directly opposite, and there- fore the surface of the lake is a bright sheen seen through some stately pines near the railroad. This bright, silvery sheen comes through the dispersing mists to me, its shores being still concealed by fog, and a low white scudding mist is seen against the more dis- tant dark clouds, drifting westward over all the forests before the sun. Gathered some of those large, sometimes pear-shaped, sweet blue huckleberries which grow amid the rubbish where woods have just been cut. A farmer told me that he lost a good many doves by their being trodden upon by oxen. P. M.— To Saw Mill Brook and hill beyond.

5 a. M.—Awoke into a rosy fog. I was enveloped by the skirts of Aurora. To the Cliffs. The. small dewdrops rest on the Asclepias pulchra by the roadside like gems, and the flower has lost half its ‘beauty when they are shaken off. What mean these orange-colored toadstools that cumber the ground, and the citron-colored (ice-cream-like) fungus? Is the earth in her monthly courses? The fog has risen up before the sun around the summit of Fair Haven. It does not make such perfect seas as formerly. It is too general and wandering. It must have a core over the river — as this has not — and be of sufficient density fo keep down on the low lands in a clear white, not grayish, smoky mass, and there must be no wind to drift it about. However, the Bedford meeting-house, rising above it and dark toward the sun, looks like a ship far at sea with all sails set. Thus the clouds may be said to float low at this season, — rest on the ground in the morning, —so that you look down on them from the hills. The whole surface of the earth is now streaked with wreaths of fog over meadow and forest, alternat- ing with the green. The sun, now working round the Cliffs, fires his rays into the battalions of fog which are collected over Fair Haven Pond and have taken refuge on the west side of the Hill; routs and disperses them. A dewy, cobwebbed morning. You observe the geome- try of cobwebs, though most are of that gossamer char- acter, close woven, as if a fairy had dropt her veil on the grass in the night. Men have, perchance, detected every kind of flower that grows in this township, have pursued it with chil- dren’s eyes into the thickest and darkest woods and swamps, where the painter’s color has betrayed it. Have they with proportionate thoroughness plucked every flower of thought which it is possible for a man to entertain, proved every sentiment which it is possible for a man to experience, here? Men have circum- navigated this globe of land and water, but how few have sailed out of sight of common sense over the ocean of knowledge!