23 May 1853 – 29 May 1853

P. M.— To Ministerial Swamp. The poet must bring to Nature the smooth mirror in which she is to be reflected. He must be something superior to her, something more than natural. He must furnish equanimity. No genius will excuse him from importing the ivory which is to be his material. That small veronica (V. arvensis) by Mrs. Hosmer’s is the same with that on the Cliffs; there is also the smooth or V. serpyllifolia by her path at the brook. This is the fifth windy day. A May wind —a wash- ing wind. Do we not always have after the early thun- der-showers a May storm? ‘The first windy weather which it is agreeable to walk or ride in — creating a lively din. That must be the Arenaria serpyllifolia, thyme-leaved sandwort, now for some days (weeks?) out on the Clamshell Hill. Put it with viscid myosotis. To-day I am surprised by the dark orange-yellow of the senecio. At first we had the lighter, paler spring yellows of willows (cowslips even, for do they not grow a little darker afterward ?), dandelion, cinquefoil, then the darker (methinks it is a little darker than the cowslip) and deeper yellow of the buttercup; and then this broad distinction between the buttercup and the krigia and senecio, as the seasons revolve toward July. Every new flower that opens, no doubt, ex- presses a new mood of the human mind. Have I any dark or ripe orange-yellow thoughts to correspond ? The flavor of my thoughts begins to correspond. Lu- pines now for some days, probably about the 19th. Whiteweed will open perhaps to-morrow or next day. For some time dandelions and mouse-ear have been seen gone to seed — autumnal sights. I have not yet seen a white oak (and put with it swamp white and chestnut) fairly in bloom. The 20th, when at Flint’s Pond I raked away the leaves for acorns, I found many dor-bugs either just ready to issue forth or which had taken refuge from the storm. The geum is out, maybe one day. As I rise the hill beyond Geum Meadow I perceive the sweet fragrance of the season from over the turf; as if the vales were vast saucers full of strawberries, as if our walks were on the rim of such a saucer. With this, couple the fact that directly the fresh shoots of the firs and spruces will have the fragrance of straw- berries. White clover. I see the light purple of the rho- dora enlivening the edges of swamps — another color the sun wears. It is a beautiful shrub seen afar, and makes a great show from the abundance of its bloom unconcealed by leaves, rising above the andromeda. Is it not the most showy high-colored flower or shrub? Flowers are the different colors of the sunlight. Saw a great silvery-grayish cocoon, perchance of an emperor moth, on a scrub apple six inches from the ground, reminding me of a hornet’s or wasp’s nest — the great silk bag — two and one half inches long by nearly two inches, with a hole by which, appar- ently, the perfect insect had flown. What a rich stuff the shining silky, silvery bag! At the Ministerial Swamp I find the spruce leaf- buds have not yet burst their envelopes except at the tops of the trees where they have pushed out and are perfect handsome cones containing a bundle of leaves. The large staminate blossoms are now dry and effete, and the young cones more than one half inch long. Perhaps they should come between the red cedar and the larch. Put the first the last of May; the spruce, both white and black, end of the first week of May, and larch directly after, till I know better. It is glorious to stand in the midst of the andromeda, which so level and thick fills the swamp, and look up at the blue spruce trees. ‘The edges of the scales of the young cones, which are at the tops of the trees (where the branches make light and open crosses), seen against the sunlit sky or against the light merely, being trans- parent, are a splendid crimson color, as if the con- densed fire of all sunsets were reflected from them, like the richest damask or ruby-throated hummingbird’s breast. They glow with the crimson fires of the sunset sky, reflected over the swamp — unspeakably rare and precious rubies as you thus look up at them; but climb the tree and look down on them, and they are com- paratively dull and opaque. These are the rubies of the swamp. Already the just bursting leaf-buds emit that rare strawberry fragrance. It is one of the most glowing, beautiful, brilliant effects in nature, exactly like the reflections from the breast of the ruby-throated hummingbird; as if a hundred ruby-throated humming- birds sat on the topmost crosses of the trees, their breasts turned to the sun. The dwarf andromeda is for the most part just prepared to leave out, though some twigs have grown an inch. How different the ramrod jingle of the chewink or any bird’s note sounds now at 5 p. mo. in the cooler, stiller air, when also the humming of insects is more distinctly heard, and perchance some impurity has begun to sink to earth strained by the air. Or is it, per- chance, to be referred to the cooler, more clarified and pensive state of the mind, when dews have begun to descend in it and clarify it? Chaste eve! A certain lateness in the sound, pleasing to hear, which releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. I have passed the Rubicon of staying out. I have said to myself, that way is not homeward; I will wander further from what I have called my home — to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me, and the birds sing my dispensation. In dreams the links of life are united: we forget that our friends are dead; we know them as of old. An abundance of pure white fringed polygalas, very delicate, by the path at Harrington’s mud-hole. Thus many flowers have their nun sisters, dressed in white. At Loring’s Wood heard and saw a tanager. That con- trast of a red bird with the green pines and the blue sky! Even when I have heard his note and look for him and find the bloody fellow, sitting on a dead twig of a pine, I am always startled. (They seem to love the darkest and thickest pines.) That incredible red, with the green and blue, as if these were the trinity we wanted. Yet with his hoarse note he pays for his color. J am transported; these are not the woods I ordinarily walk in. He sunk Concord in his thought. How he enhances the wildness and wealth of the woods! This and the emperor moth make the tropical pheno- mena of our zone. There is warmth in the pewee’s strain, but this bird’s colors and his note tell of Brazil. Even in remotest woods the trivial noon has its rule and its limit. When the chaste and pensive eve draws on, suddenly the walker begins to reflect. When I listened this evening at the door, I heard no hylodes;’ but methinks I did hear toads on the river, — unless they were frogs.’

The smooth speedwell is In its prime now, whitening the sides of the back road, above the Swamp Bridge and front of Hubbard’s. Its sweet little pansy- like face looks up on all sides. This and the Myosotis laxa are the two most beautiful litile flowers yet, if I remember rightly. P. M.— Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my time — nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opin- ion, talked to the wind — told me what I knew — and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him. The wild pink was out day before yesterday.

Wednesday. Election day. — Rain yester- day afternoon and to-day. Heard the popping of guns last night and this morning, nevertheless. I quarrel with most botanists’ description of differ- ent species, say of willows. It is a difference without a distinction. No stress is laid upon the peculiarity of the species in question, and it requires a very careful exami- nation and comparison to detect any difference in the de- scription. Having described you one species, he begins * Heard a few next evening, also the 27th. ? Vide May 30th. again at the beginning when he comes to the next and describes it absolutely, wasting time; in fact does not describe the species, but rather the genus or family; as if, in describing the particular races of men, you should say of each in its turn that it is but dust and to dust it shall return. The object should be to describe not those particulars in which a species resembles its genus, for they are many and that would be but a negative description, but those in which it is peculiar, for they are few and positive. Steady fisherman’s rain, without wind, straight down, flooding the ground and spattering on it, beat- ing off the blossoms of apples and thorns, etc. Within the last week or so the grass and leaves have grown many shades darker, and if we had leaped from last Wednesday to this, we should have been startled by the change —the dark bluish green of rank grass especially. How rapidly the young twigs shoot — the herbs, trees, shrubs no sooner leaf out than they shoot forward surprisingly, as if they had acquired a head by being repressed so long. The[y] do not grow nearly so rapidly at any [other] season. Many do most of their growing for the year in a week or two at this season. They shoot — they spring —and the rest of the year they harden and mature, and perhaps have a second spring in the latter part of summer or in the fall. The hedge-mustard is just out. Two young men who borrowed my boat the other day returned from the riverside through Channing’s yard, quietly. It was almost the only way for them. But, as they passed out his gate, C. boorishly walked out his house behind them in his shirt-sleeves, and shut his gate again behind them as if to shut them out. It was just that sort of behavior which, if he had met with it in Italy or France, he would have complained of, whose meanness he would have condemned.

P. M. — To Lee’s Cliff. No breaking away, but the clouds have ceased to drop rain awhile and the birds are very lively. The waters are dark, and our attention is confined to earth. Saw two striped snakes deliberately drop from the stone bank wall into the river at Hubbard’s Bridge and remain under water while we looked. Do not perceive the meadow fragrance in this wet weather. A high blueberry bush by roadside beyond the bridge very full of blossoms. It has the more florid and blossom- ing effect because the leaves are few and quite distinct, or standing out from the flowers — the countless in- verted white mugs (in rows and everywhere as on coun- ters or shelves) with their peculiar green calyxes. If there are as many berries as blossoms we shall fare | well. Now is the time to walk in low, damp maple copses and see the tender, luxuriant foliage that has pushed up, mushroom-like, before the sun has come to harden it — the ferns of various species and in various stages, some now in their most perfect and beautiful condi- tion, completely unfolded, tender and delicate, but per- fect in all their details, far more than any lace work — the most elaborate leaf we have. So flat, just from the laundry, as if pressed by some invisible flat- iron in the air. Unfolding with such mathematical pre- cision in the free air, —green, starched and pressed, — might they not be transferred, patterns for Mechlin and Brussels? Skunk-cabbage, nodding trillium with con- cealed flowers, sarsaparilla, and arums, uvularias in thick-sown regiments now past their prime —a rank growth of these, forming an almost uninterrupted counter of green leaves a foot or two above the damp ground. Actea alba some time. Maidenhair — frames of basins spirally arranged. The pitch pines just out, with crowded bunches of staminate blossoms about the new shoots. That barberry bush near the bars on Conantum is methinks now the most beautiful, light, and graceful bush that I ever saw in bloom. It is shaped like a haycock, broad and dense, yet light as if some leaven had raised it. But how orientally beautiful now, seen through this dark mizzling air, its parallel or rather concentric wreaths composed of leaves and flowers keeping each other apart and lightening the whole mass, each wreath above composed of rich dark-green leaves, below of drooping racemes of lively yellow flowers! Its beauty consists in a great measure in this intimate mixture of flowers and leaves, the small rich- colored flowers not being too much massed. It suggests the yellow-robed priests perchance of Thibet(?). The lowest wreaths lie on the ground. But go not so near as to be disturbed by that sickening buttery odor, as of an underdone batter pudding, all eggs but no spice. Who would think this would bake into such a red acid fruit ? Woodchucks seen tumbling into their holes. The Galium aparine, common cleavers, a new one and the earliest, several days out, perhaps, high up at the base of the rocks under Lee’s Cliff. In the same place Turritis stricta, straight tower-mustard, a slen- der towering plant with a delicate whitish or purplish- white blossom; not in Bigelow, nor located in New Eng- land by Gray. Side-flowering sandwort is abundant, for some time, by wall of Lee’s field near Garfield’s. The Crategus Crus-Galli is all ready to blossom close by the barberry bush on Conantum. It is distinguished by its leaves, which are wedge-obovate with a short petiole and shining on the upper side, as if varnished ~ and the varnish had soaked in in spots. What is that soft-leaved rubus (?), three-leaved with the odd one wedge-based, now in bloom? I see no thorns on my slip.

5.30 a. M. — To Island. The Cornus florida now fairly out, and the involu- cres are now not greenish-white but white tipped with reddish — like a small flock of white birds passing — three and a half inches in diameter, the larger ones, as I find by measuring. It is something quite novel in the tree line. That needle-shaped variety of thorn is now almost fully out on Lee’s Hill; 7. e. half the flowers open. Amelanchier berries are as large as small peas. How beautiful the geranium flower-buds just open- ing! — little purple cylindrical tubes or hoods — cigari- tos — with the petals lapped over and round each other. One opens visibly in a pitcher before me. Heard a stake-driver yesterday in the rain. It sounded exactly like a man pumping, while another man struck on the head of the pump with an axe, the last strokes sound- ing peculiarly dry and hard like a forcible echo from the wood-side. One would think all Concord would be built on piles by this time. Very deliberately they drive, and in the intervals are considering the progress of the pile into the soft mud. They are working by the day. He is early and late at his work, building his stake[ ? }house, yet did anybody ever see the pile he had driven? He has come back from his Southern tour to finish that job of spile-driving which he under- took last year. It is heavy work — not to be hurried. Only green hands are overhasty. A turtle walking is as if a man were to try to walk by sticking his legs and arms merely out the windows. P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook. Cleared up last night after two and a half days’ rain. This, with the two days’ rain the 18th and 19th, makes our May rain—and more rain either of the two than at any other time this spring. Coming out into the sun after this rain, with my thick clothes, I find it unexpectedly and oppressively warm. Yet the heat seems tempered by a certain moisture still linger- ing in the air. (Methinks I heard a cuckoo yesterday and a quail (?) to-day.) A new season has commenced — summer — leafy June. The elms begin to droop and are heavy with shade. The buttercups in the church- yard are now in perfection, and it is surprising what a fairyland they make on some hillsides, looking more glossy and bright than ever after the rain. The vireo, too, is heard more than ever on the elms; his note begins to prevail. The broad pads lying on the sur- face of the ditches on the Turnpike seem to reflect a fierce heat upon the traveller. Yellow clover is out —how long? Hellebore a day or two at Saw Mill Brook — its great spike of green flowers with yellow anthers. Its great plaited leaves look like a green shirt bosom; drawn out smooth they prove to be basins. Was that Stellaria longifolia in bloom in the low ground at Saw Mill Brook? The crickets, which I have heard for a week now more and more, as much as anything mark a new season. They are importers of thought into the world —the poor trivial world; wholesale dealers in that article. Blue-eyed grass has been out some time, as I judge by the size of its seed- vessel. The river does not look blue from Smith’s Hill, — nor has it from any point for some time past, — but indistinctly slaty and rippling, as through a mistiness. Is it not getting to be too warm? A gray down or lint comes off of the leaves and shoots, which have grown so rapidly during the warm wet weather, and whitens the clothes with clean dirt. This is the state of the woods — the beardless woods, with downy cheek as yet. Sit in shade nowadays. The bullfrogs lie spread out on the surface of Flint’s Pond. Holding down my head, the young rushes begin to look thick and green in the shallow water advancing into the deep. 8 p. Ma. — Up Union Turnpike. The reign of insects commences this warm evening after the rains. They could not come out before. I hear from the pitch pine woods beyond E. Wood’s a vast faint hum, as of a factory far enough off to be musical. I can fancy it something ambrosial from starlit mansions, a faint murmuring harp music ris- ing from all groves; and soon insects are felt on the hands and face, and dor-bugs are heard humming by, or entangled in the pines, like winged bullets. I sup- pose that those dor-bugs which I saw the other day just beginning to stir under the dead leaves have now first issued forth. They never mistake their time. Between the pines here, white and pitch, whose out- lines are dimly seen, — the rising grass cool and damp beneath, — they are heard like a thousand bullets. The toads, too, completely fill the air with their dreamy snore; so that I wonder that everybody does not re- mark upon it and, the first time they hear it, do not rush to the riverside and the pools and capture a thousand; but hardly the naturalists know whence the sound proceeds, and nobody else seems to hear it at all. The whole air trembles with it, and hearing has no other pillow but this rippling one. Tree-toads, too, keep up an incessant din from elms (? )—when near, drowning the common toads. The toads gradually ceased after midnight and I heard not one in the morning. They want much muggy warmth.

A rose in a garden. 5 p. M. — To Lupine Hill by boat. The carnival of the year commencing — a warm, moist, hazy air, the water already smooth and uncommonly high, the river overflowing, and yellow lilies all drowned, their stems not long enough to reach the surface. I see the boat-club, or three or four in pink shirts, row- ing at a distance. Beech-drops out apparently some days, the old bridge landing at Nawshawtuct; also just out green-briar. Already the ringing croak of a toad begins to be heard here and there along the river, and the troonk of a bullfrog from time to time. What is peculiar now, beginning yesterday, after rains, is the sudden heat, and the more general sound of in- sects by day, and the loud ringing croak of common toads and tree-toads at evening and in the night. Our river has so little current that when the wind has gone down, as at present, it is dark and perfectly smooth, and at present dusty as a stagnant pool in every part of it; far from there beg any murmur, there is no ripple nor eddy for the most part. Hub- bard has plowed up the low-lying field at the bathing- place and planted it with potatoes; and now we find that the field we resort to was equally used by the In- dians, for their arrowheads are now exposed by the plow. The sidesaddle-flower conspicuous, but no pollen yet. The bulbous arethusa out a day or two — probably yesterday. Though in a measure prepared for it, still its beauty surprised me; it is by far the high- est and richest color yet. Its intense color in the midst of the green meadow made it look twice as large as reality; it looks very foreign in the midst of our plants —its richly speckled, curled, and bearded lip. Devil’s- needles begin to fly; saw one the 14th. Thesium just out. This hazy afternoon the sun is shorn of his beams now at six o’clock, and the lupines do not look so well for it; their lilac tints show best looking at them to- wards the sun, for they are transparent. Last night in the dark they were all a pale, whitish color like the moon by day —a mere dull luminousness, as if they reflected light absorbed by day. Seen from this point now, the pitch pines on Bear Garden Hill, the fresh green foliage of the deciduous trees now so prevails, the pitch pines, which lately looked green, are of a dark- brownish or mulberry color by contrast, and the white pines almost as dark, but bluer. In this haziness no doubt they are a little darker than usual. The grass on pretty high ground is wet with dew an hour before sunset. Whiteweed now, and cotton-grass. For three quarters of an hour the sun is a great round red ball in the west, reflected in the water; at first a scarlet, but as it descends growing more purple and crimson and larger, with a blue bar of a cloud across it; still reflected in the water, two suns, one above the other, below the hilly bank; as if it were a round hole in the cope of heaven, through which we looked into a crimson atmosphere. If such scenes were painted faithfully they would be pronounced unnatural. It is remarkable at how little distance a hillside covered with lupines looks blue, while a house or board painted blue is seen so great a distance. A sprig of wilted fir now grown an inch emits that rich fragrance somewhat like strawberries and pine- apples, yet peculiar. Mayhew, in his “London Labour and London Poor,” treating of the costermongers, or those who get their living in the streets of London, speaks of “the muscular irritability begotten by continued wander- ing,” making one “unable to rest for any time in one place.” Mentions the instance of a girl who had been accustomed to sell sprats in the streets, who having been taken into a gentleman’s house out of charity, “the pressure of shoes was intolerable to her.” “But no sooner did she hear from her friends, that sprats were again in the market, than as if there were some magical influence in the fish, she at once requested to be freed from the confinement, and permitted to return to her old calling.”” I am perhaps equally ac- customed to a roaming field-life, experience a good deal of that muscular irritability, and have a good many friends who let me know when sprats are in the market.

‘These last two days, with their sultry, hazy air, are the first that suggest the expression “the furnace-like heat.” Bathing has begun. In the even- ing and during the night the ring of the toads fills the air, so that some have to shut the windows toward the river, but when you awake in the morning not one is to be heard. As it grows warmer in the fore- noon I hear a few again; but still I do not hear them numerously and loudly as earlier in the season at that hour, though far more numerously and loudly at night. P. M. — To Hosmer’s Holden place. Thimble-berry two or three days. Cattle stand in 1853) THE FIRST HOT WEATHER 199 the river by the bridge for coolness. Place my hat lightly on my head that the air may circulate beneath. Wild roses budded before you know it — will be out often before you know they are budded. Fields are whitened with mouse-ear gone to seed —a mass of white fuzz blowing off one side — and also with dan- delion globes of seeds. Some plants have already reached their fall. How still the hot noon; people have retired behind blinds. Yet the kingbird — lively bird, with white belly and tail edged with white, and with its lively twittering — stirs and keeps the air brisk. I see men and women through open windows in white undress taking their Sunday-afternoon nap, overcome with heat. At A. Hosmer’s hill on the Union Turn- pike I see the tanager hoarsely warbling in the shade; the surprising red bird, a small morsel of Brazil, ad- vanced picket of that Brazilian army, — parrot-like. But no more shall we see; it is only an affair of out- posts. It appears as if he loved to contrast himself with the green of the forest. These are afternoons when you expect a thunder-shower before night; the outlines of cloudy cumuli are dimly seen through the hazy, furnace-like air rising in the west. Sper- gularia rubra, spurry sandwort, in the roadside ditch on left just beyond A. Hosmer’s hill; also Veronica peregrina (?) a good while. The last also in Great Fields in the path. Raspberry out. ‘That exceedingly neat and interest- ing little flower blue-eyed grass now claims our at- tention. ‘The barrenest pastures wear now a green and luxuriant aspect. I see many of those round, white, pigeon-egg fungi in the grass since the rains. Do they become puffballs? The thyme-leaved veronica shows its modest face in little crescent-shaped regi- ments in every little hollow in the pastures where there is moisture, and around stumps and in the road ditches. The Crategus Crus-Galli this side the Holden place on left, probably yesterday, thorns three inches long, flowers with anthers not conspicuously red. ‘The Viola debilis near west end of Holden farm in meadow south side of road.