30 May 1853 – 5 June 1853

The morning wind forever blows; the poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. Forever that strain of the harp which soothed the Cerberus and called me back to life is sounding. Olympus is the outside of the earth every- where. 5 a. M. — To Chis. High blackberry out. As I go by Hayden’s in the still cool morning, the farmer’s door is open — prob- ably his cattle have been attended to — and the odor of the bacon which is being fried for his breakfast fills the air. The dog lies with his paws hanging over the door-sill this agreeably cool morning. The cistus out, probably yesterday,—a simple and delicate flower, its stamens all swept to one side. It upholds a delicate saffron-golden (?) basin about nine inches from the ground. As I look off from Fair Haven I perceive that that downy, silvery hoariness has mostly left the leaves (it now comes off on to the clothes), and they are of a uniform smooth light green, while the pines are a dirty dark brown, almost purple, and are mostly merged and lost in the deciduous trees. The Erigeron belli- difolius is a tender-looking, pale-purple, aster-like flower a foot high in little squads, nodding in the wind on the bare slopes of hill pastures. Young bush- like black cherries a day or two, on Cliffs and in such favorable places. The hylodes were about done peeping before those last few warm days, — when the toads began in-earnest in the river, — but last night being somewhat cooler they were not so loud. P. M. — To Carlisle Bridge by boat. A strong but somewhat gusty southerly wind, before which C. and I sailed all the way from home to Carlisle Bridge in not far from an hour; the river unusually high for the season. Very pleasant to feel the strong, fresh southerly wind from over the water. There are no clouds in the sky, but a high haziness, as if the moisture drawn up by yesterday’s heat was condensed by to-day’s comparative coolness. The water a dull slate-color and waves running high, —a dirty yellow where they break, — and long streaks of white foam, six or eight feet apart, stretching north and south between Concord and Bedford, — without end. The common blue flag just out at Ball’s Hill. The white maples, especially those shaped like large bushes, on the banks are now full of foliage, showing the white under sides of the leaves in the wind, and the swamp white oak, having similar silvery under sides to its leaves, and both growing abundantly and prevailing here along the river, make or impart a peculiar flash- ing light to the scenery in windy weather, all bright, flashing, and cheerful. On the meadows are large yellow-green patches of ferns beginning to prevail. Passed a large boat anchored off in the meadows not far from the boundary of Concord: It was quite a piece of ocean scenery, we saw it so long before reach- ing it and so long after; and it looked larger than reality, what with the roaring of the wind in our shrouds and the dashing of the waves. The incessant drifting about of a boat so anchored by a long cable, playing with its halter, now showing more, now less, of its side, is a pleasing sight. Landed at a high lupine bank by Carlisle Bridge. How many such lupine banks there are!— whose blue you detect many rods off. There I found, methinks, minute Specularia perfoliata, with small crenate clasping leaves alternate at some dis- tance apart, on upright stems about three inches high, but apparently fruiting in the bud. Also the Silene antirrhina very abundant there. The Viola palmata, which is later, and therefore, methinks, fresher than most, is now quite prevalent, one of the most common, in fact, in low ground and a very handsome purple, with more red than usual in its violet. The pines now dotted with white shoots, the pitch pines a little red- dish, are an interesting sight now. Whence came all those dead suckers, a dozen at least, which we saw floating to-day, some on their sides, transversely barred, some on their backs with their white bellies up and dark fins on each side? Why are they suckers only that we see? Can it be because the spearers have thrown them away? Or has some bird of prey dropped them? I rarely see other fish floating. Melvin gave George Brooks some pink azaleas yesterday, said to have grown in the north part of the town.! The white maple keys falling and covering the river.

Some incidents in my life have seemed far more allegorical than actual; they were so signi- ficant that they plainly served no other use. That is, I have been ‘more impressed by their allegorical significance and fitness; they have been like myths or passages in a myth, rather than mere incidents or history which have to wait to become significant. Quite in harmony with my subjective philosophy. This, for instance: that, when I thought I knew the flowers so well, the beautiful purple azalea or pinxter- flower should be shown me by the hunter who found it. Such facts are lifted quite above the level of the actual. ‘They are all just such events as my imagina- tion prepares me for, no matter how incredible. Per- fectly in keeping with my life and characteristic. Ever and anon something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of. The limits of the actual are set some thoughts further off. That which had seemed a rigid wall of vast thickness unexpectedly proves a thin and undulating drapery. ‘The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations. The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw, perhaps never heard [of], for which therefore there was no place in our thoughts, ’ Vide forward [next page]. may at length be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive. P. M. — A change in the weather. It is comparatively cool since last night, and the air is very clear accord- ingly; none of that haze in it occasioned by the late heat. Yesterday was another very windy day, mak- ing the sixth, I believe, of this May, the 23d having been the last. The leaves are now fairly expanded — that has been the work of May — and are of a dark summer greenness. Some have even begun to cut the rankest grass in front yards. May has been, on the whole, a pleasant month, with a few days of gentle rain-storm, — fishermen’s rains, —straight down and spattering on the earth,—and the last week quite warm, even somewhat sultry and summer-like. The bulk of the planting has been done this month, and there have been half a dozen days of strong, breezy and gusty, but not cold, winds, — northwest and then southwest and south. It is surprising to see how many leaves are already attacked by insects, — leaf- rollers, pincushion galls, one kind of oak-balls, etc., etc.; and many a shrub and tree, black cherry and shrub oak, is no sooner leaved out than it is completely stripped by its caterpillar foes. I am going in search of the Azalea nudiflora. Sophia brought home a single flower without twig or leaf from Mrs. Brooks’s last evening. Mrs. Brooks, I find, has a large twig in a vase of water, still pretty fresh, which she says George Melvin gave to her son George. I called at his office. He says that Melvin came in to Mr. Gourgas’s office, where he and others were sitting Saturday evening, with his arms full and gave each a sprig, but he does n’t know where he got it. Some- body, I heard, had seen it at Captain Jarvis’s; so I went there. I found that they bad some still pretty fresh in the house. Melvin gave it to them Saturday night, but they did not know where he got it. A young man working at Stedman Buttrick’s said it was a secret; there was only one bush in the town; Melvin knew of it and Stedman knew; when asked, Melvin said he got it in the swamp, or from a bush, etc. The young man thought it grew on the Island across the river on the Wheeler farm. I went on to Melvin’s house, though I did not expect to find him at home at this hour, so early in the afternoon. (Saw the wood- sorrel out, a day or two perhaps, by the way.) At length I saw his dog by the door, and knew he was at home. He was sitting in the shade, bareheaded, at his back door. He had a large pailful of the azalea recently plucked and in the shade behind his house, which he said he was going to carry to town at evening. He had also a sprig set out. He had been out all the forenoon and said he had got seven pickerel, — perhaps ten [ ? ]. Apparently he had been drinking and was just getting over it. At first he was a little shy about telling me where the azalea grew, but I saw that I should get it out of him. He dilly-dallied a little; called to his neigh- bor Farmer, whom he called “ Razor,” to know if he could tell me where that flower grew. He called it, by the way, the “red honeysuckle.” This was to pro- long the time and make the most of his secret. I felt pretty sure the plant was to be found on Wheeler’s land beyond the river, as the young man had said, for I had remembered how, some weeks before this, when I went up the Assabet after the yellow rocket, I saw Melvin, who had just crossed with his dog, and when I landed to pluck the rocket he appeared out of the woods, said he was after a fish-pole, and asked me the name of my flower. Did n’t think it was very hand- some, — “not so handsome as the honeysuckle, is it?” And now I knew it was his “red honeysuckle,” and not the columbine, he meant. Well, I told him he had better tell me where it was; I was a botanist and ought to know. But he thought I could n’t possibly find it by his directions. I told him he’d better tell me and have the glory of it, for I should surely find it if he did n’t; I’d got a clue to it, and should n’t give it up. I should go over the river for it. I could smell it a good way, you know. He thought I could smell it half a mile, and he wondered that I had n’t stumbled on it, or Chan- ning. Channing, he said, came close by it once, when it was in flower. He thought he’d surely find it then; but he did n’t, and he said nothing to him. He told me he found it about ten years ago, and he went to it every year. It blossomed at the old election time, and he thought it “the handsomest flower that grows. Yarrow just out. In the meanwhile, Farmer, who was hoeing, came up to the wall, and we fell into a talk about Dodge’s Brook, which runs through his farm. A man in Cam- bridge, he said, had recently written to Mr. Monroe about it, but he did n’t know why. All he knew about the brook was that he had seen it dry and then again, after a week of dry weather in which no rain fell, it would be full again, and either the writer or Monroe said there were only two such brooks in all North America. One of its sources—he thought the principal one— was in his land. We all went to it. It was in a meadow, —rather a dry one, once a swamp. He said it never ceased to flow at the head now, since he dug it out, and never froze there. He ran a pole down eight or nine feet into the mud to show me the depth. He had minnows there in a large deep pool, and cast an insect into the water, which they presently rose to and swal- lowed. Fifteen years ago he dug it out nine feet deep and found spruce logs as big as his leg, which the beavers had gnawed, with the marks of their teeth very distinct upon them; but they soon crumbled away on coming to the air. Melvin, meanwhile, was telling me of a pair of geese he had seen which were breeding in the Bedford Swamp. He had seen them within a day. Last year he got a large brood (11?) of black ducks there. We went on down the brook, — Melvin and I and his dog, — and crossed the river in his boat, and he conducted me to where the Azalea nudiflora grew, — it was a little past its prime, perhaps, — and showed me how near Channing came. (‘You won’t tell him what I said; will you?” said he.) I offered to pay him for his trouble, but he would n’t take anything. He had just as hef I'd know as not. He thought it first came out last Wednesday, on the 25th. Azalea nudiflora,— purple azalea, pinxter-flower, —but Gray and Bigelow say nothing about its clammi- ness. It is a conspicuously beautiful flowering shrub, with the sweet fragrance of the common swamp-pink, but the flowers are larger and, in this case, a fine lively rosy pink, not so clammy as the other, and, being earlier, it is free from the insects which often infest and spoil the first, though I find a very few little flies on them. With a broader, somewhat downy pale-green leaf. Growing in the shade of large wood, like the laurel. ‘The flowers, being in naked umbels, are so much the more conspicuous. (The Viola debilis by the brook, near the azalea.) It is a flower with the fra- grance of the swamp[-pink], without its extreme clam- miness and consequent insects, and with a high and beautiful color and larger segments to the corolla, with very much exserted stamens and pistil. Eaton says the nudiflora is “not viscous;” names half a dozen varieties and among them A. partita (flesh-colored flowers, 5-parted to the base), but then this is viscous. And it cannot be his species A. nitida, with glabrous and shining and small leaves. It must be an unde- scribed variety —a viscous one — of A. nudiflora. Melvin says the gray squirrel nests are made of leaves, the red squirrel of pine'stuff. Jarvis tells me that Sted- man Buttrick once hired Melvin to work for him on condition that he should not take his gun into the field, but he had known him to do so when Buttrick was away and earn two or three dollars with his game beside his day’s work, but of course the last was neglected. There is a little danger of a frost to-night.

Quite a fog this morning. Does it not al- ways follow the cooler nights after the first really warm weather about the end of May? Saw a water snake yesterday, with its tail twisted about some dead weed stubble and quite dry and stiff for an inch, as if it were preparing to shed its skin. A wilted sprig of creep- ing juniper has a little, a very little, of sweet fragrance, somewhat like that of the fir and spruce. It seems to be just coming into bloom. Bees are swarming now, and those who keep them often have to leave their work in haste to secure them. P. M. — To Walden. Summer begins now about a week past, with the expanded leaves, the shade and warm weather. Cul- tivated fields also are leaving out, 2. e. corn and pota- toes coming up. Most trees have bloomed and are now forming their fruit. Young berries, too, are form- ing, and birds are being hatched. Dor-bugs and other insects have come forth the first warm evening after showers. The birds have now all (?) come and no longer fly in flocks. The hylodes are no longer heard. The bull- frogs begin to trump. Thick and extensive fogs in the morning begin. Plants are rapidly growing, — shooting.

3.30 a. Mi — When I awake I hear the low universal chirping or twittering of the chip-birds, like the bursting bead on the surface of the uncorked day. First come, first served! You must taste the first glass of the day’s nectar, if you would get all the spirit of it. Its fixed air begins to stir and escape. Also the robin’s morning song is heard as in the spring, earlier than the notes of most other birds, thus bringing back the spring; now rarely heard or noticed in the course of the day. 4 a. M.— To Nawshawtuct. — I go to the river in a fog through which I cannot see more than a dozen rods,—three or four times as deep as the houses. As I row down the stream, the dark, dim outlines of the trees on the banks appear, coming to meet me out of the mist on the one hand, while they retreat and are soon concealed in it on the other. My strokes soon bury them behind me. The birds are wide awake, as if knowing that this fog presages a fair day. I ascend Nawshawtuct from the north side. I am aware that I yield to the same in- fluence which inspires the birds and the cockerels, whose hoarse courage I hear now vaunted. So men should crow in the morning. I would crow like chan- ticleer in the morning, with all the lustiness that the new day imparts, without thinking of the evening, when I and all of us shall go to roost, — with all the humility of the cock, that takes his perch upon the highest rail and wakes the country with his clarion. Shall not men be inspired as much as cockerels? My feet are soon wet with fog. It is, indeed, a vast dew. And are not the clouds another kind of dew? Cool nights produce them. Now I have reached the hilltop above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appear- ing as distant islands in the main. Wachusett is a more distant and larger island, an Atlantis in the west; there is hardly one to touch at between me and it. It is just like the clouds beneath you as seen from a mountain. It is a perfect level in some directions, cutting the hills near their summits with a geometrical line, but puffed up here and there, and more and more toward the east, by the influence of the sun. An early freight-train of cars is heard, not seen, rushing through the town beneath it. It resembles nothing so much as the ocean. You can get here the impression which the ocean makes, without ever going to the shore. Men — poor simpletons as they are — will go to a panorama by families, to see a Pilgrim’s Progress, perchance, who never yet made progress so far as to the top of such a hill as this at the dawn of a foggy morning. All the fog they know is in their brains. The seashore exhibits nothing more grand or on a larger scale. How grand where it rolls off northeast- ward (?) over Ball’s Hill like a glorious ocean after a storm, just lit by the rising sun! It is as boundless as the view from the highlands of Cape Cod. They are exaggerated billows, the ocean on a larger scale, the sea after some tremendous and unheard-of storm, for the actual sea never appears so tossed up and uni- versally white with foam and spray as this now far in the northeastern horizon, where mountain billows are breaking on some hidden reef or bank. It is tossed up toward the sun and by it into the most boisterous of seas, which no craft, no ocean steamer, is vast enough to sail on. Meanwhile my hands are numb with cold and my wet feet ache with it. Now, at 5.15, before this south- west wind, it is already grown thin as gossamer in that direction, and woods and houses are seen through it, while it is heaped up toward the sun, and finally be- comes so thick there that for a short time it appears in one place a dark, low cloud, such as else can only be seen from mountains; and now long, dark ridges of wood appear through it, and now the sun reflected from the river makes a bright glow in the fog, and now, at 5.30, I see the green surface of the meadows and the water through the trees, sparkling with bright reflections. Men will go further and pay more to see a tawdry picture on canvas, a poor painted scene, than to behold the fairest or grandest scene that nature ever displays in their immediate vicinity, though they may have never seen it in their lives. The triosteum a day or two. Cherry-birds are the fe" only ones I see in flocks now. I can tell them afar by their peculiar fine springy note. The hickory is not yet blossomed. Sanicle and waxwork just out. On Monday saw apparently fresh-broken tortoise eggs. Locust tree just opening. 4 p. mM. — To Conantum. Equisetum limosum out some days. Look for it at Myosotis Brook, bottom of Wheildon’s field. Side- saddle-flower — purple petals (?) now begin to hang down. Arethusas are abundant in what I may call Arethusa Meadow. ‘They are the more striking for growing in such green localities, — in meadows where their brilliant purple, more or less red, contrasts with the green grass. Found four perfect arrowheads and one imperfect in the potato-field, just plowed up for the first time that I remember, at the Hubbard Bath- ing-Place. Each hill of potatoes (they are now just out of the ground) has been probed by some animal, and a great many of the potatoes, planted not long since, abstracted. Some are left on the surface. Al- most every hill in the field which bounds on the river has been disturbed. Was it a muskrat, or a mink, or a woodchuck, or a skunk? The tracks are of the right size for any of these. Viburnum Lentago in the hedge on west side of Arethusa Meadow. It is all fully out. It must be three or four days or more, then, some of it. Clintonia borealis, a day or two. This is perhaps the most inter- esting and neatest of what I may call the liliaceous (?) © plants we have. Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear dark-green leaves, which Bigelow describes truly as “more than half a foot long, oblanceolate, smooth and shining.” They are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a cen- tre at the ground,’ sometimes very symmetrically dis- posed in a triangular fashion; and from their midst rises the scape [a] foot high, with one or more umbels of “green bell-shaped flowers,” yellowish-green, nod- ding or bent downward, but without fragrance. In fact, the flower is all green, both leaves and corolla. The leaves alone — and many have no scape — would detain the walker. Its berries are its flower. A sin- gle plant is a great ornament in a vase, from the beauty of its form and the rich, unspotted green of its leaves.