14 November 1853 – 20 November 1853

Methinks I have not seen any of those white-in-tail birds for a week (?); but I see a little sparrow or two to-day, maybe a song sparrow? Mal- lows still in bloom, and hedge-mustard. P. M. — To Annursnack and Cedar Swamp. There is a clear air and a strong northwest wind drying up the washed earth after the heavy rain of yesterday. The road looks smooth and white as if washed and swept. It is surprising how rapidly our sandy soil dries up. We walk dry-shod the day after a rain which raises the river three feet. I am struck by the dark blue of the agitated river. Saw yarrow apparently just opened and tansy still fresh, but the fringed gentian in P. Barrett’s meadow has long since withered. It falls before the first severe frosts. It is remarkable how short a career it has, in our meadows at least. Its stem and leaves never conspicuous, it is not to be detected at all, perhaps, before the middle of September, and by about the middle of October with us it has already succumbed to the frosts. It came very near not being an inhabitant of our latitude, perhaps our globe, at all. The witch- hazel lasts much longer. However, I have seen it in November on a high hillside in Weston. When the flower season is over, when the great company of flower-seekers have ceased their search, this just raises its blue face above the withering grass beside the brooks for a moment, having at the eleventh hour made up its mind to join this planet’s floral exhibition. ! I cimb Annursnack. Under this strong wind more dry oak leaves are rattling down. All winter is their fall. A distinction is to be made between those trees whose leaves fall as soon as the bright autumnal tints are gone and they are withered and those whose leaves are rustling and falling all winter even into spring. October is the month of painted leaves, of ripe leaves, when all the earth, not merely flowers, but fruits and leaves, are ripe. With respect to its colors and its season, it is the sunset month of the year, when the earth is painted like the sunset sky. This rich glow flashes round the world. ‘This light fades into the clear, white, leafless twilight of November, and what- ever more glowing sunset or Indian summer we have then is the afterglow of the year.” In October the man is ripe even to his stalk and leaves; he is per- vaded by his genius, when all the forest is a universal harvest, whether he possesses the enduring color of the pines, which it takes two years to ripen and wither, or the brilliant color of the deciduous trees, which fade the first fall. From this hill I am struck with the smoothness and washed appearance of all the landscape. All these russet fields and swells look as if the withered grass had been combed by the flowing water. Not merely the sandy roads, but the fields are swept. All waters — the rivers and ponds and swollen brooks — and many new ones are now seen through the leafless trees — are blue as indigo, reservoirs of dark indigo amid the general russet and reddish-brown and gray.’ October answers to that period in the life of man when he is no longer dependent on his transient moods, when all his experience ripens into wisdom, but every root, branch, leaf of him glows with maturity. What he has been and done in his spring and summer ap- pears. He bears his fruit. Now for the bare branches of the oak woods, where hawks have nested and owls perched, the sinews of the trees, and the brattling (?) of the wind in their midst. For, now their leaves are off, they ’ve bared their arms, thrown off their coats, and, in the attitude of fencers, await the onset of the wind, to box or wrestle with it. Such high winds would have done much harm six weeks ago. The top of Annursnack has been burned, and sown with winter rye, and the green blade contrasts with the black ground there. It is the most conspicuous radical leaf. Went through the white cedar swamp. There are white cedars, larch (now bare), spruce, etc.; cedars two feet through, the only ones I know in Concord. It was here were cut the cedar posts which Alcott put into Emerson’s summer-house. They could not be spared even for that. It is a stout tree here, taper- ing with singular abruptness. Its small flattish leaves, dispersed crosswise and at other or different angles with each other, give it a peculiarly light, fantastic look. Myriads of little ones are springing in the more open parts of the swamp. They are turned a reddish green now. The large trees have a very rough bark, regularly furrowed perpendicularly, and a bright- yellow resin between the furrows. I find that the inner bark makes a good lye. Is this used by the Indians? Methinks these are flower-buds which are formed at the ends of the leafets and will open early in the spring. This swamp must be visited in midsummer. You see great shelf-shaped fungi, handsomely buttressed and perfectly horizontal, on the under side of slant- ing dead trees, at different stages one above another. Do lichens or fungi grow on you? Sometimes the one side of a man is pasture for fungi while the other is clothed with lichens, he being partially rotten. Our arbor-vitee cones are full of broadly winged | seeds. 6.30 p. M. — To Baker Farm by boat. It is full moon, and a clear night, with a strong northwest wind; so C. and I must have a sail by moon- light. The river has risen surprisingly, to a spring height, owing to yesterday’s rain, higher than before since spring. We sail rapidly upward. The river apparently, almost actually, as broad as the Hudson. Venus remarkably bright, just ready to set. Not a cloud in the sky, only the moon and a few faint unobtrusive stars here and there, and from time to time a meteor. The water washes against our bows with the same sound that one hears against a vessel’s prow by night on the ocean. If you had waked up here, you would not know at first but you were there. The shore-lines are concealed; you look seemingly over an almost - boundless waste of waters on either hand. The hills are dark, vast, lumpish. Some near, familiar hill ap- pears as a distant bold mountain, for its base is in- definitely removed. It is very pleasant to make our -way thus rapidly but mysteriously over the black . waves, black as ink and dotted with round foam- spots with a long moonlight sheen on one side — to make one’s way upward thus over the waste of waters, not knowing where you are exactly, only avoiding shores. ‘The stars are few and faint in this bright light. How well they wear! C. thought a man could still ‘get along with them who was considerably reduced in his circumstances, that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed.’ Fair Haven Hill never looked more grand and mountain-like than now that all its side is dark and we only see its bold outline at an indefinite distance. Under the lee of the Holden wood we found unexpectedly smooth and pleasant water and stillness, where we heard the wind roar be- hind us. The night is cool but not damp, and me- thinks you can be abroad with more impunity than in summer nights even. The walls on Conantum are merely black streaks, inky lines running over the hill. , 1 [Excursions, p. 328; Riv. 403, 404.] The wind goes down somewhat. The features of the landscape are simpler and lumped. We have the moon with a few stars above, a waste of black, dashing waves around, reflecting the moon’s sheen on one side, and the distant shore in dark swelling masses, dark floating isles between the water and the sky, on either hand. Moored our boat under Fair Haven Hill. The light is so strong that colors of objects are not much changed from the day. The water seen from the hill is still blue, and the fields are russet. How can we omit to go forth on the water these windy days and nights, to be tossed by the waves? It is some such novelty to a landsman as an earthquake. To take the hand of Nature and be shaken. Heard one cricket to-night.

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill and by boat to witch-hazel bush. Were they not the white-in-tail birds I saw this afternoon? Cricket still. After yesterday’s clear, windy weather we have to-day less wind and much haze. It is Indian-summer-like. The river has risen yet higher than last night, so that I cut across Hub- bard’s meadow with ease. Took up a witch-hazel with still some fresh blossoms; also a barberry bush. What appeared to be the minute fibrous roots of the last covered one side of a rock thickly like a piece of rotten flannel. How conspicuous its bright-yellow roots in the soil! The flood has covered most muskrat-cabins again. It has also reached and floated higher yet the last week. Just after sundown, though it had been windy before, the waters became suddenly smooth, and the clear yellow light of the western sky was handsomely reflected in the water, making it doubly light to me on the water, diffusing light from below as well as above. Were those insects on the surface after the moon rose skaters or water-bugs? After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circum- stance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are com- paratively soft. I was the other night elected a curator of our Ly- ceum, but was obliged to decline, because I did not know where to find good lecturers enough to make a course for the winter. We commonly think that we cannot have a good journal in New England, because we have not enough writers of ability; but we do not suspect likewise that we have not good lecturers enough to make a Lyceum. The tall wool-grass, with its stately heads, still stands above and is reflected in the smooth water. Together with the barberry, I dug up a brake root by chance. This, too, should have gone into the witches’ ealdron. It is large and black, almost like a cinder without, and within curiously black and white in par- allel fibres, with a sort of mildewiness as if it were rotting ; yet fresh shoots are ready for the spring with a cottony point. Goodwin says he killed a mink the other day on a small white pine tree. Some years ago, about this season, he dug out fifteen muskrats in one nest in the ground at Goose Pond. He says the white rabbit does not run to his hole, but the gray one does. This evening at sundown, when I was on the water, I heard come booming up the river what I suppose was the sound of cannon fired in Lowell to celebrate the Whig victory, the voting down the new Constitu- tion. Perchance no one else in Concord heard them, and it is remarkable that I heard them, who was only interested in the natural phenomenon of sound borne far over water. The river is now so full and so high over the meadows, and at that hour was so smooth withal, that perchance the waves of sound flowed over the smooth surface of the water with less obstruction and further than in any other direction. I also noticed this afternoon that, before the water generally was smoothed, those parts of the inundated meadow where spires of grass rose thinly above the surface were already quite smooth and glossy, so effectually did they break and dissipate the wave- lets. A multitude of fine grass stems were a sufficient breakwater to render the surface smooth. This afternoon has wanted no condition to make it a gossamer day, it seems to me, but a calm atmos- phere. Plainly the spiders cannot be abroad on the water unless it is smooth. The one I witnessed this fall was at time of flood. May it be that they are driven out of their retreats like muskrats and snow-fleas, and spin these lines for their support? Yet they work on the causeway, too. I see many cranberries on the vines at the bottom, making a great show. It might be worth the while, where possible, to flood a cranberry meadow as soon as they are ripe and before the frosts, and so preserve them plump and sound till spring.

P. M.— To Nawshawtuct by boat with Sophia, up Assabet. The river still higher than yesterday. I paddled straight from the boat’s place to the Island. I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock and various other ferns, one the marginal (?) shield fern and one the terminal shield fern, and this other, here inserted, on the steep bank above the Hemlocks. I admire the fine blue color of the cedar berries.

I notice that many plants about this sea- son of the year or earlier, after they have died down at top, put forth fresh and conspicuous radical leaves against another spring. So some human beings in the November of their days exhibit some fresh radical greenness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential vitality. When their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring. The dry fields have for a long time been spotted with the small radical leaves of the fragrant life-everlasting, not to mention the large primrose, johnswort, etc., etc. And almost every plant, although it may show no greenness above ground, if you dig about it, will be found to have fresh shoots already pointing upward and ready to burst forth in the spring. Are not more birds crushed under the feet of oxen than of horses ?

Conchologists call those shells “which are fished up from the depths of the ocean” and are never seen on the shore, which are the rarest and most beauti- ful, Pelagi, but those which are cast on shore and are never so delicate and beautiful as the former, on ac- count of exposure and abrasion, Lzttorales. So it is with the thoughts of poets: some are fresh from the deep sea, radiant with unimagined beauty, — Pelagi ; but others are comparatively worn, having been tossed by many a tide, — Littorales, — scaled off, abraded, and eaten by worms.

P. M. Up river in boat to Hubbard’s meadow, cranberrying. They redden all the lee shore, the water being still apparently at the same level with the 16th. This is a very pleasant and warm Indian-summer afternoon. Methinks we have not had one like it since October 31st. This, too, is a gossamer day, though it is not particularly calm. If it were, it would be still more perfect. My boat I find to be covered with spiders, whose fine lines soon stretch from side to side. Got a bushel and a half of cranberries, mixed with chaff. Brought home one of those little shells & found in the shore wreck, which look like a bugle-horn. I notice that at the bridges there is now a slight rapid, and the water is perceptibly several inches lower on the down-stream side, the piers acting as a dam, the stream being somewhat narrowed there withal by the abutments. What is the peculiarity of the Indian summer? From the 14th to the 21st Octo- ber inclusive, this year, was perfect Indian summer; and this day the next? Methinks that any particularly pleasant and warmer weather after the middle of October is thus called. Has it not fine, calm spring days answering to it? Autumnal dandelion quite fresh. Tansy very fresh yesterday.

7.30 a.m. — To Hubbard’s meadow, cran- berrying. Still quite warm as yesterday. I wear no greatcoat. There has been no freezing in the night. I hear a single hylodes in the wood by the water, while I am raking the cranberries. This warmth has aroused him. While raking, I disturbed two bullfrogs, one quite small. These, too, the warm weather has perhaps aroused. They appear rather stupid. Also I see one painted tortoise, but with no bright markings. Do they fade? I observe on some muskrat-cabins much of that bleached and withered long grass, strewn as if pre- paratory to raising them, for almost all are covered with water now. It apparently is used as a binder. I find, washed up with the cranberries and also float- ing over the meadow and about the cabins, many frag- ments of a root, often with that green, somewhat pellucid, roundish pad attached. This appears to be the musk- rats’ principal vegetable food now. It is not flagroot, but either yellow lily, pontederia, white lily, — or can it be heart-leaf root ? The shore is so reddened with cranberries that I perceive them fifteen rods off, tingeing it. Many of them being frost-bitten, they have now the pleasant taste of spring cranberries, which many prefer. They, as well as the wreck generally, are covered, as if pep- pered, with the skipping snow-fleas. In the wreck I find also the common little trumpet-shaped cockle, and some caddis-worms out of their cases. There is an abundance of chaff, 2. e. broken meadow-grass and cranberry leaves, in it now. Minott said he heard geese going south at day- break the 17th, before he came out of the house, and heard and saw another large flock at 10 a. m. Those I heard this afternoon were low and far in the western horizon. I did [not] distinctly see them, but heard them farther and farther in the southwest, the sound of one which did the honking guiding my eyes. I had seen that a storm was brewing before, and low mists already gathered in the northeast. It rained soon after I got home. The 18th was also a drizzling day. Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm. I have not seen any tree sparrows of late, nor white- in-tails. Would it not be worth the while to flood a cranberry meadow just before the frosts come, and so preserve them plump and fresh till spring? * I once came near speculating in cranberries. Being put to it to raise the wind to pay for “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and having occasion to go to New York to peddle some pencils which I had made, as I passed through Boston I went to Quincy Market and inquired the price of cranberries. The dealers took me down cellar, asked if I wanted wet or dry, and showed me them. I gave them to understand that I might want an indefinite quantity. It made a slight sensation among them and for aught I know raised the price of the berry for a time. I then visited various New York packets and was told what would be the freight, on deck and in the hold, and one skipper was very anxious for my freight. When I got to New York, I again visited the markets as a purchaser, and “the best of Eastern Cranberries” were offered me by the barrel at a cheaper rate than I could buy them in Boston. I was obliged to manufacture a thousand dollars’ worth of pencils and slowly dispose of and finally sacrifice them, in order to pay an assumed debt of a hundred dollars. What enhances my interest in dew —I am think- ing of the summer — is the fact that it is so distinct from rain, formed most abundantly after bright, star- lit nights, a product especially of the clear, serene air. The manna of fair weather; the upper side of rain, as the country above the clouds. That nightly rain called dew, which gathers and falls in so low a stratum that our heads tower above it like mountains in an ordinary shower. It only consists with comparatively fair weather above our heads. Those warm volumes of air, forced high up the hillsides in summer nights, are driven thither to drop their dew there, like kine to their yards to be milked; that the moisture they hold may be condensed and so dew formed before morning on the tops of the hills. A writer in Harper’s Magazine (vol. vii, page 505) says that the mist at evening does not rise, “but gradually forms higher up in the air.’”’ He calls it the moisture of the air be- come visible. Says there is most dew in clear nights, because clouds prevent the cooling down of the air; they radiate the heat of the earth back to it; and that a strong wind, by keeping the air in motion, — prevents its heat from passing off. Therefore, I pro- ceed, for a plentiful dew it must not only be clear but calm. The above writer says bad conductors of heat have always most dew on them, and that wool or swan’s-down is “good for experimenting on the quantity of dew falling,” — weight before and after. Thinks it not safe to walk in clear nights, especially after midnight, when the dew is most abundantly form- ing; better in cloudy nights, which are drier. Also thinks it not prudent to venture out until the sun begins to rise and warms the air. But methinks this prudence begets a tenderness that will catch more cold at noonday than the opposite ne at midnight.