1 May 1854 – 7 May 1854

A fine, clear morning after three days of rain, — our principal rain-storm this year, — raising the river higher than it has been yet. 6 a. M. — Up railroad. Everything looks bright and as if it were washed clean. The red maples, now fully in bloom, show red tops at a distance. Is that a black cherry so forward in the cow-killer? When I first found the saxifrage open, I observed that its leaves had been eaten con- siderably. 9 a.mM.— To Cliffs and thence by boat to Fair Haven. I see the scrolls of the ferns just pushed up, but yet wholly invested with wool. The sweet-fern has not yet blossomed; its anthers are green and close, but its leaves, just beginning to expand, are covered with high-scented, amber-like dots. Alder leaves begin to expand in favorable places. The viburnum (Lentago or nudum) leaves unexpectedly forward at the Cliff Brook and about Miles Swamp. I am not sure that I distinguish the nudum now, but suspect the other to be most forward. ‘Snakes are now common on warm banks. At Lee’s Cliff find the early cinquefoil. I think that the columbine cannot be said to have blossomed there before to-day, —the very earliest. A choke- cherry is very strongly flower-budded and considerably leaved out there. The early rose is beginning to leaf out. At Miles Swamp, benzoin will apparently open to-morrow, before any leaves begin. The creeping ju- niper appears to be now just in bloom. I see only the female flower. I sail back with a fair southwest wind. The water is strewn with myriads of wrecked shad-flies, erect on the surface, with their wings up like so many schooners all headed one way. What an abundance of food they must afford to the fishes! Now and then they try to fly, and fall on the water again. They apparently reach from one end of the river to the other, one to a square yard or two. The scleranthus is out and a tuft of that brownish-flowered kind of sedge. P. M. — Up Assabet by boat to Cedar Swamp. The earliest shrubs and trees to leaf have been thus far in this order: The earliest gooseberry (in garden and swamp), raspberries, thimble-berry (perhaps in favorable places only), wild red cherry (if that is one near Everett’s),! meadow-sweet, (red currant and sec- ond gooseberry, I think, here), sweet-fern (but is very slow to go forward), S. alba (April 27), and also a small dark native willow, young black cherry (if that is one in the cow-catcher, and others are as forward), choke-cherry, young shoots, viburnum (am not sure if Lentago is earlier than nudum; as both are leafing, put the Lentago first and nudum next), diervilla (if that light-stemmed plant on Island is it), barberry (perhaps in favorable places only), and some young apples in like places, alders (in favorable places), early rose. Saw two black ducks. Have seen no F. hyemalis for five or six days. Hear a golden-crested wren at Cedar Swamp. I think that I may have mistaken the note of the mrytle-bird for that of the creeper the other morning. A peetweet, and methinks I have heard it a day or two. I have seen Goodwin and Haynes all day hunting muskrats and ducks, stealthily paddling along the river- side or by the willows and button-bushes, now the river is so high, and shooting any rat that may expose him- self. In one instance a rat they had wounded looked exactly like the end of an old rider stripped of bark, as it lay just on the surface close to the shore within a few feet of them. Haynes would not at first believe it a muskrat only six or eight feet off, and the dog could not find it. How pitiful a man looks about this sport! Haynes reminded me of the Penobscots. Early starlight by riverside. The water smooth and broad. I hear the loud and incessant cackling of probably a pigeon woodpecker, — what some time since I thought to be a different kind. Thousands of robins are filling the air with their trills, mingling with the peeping of hylodes and ring- ing of frogs [sic]; and now the snipes have just begun their winnowing sounds and squeaks, and I hear Barrett’s sawmill beside; and whenever a gun fires, Wheeler’s peacock screams. The flowers of the larch which I examined on the 24th ult. have enlarged somewhat and may now certainly be considered in blossom, though the pollen is not quite distinct. I am not certain whether the 26th was not too early. The crimson scales of the female cones are still more conspicuous.

The cracks in the ground made by the frost last winter are still quite distinct. It is the young black cherry which is so forward now.

P. M. —In rain to Nawshawtuct. The river rising still. What I have called the small pewee on the willow by my boat, — quite small, utter- ing a short tchevet from time to time. Some common cherries are quite forward in leafing; say next after the black. The Pyrus arbutifolia, of plants I observed, would follow the cherry in leafing. It just begins to show minute glossy leaves. The meadow-sweet begins to look fairly green, with its little tender green leaves, making thin wreaths of green against the bare stems of other plants (this and the gooseberry), — the next plant in this respect to the earliest gooseberry in the garden, which appears to be the same with that in the swamp. I see wood turtles which appear to be full and hard with eggs. Yesterday I counted half a dozen dead yellow-spotted turtles about Beck Stow’s. There is a small dark native willow in the meadows as early to leaf as the S. alba, with young catkins. Anemone nemorosa near the ferns and the sassafras appeared yesterday. ‘The ferns invested with rusty wool (cin- namomea ?) have pushed up eight or ten inches and show some of the green leaf.

P. M.— To Boiling Spring, Laurel Glen, and Hubbard’s Close. I observe the following plants, leafing in about this order, to be added to the list of May Ist: — Elder has made shoots two or three inches long, — much more than any other shrub or tree, — but is not common enough to show. Possibly it should rank with or next to the goose- berry. Mountain-ash, larger leaves now than any tree, and the first tree to show green at a little distance. Cultivated cherry. Pyrus arbuttfolia. Horse-chestnut. Hazel just passing from buds to leaves. Late gooseberry in gardens. Early apples. Probably pears. Wild red cherry in woods. Dwarf or sand cherry. Hardhack. Diervilla near Laurel Glen (comes on fast after this).? Low blackberry. Some young red maple buds begin to expand. Against the wall in front of young Farrar’s house a scroll-shaped slender fern now three inches high; stem invested with narrow shining brown scales one third of an inch long. The Salix tristis now out (not out May Ist), appeared the 3d. The same of the sweet- fern. The red maple keys are now about three quar- ters of an inch long (with stems). I see no leaves on black, red, or shrub oaks now, —their buds expanding and showing a green or yellowish point,—but they still hang on the white oak. May 3d and 4th, it rained again, — especially hard the night of the 4th, — and the river is now very high, far higher than in any other freshet this year; will reach its height probably to-morrow. Heard what I should call the twitter and mew of a goldfinch' and saw the bird go over with ricochet flight. The oak leaves apparently hang on till the buds fairly expand. Thalictrum anemonoides by Brister’s Spring on hillside. Some skunk-cabbage leaves are now eight or nine inches wide near there. These and the hellebore make far the greatest show of any herbs yet. The peculiarly beautiful clean and tender green of the grass there! Green herbs of all kinds, — tansy, buttercups, etc., etc., etc., now make more or less show. Put this with the grassy season’s beginning. Have not observed a tree sparrow for four or five days. The Emerson children found blue and white violets May ist at Hubbard’s Close, probably V2ola ovata and blanda ; but I have not been able to find any yet. Salix alba.

P. M.— To epigzea via Clamshell Hill. There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, 7. e. to be signi- ficant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event. Senses that take cognizance of outward things merely are of no avail. It matters not where or how far you travel, —the far- ther commonly the worse, —but how much alive you are. If it is possible to conceive of an event outside to humanity,-it is not of the slightest significance, though it were the explosion of a planet. Every impor- tant worker will report what life there is in him. It makes no odds into what seeming deserts the poet is born. Though all his neighbors pronounce it a Sahara, it will be a paradise to him; for the desert which we see is the result of the barrenness of our experience. No mere willful activity whatever, whether in writing verses or collecting statistics, will produce true poetry or science. If you are really a sick man, it is indeed to be regretted, for you cannot accomplish so much as if you were well. All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love,—to sing; and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremities. It is a pity that this divine creature should ever suffer from cold feet; a still greater pity that the coldness so often reaches to his heart. I look over the report of the do- ings of a scientific association and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the tem- perature of blood-heat. It does n’t all amount to one rhyme. The ducks appear to be gone (though the water is higher than any time since that greatest of all rises, I think, —reached its height yesterday; the arches are quite concealed), swept by with the spring snow and ice and wind, though to-day it has spit a little snow and is very windy (northwest) and cold enough for gloves. Is not that the true spring when the F. hyemalis and tree sparrows are with us singing in the cold mornings with the song sparrows, and ducks and gulls are about? The Viola ovata this end of Clamshell Hill, perhaps a day or two; let it go, then, May Ist; also dandelions, perhaps the first, yesterday. This flower makes a great show, —a sun itself in the grass. How emphatic it is! You cannot but observe it set in the liquid green grass even at a distance. I am surprised that the sight of it does not affect me more, but I look at it as unmoved as if but a day had elapsed since I saw it in the fall. As I remember, the most obvious and startling flowers as yet have been the crowfoot, cowslip, and dandelion, so much of a high color against the russet or green. We do not realize yet so high and brilliant a flower as the red lily or arethusa. Horse-mint is an inch or two high, and it {is] refreshing to scent it again. The Equisetum sylva- ticum has just bloomed against Hosmer’s gap. It is the young shoots of the choke-cherry which are the more forward, — those which are not blos- som-budded, — and this is the case with most trees and shrubs. These are growing while the older are blossoming. Female flower of sweet-gale how long? At Ministerial Swamp, the anthers of the larch appear now effete. I am surprised to find a larch whose female cones are pure white (not rose or crimson). The bundles of larch leaves are now fairly separating. Meadow saxifrage just out at Second Division. The cowslip now makes a show there, though not elsewhere, and not there as much as it will. There is a large and dense field of a small rush there, already a foot high, whose old and dead tops look like blossoms at a dis- tance. The mayflower is in perfection. It has prob- ably been out more than a week. Returned over the hill back of J. P. Brown’s. Was surprised at the appearance of the flood. Seen now from the same side with the westering sun, it looks hke a dark-blue liquid like indigo poured in amid the hills, with great bays making up between them, flooding the causeways and over the channel of each tributary brook, — another Musketaquid making far inland. I see in the distance the light, feathery willow rows [?] on the causeway, stretching across it, the trees just blooming and coming into leaf, and isolated red-topped maples standing far in the midst of the flood. ‘This dark-blue water is the more interesting because it is not a permanent feature in the landscape. Those white froth lines conform to the direction of the wind and are from four to seven or eight feet apart. Remembering my voyage of May Ist, and Goodwin and Haynes hunting, you might have passed up and down the river three or four miles and yet not have seen one muskrat, yet they killed six at least. One in stern paddling slowly along, while the other sat with his gun ready cocked and the dog erect in the prow, all eyes constantly scanning the surface amid the but- ton-bushes and willows, for the rats are not easy to distinguish from a bunch of dried grass or a stick. Suddenly one is seen resting on his perch, and crack goes the gun, and over the dog instantly goes to fetch him. These men represent a class which probably always exists, even in the most civilized community, and allies it to the most savage. Goodwin said in the morning that he was laying stone, but it was so muddy on account of the rain that he told Haynes he would like to take a cruise out.

I have noticed the steel-colored, velvet-like lichen on the stumps of maples especially, also on oaks and hickories. .Sometimes, where a maple grove has been cut down some years, every stump will be densely clothed with them. Our principal rain this spring was April 28th, 29th, and 30th, and again, May 3d and 4th, apparently the settling storm of the season. ‘The great source of freshets far and wide. I observed the swallows yester- day, — barn swallows and some of those white-bellied with grayish-brown backs, — flying close to the surface of the water near the edge of the flooded meadow. Probably they follow their insect prey. P. M. — To Cliffs. The causeways being flooded, I have to think before I set out on my walk how I shall get back across the river. The earliest flowers might be called May-day flowers, — if indeed the sedge is not too far gone for one then. A white-throated sparrow still (in woods). Viburnum Lentago and nudum are both leafing, and I believe I can only put the former first because it flowers first. Cress at the Boiling Spring, one flower. As I ascend. Cliff Hill, the two leaves of the Solomon’s-seal now spot the forest floor, pushed up amid the dry leaves. Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum leafing. Flowers, e. g. wil- low and hazel catkins, are self-registering indicators of fair weather. I remember how I waited for the hazel catkins to become relaxed and shed their pollen, but they delayed, till at last there came a pleasanter and warmer day and I took off my greatcoat while survey- ing in the woods, and then, when I went to dinner at noon, hazel catkins in full flower were dangling from the banks by the roadside and yellowed my clothes with their pollen. If man is thankful for the serene and warm day, much more are the flowers. From the Cliffs I again admire the flood, — the now green hills rising out of it. It is dark-blue, clay, slate, and light-blue, as you stand with regard to the sun. With the sun high on one side it is a dirty or clayey slate; directly in front, covered with silvery sparkles far to the right or north, dark-blue; farther to the southwest, light-blue. My eyes are attracted to the level line where the water meets the hills now, in time of flood, con- verting that place into a virgin or temporary shore. There is no strand, — nothing worn; but if it is calm we fancy the water slightly heaped above this line, as when it is poured gently into a goblet. (How in the spring we value any smoothness, gentleness, warmth!) It does not beat, but simply laves the hills (already the peetweet flutters and teeters along it a flight fur- ther back), submerging the blossoming flowers which I went to find. I see the sweet-gale deeply buried, and the V. blanda, etc., etc., and the A. calyculata and the cowslips. I see their deluged faces at the bottom and their wrecked petals afloat. I paddle right over Miles’s meadow, where the bottom is covered with cow- slips in full bloom; their lustre dimmed, they look up with tearful faces. Little promontories at Lee’s Cliff, clothed with young pines, make into the water; yet they are rarely submerged; as if nature or the trees remembered even the highest floods and kept out of their way, avoiding the shore, leaving a certain neu- tral ground. Early strawberry just out. I found an Amelanchier Botryapvum, with its tender reddish-green leaves already fluttering in the wind and stipules clothed with white silky hairs, and its blossom so far advanced that I thought it would open to-morrow. But a little farther there was another which did not rise above the rock, but caught all the reflected heat, which to my surprise was fully open; yet a part which did rise above the rock was not open. What indicators of warmth! No thermometer could show it better. The Amelan- chier Botryapium leaves begin now to expand. The juniper branches are now tipped with yellowish and expanding leaf-buds; put it just before the larch. I begin to see cows turned out to pasture. I am inclined to think some of these are coarse, windy days, when I cannot hear any bird. What are those small ferns under the eaves of the rocks at the Cliffs, their little balls unrolling as they ascend, now three or four inches high? How many plants have these crimson or red stigmas? Maples, hazels, sweet-gale, sweet-fern. High blackberry leaf- ing. The leaves are now off the young oaks and shrub oaks on the plain below the Cliffs, except the white oaks, which leaf later. I noticed it elsewhere, — first May 5th, when — or a day or two before perhaps — they suddenly cast-off their winter clothing; and the plain now appears thinly covered with gray stems, but in a short month they will have put on a new green coat. They wear their leaves almost all the year. The partridge and rabbit must do without their shelter now a little while. A ruby-crested wren by the Cliff Brook, — a chubby little bird. Saw its ruby crest and heard its harsh note.'’ The birds I have described as such were the same. Hellebore is the most noticeable herb now. Alders, young maples of all kinds, and ostrya, etc., now beginning to leaf. I observe the phe- nomena of the seashore by our riverside, now that there is quite a sea on it and the meadow, though the waves are but eight inches or a foot high. As on the sea beach, the waves are not equally high and do not break with an equally loud roar on the shore; there is an interval of four or five or half a dozen waves between the larger ones. In the middle of the meadow, where the waves run highest, only the middle and highest parts of the waves are whitened with foam, where they are thinnest and yield to the wind apparently, while their broad bases are detained by union with the water; but next the shore, where their bases are much more detained | by friction on the bottom, their tops for their whole length curve over very regularly like a snow-drift, and the water is evenly poured as over a dam and falls with foam and a roar on the water and shore. It is exhila- rating to stoop low and look over the rolling waves northwest. The black rolling waves remind me of the backs of waves [sic ; = whales?]. It is remarkable how cleanly the water deposits its wreck, now spotted with cranberries. ‘There is a bare space of clean grass, per- fectly clean and about a foot wide, now left between the utmost edge of the breakers and the steep and abrupt edge of the wreck. So much it has gone down. Thus perfectly the water deposits what floats on it on the land. The oak buds — black, shrub, etc., except white oak — are now conspicuously swollen. A spread- ing red maple in bloom, seen against a favorable back- ground, as water looking down from a hillside, is a very handsome object, presenting not a dense mass of color but an open, graceful and ethereal top of light crimson or scarlet, not too obvious and staring, slightly tingeing the landscape as becomes the season, —a veil of rich workmanship and high color against the sky, or water, [or] other trees. At sunset across the flooded meadow to Nawshaw- tuct. The water becoming calm. The sun is just dis- appearing as I reach the hilltop, and the horizon’s edge appears with beautiful distinctness. As the twi- light approaches or, deepens, the mountains, those pil- lars which point the way to heaven, assume a deeper blue. As yet the aspect of the forest at a distance is not changed from its winter appearance, except where the maple-tops in blossom in low lands tinge it red. And the elm-tops are in fruit in the streets; and is there not [a] general but slight reddish tinge from ex- panding buds? Scared up ducks of some kind.