2 November 1857 – 8 November 1857

P. M.— To Bateman’s Pond. Row up Assabet as far as the Pokelogan, thence on foot. It is very pleasant and cheerful nowadays, when the brown and withered leaves strew the ground and al- most every plant is fallen or withered, to come upon a patch of polypody on some rocky hillside in the woods, —as in abundance on hillside between Calla Swamp and Bateman’s Pond, and still more same hillside east of the callas, — where, in the midst of the dry and rustling leaves, defying frost, it stands so freshly green and full of life. The mere greenness, which was not remarkable in the summer, is positively interest- ing now. My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. The brakes, the sar- saparilla, the osmundas, the Solomon’s-seals, the lady’s- slippers have long since withered and fallen. The huckle- berries and blueberries, too, have lost their leaves. The forest floor is covered with a thick coat of moist brown leaves. But what is that perennial and spring- like verdure that clothes the rocks, of small green plumes pointing various ways? It is the cheerful community of the polypody. It survives at least as the type of vegetation, to remind us of the spring which shall not fail. ‘These are the green pastures where I browse now. Why is not this form copied by our sculp- tors instead of the foreign acanthus leaves and bays? The sight of this unwithering green leaf excites me like red at some seasons. Are not the wood frogs the philosophers who walk (?) in these groves?? Methinks I imbibe a cool, composed, frog-like philosophy when I behold them. I don’t care for acanthus leaves; they are far-fetched. I do love this form, however, and would like to see it painted or sculptured, whether on your marble or my butter. How fit for a tuft about the base of a column! I come to a black snake in the wood-path, with its crushed head resting on a stone and its uninjured body trailing thence. How often I see where thus some heel has bruised the serpent’s head! I think it an unnatural antipathy. Crossed over that high, flat-backed rocky hill, where the rocks, as usual thereabouts, stand on their edges, and the grain, though usually running northeasterly and southwesterly, — by compass east-northeast, west- southwest, —is frequently kinked up in a curious manner, reminding me of a curly head. Call the hill Curly-pate. Bateman’s Pond is agitated by the strong wind, — a slate-colored surface under the cloudy sky. I find some good blue pearmains under their tree in a swamp, amid the huckleberry bushes, etc., all fallen. They lie with a rich bloom on them still, though half of them are gnawed by squirrels or rabbits; low in the sedge, with decayed leaves adhering to them. How contagious are boys’ games! A short time ago they were spinning tops, as I saw and heard, all the country over, Now every boy has a stick curved at the end, \- a hawkie (?), in his hand, whether in yards or in distant lanes I meet them. The evergreen ferns and lycopodiums now have their day; now is the flower of their age, and their greenness is appreciated. They are much the clearest and most liquid green in the woods, more yellow and brown specked in the open places. The form of the polypody is strangely interesting; it is even outlandish. Some forms, though common in our midst, are thus perennially foreign as the growths of other latitudes; there being a greater interval between us and their kind than usual. We all feel the ferns to be further from us, essentially and sympathetically, than the phenogamous plants, the roses and weeds, for instance. It needs no geology nor botany to assure us of that. We feel it, and told them of it first. The bare outline of the polypody thrills me strangely. It is a strange type which I cannot read. It only piques me. Simple as it is, it is as strange as an Oriental char- acter. It is quite independent of my race, and of the Indian, and all mankind. It is a fabulous, mythologi- cal form, such as prevailed when the earth and air and water were inhabited by those extinct fossil creatures that we find. It is contemporary with them, and affects as the sight of them. As I stood on Curly-pate, the air had become grad- ually thick with mist in the southwest. The sky was overcast, and a cool, strong wind blew from the same quarter, and in the mist I perceived the strong scent of smoke from some burning. Standing on one of those curly-headed rocks, whose strata are vertical, gives me a sense of elevation like a mountain-top. In fact, they are on the axis of elevation. There are no fresh — or blue — fringed gentians by the swamp-side by Bateman’s now. Wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy now and are chiefly fallen. Returning, I see the red oak on R. W. E.’s shore reflected in the bright sky water. In the reflection the tree is black against the clear whitish sky, though as I see it against the opposite woods it is a warm green- ish yellow. But the river sees it against the bright sky, and hence the reflection is like ink. The water tells me how it looks to it seen from below. I think that most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river’s bank, or paddle along its stream, without seeing the reflections. Their minds are not abstracted from the surface, from surfaces generally. It is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections. I am aware often that I have been occupied with shallow and commonplace thoughts, looking for something super- ficial, when I did not see the most glorious reflections, though exactly in the line of my vision. If the fisher- man was looking at the reflection, he would not know when he had a nibble! I know from my own experi- ence that he may cast his line right over the most elysian landscape and sky, and not catch the slightest notion of them. You must be in an abstract mood to see reflections however distinct. I was even startled by the sight of that reflected red oak as if it were a black water-spirit. When we are enough abstracted, the opaque earth itself reflects images to us; 2. e., we are imaginative, see visions, etc. Such a reflection, this inky, leafy tree, against the white sky, can only be seen at this season. The water is falling fast, and I push direct over the meadow this evening, probably for the last time this fall, scraping the cranberry vines and hummocks from time to time with my flat-bottomed boat.

P. M.— To the Easterbrooks moraine via Ponkawtasset-top. Islands, pale-brown grassy isles, are appearing again in the meadow as the water goes down. From this hilltop, looking down-stream over the Great Mead- ows away from the sun, the water is rather dark, it being windy, but about the shores of the grassy isles is a lighter-colored smooth space. Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen. There is a wild pear tree on the east side of Ponkaw- tasset, which I find to be four and a half feet in cir- cumference at four feet from the ground. Looking westward now, at 4 p. M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of a maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a pheno- menon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig, but the latter often curve upward more than the other. I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, — robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month. Follow up the Boulder Field northward, and it ter- minates in that moraine. As I return down the Boulder Field, I see the now winter-colored — 2. e. reddish (of oak leaves) — horizon of hills, with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, between two of the boulders, which are a dozen rods from me, a dozen feet high, and nearly as much apart, — as a landscape between the frame of a picture. But what a picture- frame! ‘These two great slumbering masses of rock, reposing like a pair of mastodons on the surface of the pasture, completely shutting out a mile of the hori- zon on each side, while between their adjacent sides, which are nearly perpendicular, I see to the now puri- fied, dry, reddish, leafy horizon, with a faint tinge of blue from the distance. To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! I want no other gilding to my picture-frame. ‘There they lie, as perchance they tumbled and split from off an iceberg. What better frame could you have? The globe itself, here named pasture, for ground and foreground, two great boulders for the sides of the frame, and the sky itself for the top! And for artists and subject, God and Nature! Such pictures cost nothing but eyes, and it will not bankrupt one to own them. They were not stolen by any conqueror as spoils of war, and none can doubt but they are really the works of an old master. What more, pray, will you see between any two slips of gilded wood in that pasture you call Europe and browse in sometimes? It is singular that several of those rocks should be thus split into twins. Even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and par- allel, having a path between them. It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it! And yet I suppose they are considered an incumbrance only by the owner. I came along the path that comes out just this side the lime-kiln. Coming by Ebby Hubbard’s thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. It seems, then, that no wood is so dense but that the rays of the setting sun may penetrate twenty rods into it. The other day (November Ist), I stood on the sunny side of such a wood at the same season, or a little earlier. Then I saw the lit sides of the tree stems all aglow with their lichens, and observed their black shadows behind. Now I see chiefly the dark stems massed together, and it is the warm sunlight that is reduced to a pencil of light; 2. e., then light was the rule and shadow the exception, now shadow the rule and light the exception. I notice some old cow-droppings in a pasture, which are decidedly pink. Even these trivial objects awaken agreeable associations in my mind, connected not only with my own actual rambles but with what I have read of the prairies and pampas and Eastern land of grass, the great pastures of the world.

P. M.— To Pine Hill via Spanish Brook. I leave the railroad at Walden Crossing and follow the path to Spanish Brook. How swift Nature is to repair the damage that man does! When he has cut down a tree and left only a white-topped and bleed- ing stump, she comes at once to the rescue with her chemistry, and covers it decently with a fresh coat of gray, and in course of time she adds a thick coat of green cup and bright cockscomb lichens, and it be- comes an object of new interest to the lover of nature! Suppose it were always to remain a raw stump instead! It becomes a shell on which this humble vegetation spreads and displays itself, and we forget the death of the larger in the life of the less. I see in the path some rank thimble-berry shoots covered with that peculiar hoary bloom very thickly. It is only rubbed off in a few places down to the purple As 3 acta SPW skin, by some passing hunter perchance. It is a very singular and delicate outer coat, surely, for a plant to wear. I find that I can write my name in it with a pointed stick very distinctly, each stroke, however fine, going down to the purple. It is a new kind of enamelled card. What is this bloom, and what purpose does it serve? Is there anything analogous in animated nature? It is the coup de grace, the last touch and perfection of any work, a thin elysian veil cast over it, through which it may be viewed. It is breathed on by the artist, and thereafter his work is not to be touched without injury. It is the evidence of a ripe and com- pleted work, on which the unexhausted artist has breathed out of his superfluous genius, and his work looks through it as a veil. If it is a poem, it must be invested with a similar bloom by the imagination of the reader. It is the subsidence of superfluous ripeness. Like a fruit preserved in its own sugar. It is the handle by which the imagination grasps it. I frequently see a spreading pitch pine on whose lower and horizontal limbs the falling needles have lodged, forming thick and unsightly masses, where anon the snow will collect and make a close canopy. The evergreens, with their leaves, are, of course, more likely to catch this litter than the deciduous trees, and the pines especially, because their lower branches are oftener horizontal and flat, beside being unyielding to the wind. Robins build there. I notice the new and as yet unswollen scales of willow catkins or buds (the first [?] by the pond) quite yellow in the sun, but nearer I find that half are turned black. The evergreen ferns and lycopodiums, etc., on the forest floor, though partly fallen, represent the ever- green trees among humbler plants. I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees ex- tend wholly across its length, or half a mile, —I sit high. The sun is once or twice its diameter above the horizon, and the mountains north of it stand out grand and distinct, a decided purple. But when I look critically, I distinguish a whitish mist — such is the color of the denser air — about their lower parts, while their tops are dark-blue. (So the mountains too have a bloom on them; and is not the bloom on fruits equivalent to that blue veil of air which dis- tance gives to many objects?) I see one glistening reflection on the dusky and leafy northwestern earth, seven or eight miles off, betraying a window there, though no house can be seen. It twinkles incessantly, as from a waving surface. This, probably, is the un- dulation of the air. Now that the sun is actually set- ting, the mountains are dark-blue from top to bottom. As usual, a small cloud attends the sun to the por- tals of the day and reflects this brightness to us, now that he is gone. But those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly! They are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way.

P. M. — To the Dam Meadows. But little corn is left in the field now, and that looks rather black. There is an abundance of cat-tail in the Dam Meadows. Returning, talked with Minott. He told me how he and Harry Hooper used to go to Howard’s meadow (Heywood’s, by the railroad) when it was flowed and kill fishes through the ice. ‘They would cut a long stick and go carefully over the ice when it was only a couple of inches thick, and when they saw a fish, strike the ice smartly, cracking it in all directions, right over him, and when he turned his belly, being stunned, would cut him out quickly before he came to. These were little fishes which he called “ prods.” He did n’t know much more about them. They were somewhat like a small pout, but had different heads. They got so many once that he told Harry to cut a stick and string them and they’d give them to Zilpha as they went by. He has caught pickerel in the brook there which weighed two or three pounds. He went to Bateman’s Pond once in the winter to catch minnows with a net through the ice, but did n’t get any. He went—rode—with Oliver Williams first into Acton and then round to this pond on this errand. Minott was rather timid. One day early in the winter he had been over to Fair Haven Hill after a fox with John Wyman, but they didn’t get him. The pond was frozen about two inches thick, but you could easily see the water through the ice, and when they came back, Wyman said he was going straight across because it was nearer, but Minott objected. But Wyman told him to follow; it was safe enough. Minott followed half a dozen rods and then decided that he would n’t risk it and went back; he’d go ten miles round sooner than cross. “But,” said Minott, “the fellow kept on and I’ll be hanged if he did n’t get safe across.”’ The pitch pines generally have lost their leaves now, and the larches are fast falling. The elms have been bare some time. Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting to it, — as those polypodies. The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. That is a mere re- flecting surface. It is not the polypody in my pitcher or herbarium, or which I may possibly persuade to grow on a bank in my yard, or which is described in botanies, that interests me, but the one that I pass by in my walks a little distance off, when in the right mood. Its influence is sporadic, wafted through the air to me. Do you imagine its fruit to stickto the back of the leaf all winter? At this season polypody is in the air.’ It is worth the while to walk in swamps now, to bathe your eyes with greenness. The terminal shield fern is the handsomest and glossiest green. Start up a snipe feeding in a wet part of the Dam Meadows. I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the pheno- menon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you. The important fact is its effect on me. He thinks that I have no busi- ness to see anything else but just what he defines the rainbow to be, but I care not whether my vision of truth is a waking thought or dream remembered, whether it is seen in the light or in the dark. It is the subject of the vision, the truth alone, that concerns me. ‘The philosopher for whom rainbows, etc., can be explained away never saw them. With regard to such objects, I find that it is not they themselves (with which the men of science deal) that concern me; the point of interest is somewhere between me and them (2. e. the objects)... . And where does your Eastern stuff go to?’ Whose houses does it build? It has built Bangor, and what is the precise value of Bangor, omitting the lumber on its wharves? Western stuff is good enough for me. I think that this craving a better material than we de- serve, and wasting what we get, is the secret of bank- ruptcy. And what is it, after all, but lumber? I do not wish to see any more poor men in rich houses. I would rather see one rich man in a poor house. No more cripples on stilts... . For a man to pride himself on this kind of wealth, as if it enriched him, is as ridiculous as if one strug- gling in the ocean with a bag of gold on his back should gasp out, “I am worth a hundred thousand dollars!” I see his ineffectual struggles just as plainly, and what it is that sinks him.

Very warm but rather cloudy weather, after rain in the night. Wind southwest. Thermometer on north of the house 70° at 12 m. Indian summer. The cocks crow in the soft air. They are very sensi- tive to atmospheric changes. P. M. — To Curly-pate via old Carlisle road. Stedman Buttrick tells me that Dr. Ripley used to have his pork packed with the best pieces at the top of the barrel, and when some parishioner wondered at it, that he should thus eat these first, he answered that when packed thus the topmost were the best all the way through. He said that his grandfather lived in the Jarvis house, and that the other old house whose upper story projected over the lower like the Hunt house, and which I saw in the picture of Concord Fight, stood close to his own house, and he pulled it down when he was sixteen. I passed through that chestnut wood in the hollow southeast of Curly-pate. Turning over the wet chestnut leaves in the hollows, looking for nuts, I found a red- backed salamander, between three and four inches long, bluish-gray beneath (Salamandra erythronota). It jerked itself about in a lively manner, trying to hide itself under the leaves, and would quickly slip out of my fingers. Its motions appeared to partake of those of a snake and a frog, — between a squirm and a hop. It was not particularly swift, yet, from the character of the motion and its glossiness, it was glancing. A dozen rods further I turned [up] another, very similar but without a red back, but rather slightly clay-colored. I did not observe any transverse bands; else it might be the S. fasciata. When I came out on to the old Carlisle road in the dusk on my return, I saw Brooks Clark coming home- ward, with his axe in his hand and both hands behind his back, being bent almost double. He said he was over eighty. Some years ago he bought some land up that way, and, the birches having sprung up there, he called it his birch pasture. ‘There was enough birch wood there to carry him through the winter, and he was now cutting it. He remembered when they began to burn lime there, and bought the right to get out stone of Easterbrooks more than sixty years ago. It was Peter Barrett that began it. ‘The lime sold for $5.00 a cask (larger casks than now). But the stone was difficult to get out. He remembers seeing the mowers at work in the meadow where Stedman But- trick’s handsome pine and maple wood is, seventy years ago, and where there was a large old chestnut by the roadside there, which being cut, two sprouts came up which have become the largest chestnut trees by the wall now. As for the yellow birch cellar-hole, Ephraim Brown told him that old Henry Flint (an ancestor of Clark’s wife) dug it, and erected the frame of a house there, but never finished it, selling out, going to live by the river. It was never finished. Clark’s father told him that he remembered when there were no fences between his house and Lawrence’s; it was all open. This road was the new one; the bridle-road the old one. Minott is a very pleasing figure in nature. He improves every scenery, — he and his comrades, Harry Hooper, John Wyman, Oliver Williams, etc. If he gets intoa pond- hole he disturbs it no more than a water-spirit for me.

You will sometimes see a sudden wave flow along a puny ditch of a brook, inundating all its shores, when a musquash is making his escape beneath. He soon plunges into some hole in the bank under water, and all is still again. P. M. — To Bateman’s Pond with R. W. E. Stedman Buttrick, speaking of R. W. E.’s cow that was killed by lightning and not found for some days, said that they heard a “bellering” of the cows some days before they found her, and they found the ground much trampled about the dead cow; that that was the way with cows in such cases; if such an accident happened to one of their number, they would have spells of gathering around her and “bellering.” Minott adorns whatever part of nature he touches; whichever way he walks he transfigures the earth for me. If acommon man speaks of Walden Pond to me, I see only a shallow, dull-colored body of water without reflections or peculiar color, but if Minott speaks of it, I see the green water and reflected hills at once, for he has been there. I hear the rustle of the leaves from woods which he goes through. This has been another Indian-summer day. Ther- mometer 58° at noon.

A warm, cloudy, rain-threatening morning. About 10 a. m. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest, or parallel with the gen- eral direction of the coast and great mountain-ranges. The sonorous, quavering sounds of the geese are the voice of this cloudy air, — a sound that comes from directly between us and the sky, an aerial sound, and yet so distinct, heavy, and sonorous, a clanking chain drawn through the heavy air. I saw through my window some children looking up and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and I knew at once that the geese were in the air. It is always an exciting event. The children, instinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. These travellers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. And though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the clank of a chain in a neighboring stithy. So they mi- grate, not flitting from hedge to hedge, but from lati- tude to latitude, from State to State, steering boldly out into the ocean of the air. It is remarkable how these large objects, so plain when your vision is rightly directed, may be lost in the sky if you look away for a moment, — as hard to hit as a star with a telescope. It is a sort of encouraging or soothing sound to assuage their painful fears when they go over a town, as a man moans to deaden a physical pain. The direction of their flight each spring and autumn reminds us in- landers how the coast trends. In the afternoon I met Flood, who had just endeavored to draw my attention to a flock of geese in the mizzling air, but encounter- ing me he lost sight of them, while I, at length, looking that way, discerned them, though he could not. This was the third flock to-day. Now if ever, then, we may expect a change in the weather. P. M. — To the swamp in front of the C. Miles house. The great white pines on the hill south of it were cut, apparently last winter. I count on two stumps about one hundred and twenty-five rings, and the sap averages in each case about three inches thick. In a thick white pine wood, as in that swamp at the east end, where the ground is level, the ground now (and for some time) is completely covered with a carpet of pale-brown leaves, completely concealing the green mosses and even some lycopodiums. The effect is exactly as [if] a uniform pale-brown matting had been spread over the green and russet floor. It is even sooth- ing to walk over this soft and springy bed. How si- lently and unobserved by most do these changes take place! This additional warm maiting is tucked about their roots to defend them from the frost. It is inter- esting to see the green of mosses peeping out here and there. You hear only the soft crisped sound of sinking needles under your feet. I find in the swamp there by the larches the Kalmia glauca, good specimens. I have no doubt that a good farmer, who, of course, loves his work, takes exactly the same kind of plea- sure in draining a swamp, seeing the water flow out in his newly cut ditch, that a child does in its mud dikes and water-wheels. Both alike love to play with the natural forces. There is quite a ravine by which the water of this swamp flows out eastward, and at the bottom of it many prinos berries are conspicuous, now apparently in their prime. These are appointed to be an ornament of this bare season between leaves and snow. ‘The swamp-pink’s large yellowish buds, too, are conspicu- ous now. I see also the swamp pyrus buds, expanded sometimes into small leaves. ‘This, then, is a regular phenomenon. It is the only shrub or tree that I know which so decidedly springs again in the fall, in the Indian summer. It might be called the Indian-summer shrub. The clethra buds, too, are decidedly expanded there, showing leafets, but very small. Some of the new pyrus leaves are nearly full-grown. Would not this be a pretty device on some hale and cheery old man’s shield, — the swamp pyrus unfolding its leaves again in the fall? Every plant enjoys some preémi- nence, and this is its. The most forward to respond to the warmer season. How much spring there is in it! Its sap is most easily liquefied. It takes the least sun and mildness to thaw it and develop it. It makes this annual sacrifice of its very first leaves to its love for the sun. While all other shrubs are reserved, this is open and confiding. I see it not without emotion. I too have my spring thoughts even in November. This I see in pleasant October and November days, when rills and birds begin to tinkle in winter fashion through the more open aisles of the swamps. I do not know exactly what that sweet word is which the chickadee says when it hops near to me now in those ravines. The chickadee Hops near to me. When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. We give our attention to nearer ob- jects, being less distracted from them. I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot. What a difference it makes between two ravines in other respects exactly similar that in the one there is a stream which drains it, while the other is dry! I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of robins, etc., where some hawk or beast of prey has torn them to pieces. I step over the slip-noose snares which some wood- ling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits? Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too. The day after never, we will have an explanation.