15 November 1858 – 21 November 1858

P. M. — To Grackle Swamp. A very fine snow falling, just enough to whiten the bare spots a little. I goto look for evergreen ferns before they are covered up.’ The end of last month and the first part of this is the time. I do not know that I find more than one kind now in that swamp, and of that the fertile fronds are mostly decayed. All lie flat, ready to be buried in snow. Slight as the snow is, you are now reminded occasion- ally in your walks that you have contemporaries, and perchance predecessors. I see the track of a fox which was returning from his visit to a farmyard last night, and, in the wood-path, of a man and a dog. The dog must have been a large one. I see their shadows before me. In another place, where the snow is so slight and lifted up on the withered grass that no track is left, I see by the cakes or balls of snow that have dropped from his shoes that aman has passed. This would be known for a man and a dog’s track in any part of the world. Five toes in a bundle, somewhat diamond-shape, form- ing a sort of rosette, are the print of the dog, whether on the sands of Africa or the snow of New England. The track of his master is somewhat more variable, yet re- ducible within certain limits. The Lycopodium dendroideum var. obscurum appears to be just in bloom in the swamp about the Hemlocks (the regular one (not variety) is apparently earlier), — later than the Lycopodium complanatum, which is done there. Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November; also the frost-weed and evergreen ferns. Buds and twigs (like gossamer), and the mazes made by twigs, and the silvery light on this down, and the silver-haired andropogon grass to the first half of November. The water andromeda leaves have fallen, and the per- sistent turned that red brown; how long?

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close. A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. The Cornus Canadensis is called by Loudon “a de- ciduous herbaceous plant,”’ the pyrolas “ever-green herbaceous plants.’” The bunchberry leaves are now little if any withered,’ but generally drooping, the four hanging together as is the habit of the sericea and florida, the lambkill, etc. The plant dies down to its perennial ¢ root each year, and a fresh one shoots up in the spring. You can see its pink bud already strongly formed. But this year’s plant is very slow to die, and I suspect many of the leaves remain green all winter under the snow. They are now generally purplish-tinged. Let me ob- serve in what respect the pyrolas are more evergreen. The new bud is formed between the present two leaves, the old leaves, lower on the stem or vine, being mostly decayed. There are many large limbs strewn about the woods, which were broken off by that strong southeast wind in peach time. These are now thickly leaved, the dead wood not being able to cast off the withered leaves; but the leaves having died thus prematurely are of a different color from that their companions changed to, — a pecu- har yellow-brown (2. e. chestnuts and oaks) with more or less green in it. I see a gray squirrel, eight or ten rods off in Hubbard’s large wood, scamper over the leaves and run up an oak. From the oak it crosses ascending into a tall white pine top, and there hes concealed, and I can see no more of him. The earth half covered with this slight snow, merely grayed with [it], is the more like the bare gray limbs of oak woods now, and such woods and the earth make the more uniform impression. Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our hand- somest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods. The mountain laurel, the Lycopodium dendroideum, complanatum, and lucidulum, and the terminal shield fern are also very interesting. Preaching? Lecturing? Who are ye that ask for these things? What do ye want to hear, ye puling in- fants? A trumpet-sound that would train you up to mankind, or a nurse’s lullaby? ‘The preachers and lec- turers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. It would be a relief to breathe one’s self occasionally among men. If there were any magnanimity in us, any grandeur of soul, anything but sects and parties undertaking to patronize God and keep the mind within bounds, how often we might encourage and provoke one another by a free expression! I will not consent to walk with my mouth muzzled, not till I am rabid, until there is danger that I shall bite the un- offending and that my bite will produce hydrophobia. Freedom of speech! It hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what those words mean. It is not leave given me by your sect to say this or that; it is when leave is given to your sect to withdraw. The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. I ask only that one fourth part of my honest thoughts be spoken aloud. What is it you tolerate, you church to-day? Not truth, but a lifelong hypocrisy. Let us have institutions framed not out of our rottenness, but out of our sound- ness. This factitious piety is like stale gingerbread. I would like to suggest what a pack of fools and cowards we mankind are. They want me to agree not to breathe too hard in the neighborhood of their paper castles. If I should draw a long breath in the neighborhood of these institutions, their weak and flabby sides would fall out, for my own inspiration would exhaust the air about them. The church! it is eminently the timid in- stitution, and the heads and pillars of it are constitu- tionally and by principle the greatest cowards in the community. The voice that goes up from the monthly concerts is not so brave and so cheering as that which rises from the frog-ponds of the land. The best “ preach- ers,’ so called, are an effeminate class; their bravest thoughts wear petticoats. If they have any manhood they are sure to forsake the ministry, though they were to turn their attention to baseball. Look at your edi- tors of popular magazines. I have dealt with two or three the most liberal of them. They are afraid to print a whole sentence, a round sentence, a free-spoken sen- tence. They want to get thirty thousand subscribers, and they will do anything to get them. ‘They consult the D.D.’s and all the letters of the alphabet before printing a sentence.’ I have been into many of these cowardly New England towns where they profess Christianity, — invited to speak, perchance, — where they were trembling in their shoes at the thought of the things you might say, as if they knew their weak side, — that they were weak on all sides. The devil they have covenanted with is a timid devil. If they would let their sores alone they might heal, and they could to the wars again like men; but in- stead of that they get together in meeting-house cellars, rip off the bandages and poultice them with sermons. One of our New England towns is sealed up her- metically like a molasses-hogshead, — such is its sweet Christianity, — only a little of the sweet trickling out at the cracks enough to daub you. The few more lib- eral-minded or indifferent inhabitants are the flies that buzz about it. It is Christianity bunged up. I see aw- ful eyes looking out through a bull’s-eye at the bung- hole. It is doubtful if they can fellowship with me. The further you go up country, I think the worse it is, the more benighted they are. On the one side you will find a barroom which holds the “ Scoffers,”’ so called, on the other a vestry where is a monthly concert of prayer. There is just as little to cheer you in one of these com- panies as the other. It may be often the truth and right- eousness of the barroom that saves the town. There is nothing to redeem the bigotry and moral cowardice of New-Englanders in my eyes. You may find a cape which runs six miles into the sea that has not a man of moral courage upon it. What is called faith is an im- mense prejudice. Like the Hindoos and Russians [ ? ] and Sandwich-Islanders (that were), they are the crea- tures of an institution. They do not think; they ad- here like oysters to what their fathers and grandfathers adhered to. How often is it that the shoemaker, by thinking over his last, can think as valuable a thought as he makes a valuable shoe? I have been into the town, being invited to speak to the inhabitants, not valuing, not having read even, the Assembly’s Catechism, and I try to stimulate them by reporting the best of my experience. I see the craven priest looking round for a hole to escape at, alarmed because it was he that invited me thither, and an awful silence pervades the audience. They think they will never get me there again. But the seed has not all fallen in stony and shallow ground. The following are our shrubby evergreen plants (not including Contfere):1 — Mitchella repens Linnsea Andromeda Poltfolia Cassandra calyculata Mayflower Checkerberry Mountain laurel Lambkill Kalmia glauca Labrador tea Common cranberry European cranberry To which I will add the herbaceous: — Chimaphila umbellata maculata N. B. — Rubus hispidus leaves last through the win- ter, turning reddish.’ It is no compliment to be invited to lecture before the rich Institutes and Lyceums. The settled lecturers are as tame as the settled ministers. The audiences do not want to hear any prophets; they do not wish to be stimulated and instructed, but entertained. ‘They, their wives and daughters, go to the Lyceum to suck a sugar- plum. The little of medicine they get is disguised with sugar. It is never the reformer they hear there, but a faint and timid echo of him only. They seek a pass- time merely. Their greatest gunsand sons of thunder are only wooden guns and great-grandsons of thunder, who give them smooth words well pronounced from manu- scripts well punctuated, — they who have stolen the little fire they have from prophets whom the audience would quake to hear. They ask for orators that will entertain them and leave them where they found them. The most successful lecturing on Washington, or what-not, is an awful scratching of backs to the tune, it may be, of fifty thousand dollars. Sluggards that want to have a lullaby sung to them! Such manikins as I have described are they, alas, who have made the greatest stir (and what a shallow stir) in the church and Lyceum, and in Congress. They want a medicine that will not interfere with their daily meals. There is the Lowell Institute with its restrictions, re- quiring a certain faith in the lecturers. How can any free- thinking man accept its terms? It is as if you were to resolve that you would not eat oysters that were not of a particular faith, — that, for instance, did not believe the Thirty-Nine Articles, —for the faith that is in an oyster is just as valuable as the faith referred to in Mr. Lowell’s will. These popular lecturers, our preachers, and maga- zines are for women and children in the bad sense. The curators have on their lists the names of the men who came before the Philomathean Institute in the next large town and did no harm; left things 2n statu quo, so that all slept the better for it; only confirmed the audi- ence in their previous badness; spoke a good word for God; gave the clergy, that heavy set, a lift; told the youngsters to be good boys. A man may have a good deal to say who has not any desk to thump on, who does not thunder in bad air. They want all of a man but his truth and independ- ence and manhood. One who spoke to their condition would of course make them wince, and they would retaliate, 7. e. kick him out, or stop their ears. The cold weather which began on the 12th, with the snow of the 13th and since, suddenly killed the few re- maining living leaves, without any exceptions to speak of. Most foreign plants at once dropped their leaves, though pretty thick before, but there are many still on the privet. The sweet-fern in some places has still many green, more than any indigenous shrub or tree, though far the greater part of them (the sweet-ferns) are bare or withered. Probably the larch about fallen.

The ground has remained frozen since the morning of the 12th. P. M. — Up Assabet. The polypody on the rock is much shrivelled by the late cold. The edges are curled up, and it is not nearly so fair as it was ten days ago. I see a small botrychium in the swampy wood west of river, opposite Emerson’s field, quite fresh, not at all injured. The musquash are more active since the cold weather. I see more of them about the river now, swimming back and forth across the river, and diving in the middle, where I lose them. They dive off the round-backed, black mossy stones, which, when small and slightly ex- posed, look much like themselves. In swimming show commonly three parts with water between. One sitting in the sun, as if for warmth, on the opposite shore to me looks quite reddish brown. ‘They avail themselves of the edge of the ice now found along the sides of the river to feed on. Much Lycopodium complanatum did not shed pollen on the 3d, and the Lycopodiwm dendroideum var. ob- scurum sheds it only within a very few days‘ (was ap- parently in its prime yesterday). So it would seem that these lycopodiums, at least, which have their habitat on the forest floor and but lately attracted my attention there (since the withered leaves fell around them and revealed them by the contrast of their color and they emerged from obscurity), — it would seem that they at the same time attained to their prime, their flowering season. It was coincident with this prominence.’ Leaving my boat, I walk through the low wood west of Dove Rock, toward the scarlet oak. The very sun- light on the pale-brown bleached fields is an interesting object these cold days. I naturally look toward [it] as to a wood-fire. Not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and of mind to appreciate different objects at different seasons. I see one thing when it is cold and another when it is warm. Looking toward the sun now when an hour high, there being many small alders and birches between me and it for half a dozen rods, the light reflected from their twigs has the appearance of an immense cobweb with closely concentric lines, of which I see about one fourth, on account of the upward curve of the twigs on each side, and the light not being reflected to me at all from one side of the trees directly in front of me. The light is thus very pleasantly diffused. We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us. Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, shortly after, the sun ap- pearing but a point above the sweet-fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare downy twigs of this plant in a surprising manner which would not be believed if described. It was quite like the sunlight re- flected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. Yet in an ordinary light these are but dark or dusky looking twigs with scarcely a noticeable downiness. Yet as I saw it, there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left. A myriad of surfaces are now prepared to reflect the light. This is one of the hundred silvery lights of November. The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights” would be a theme for me. I am surprised to see a stake-driver fly up from the weeds within a stone’s throw of my boat’s place. It drops its excrement from thirty feet in the air, and this falling, one part being heavier than another, takes the form of a snake, and suggests that this may be the origin of some of the stories of this bird swallowing a snake or eel which passed through it. Nature is moderate and loves degrees. Winter is not all white and sere. Some trees are evergreen to cheer us, and on the forest floor our eyes do not fall on sere brown leaves alone, but some evergreen shrubs are placed there to relieve the eye. Mountain laurel, lambkill, checker- berry, wintergreen, etc., etc., etc., and a few evergreen ferns scattered about keep up the semblance of summer still. As for the evergreen ferns, I see now — Common polypody (though shrivelled by cold yee exposed). Asplenium trichomanes. A. ebeneum. Aspidium spinulosum (?), large frond, small-fruited, in swamp southeast Brister’s Spring, on 16th. A. cristatum (?), Grackle Swamp on the 15th, with oftener what I take to be the narrower and more open sterile frond. A. marginale (common). A. achrostichoides (terminal shield). The first one and the last two are particularly hand- some, the last especially, it has so thick a frond.

P. M. — To Conantum. Notice the short bright-yellow willow twigs on Hub- bard’s Causeway. They are prominent now, first, be- cause they are bare; second, because high-colored al- ways and [because of] this rarity of bright colors at pre- sent; third, because of the clear air and November light. For the same reason I notice nowadays the red twigs of the silky cornel by the river. The black willow twigs are tawny in the mass, almost cinnamon. The fruitless enterprise of some persons who rush helter-skelter, carrying out their crazy scheme, —merely “putting it through,” as they phrase it, — reminds me of those thistle-downs which, not being detained nor steadied by any seed at the base, are blown away at the first impulse and go rolling over all obstacles. They may indeed go fastest and farthest, but where they rest at last not even a thistle springs. I meet these useless barren thistle-downs driving over the fields. They re- mind me of busy merchants and brokers on ’change doing business on credit, gambling with fancy stocks, that have failed over and over again, assisted to get a-going again to no purpose,— a great ado about no- thing, — all in my eye, — with nothing to deposit, not of the slightest use to the great thistle tribe, not even tempting a jackass. When you right or extricate one of these fellows and set him before the wind again, it is worth the while to look and see if he has any seed of suc- cess under him. Such a one you may know afar — he floats more slowly and steadily — and of his enterprise expect results. Am surprised to see Fair Haven Pond completely frozen over during the last four days. It will probably open again. ‘Thus, while all the channel elsewhere is open and a mere edging of ice amid the weeds is seen, this great expansion is completely bridged over, thus early. Some mocker-nuts, and I think some hickories, on Conantum are not yet bare. Their withered leaves hold on almost like the oaks. Now is the time to gather the mocker-nuts. I go along under the east side of Lee’s Cliff, looking at the evergreen ferns. The marginal fern is the common- est. How pretty the smallest asplenium sometimes, in a recess under a shelving rock, as it were pinned on rosettewise, as if it were the head of a breastpin. I look south from the Cliff. The westering sun just out of sight behind the hill. Its rays from those bare twigs across the pond are bread and cheese to me. So many oak leaves have fallen that the white birch stems are more distinct amid the young oaks; I see to the bone. See those brave birches prepared to stand the winter through on the hillsides. They never sing, “ What’s this dull town to me?” The maples skirting the meadows (in dense phalanxes) look like light infantry advanced for a swamp fight. Ah, dear November, ye must be sacred to the Nine surely.’ The early willow catkins already peep out a quarter of an inch. Early crowfoot is reddened at Lee’s.

P. M. — Mocker-nutting, to Conantum. The lambkill and water andromeda are turned quite dark red where much exposed; in shelter are green yet. Those long mocker-nuts appear not to have got well ripe this year. ‘They do not shed their husks, and the meat is mostly skinny and soft and flabby. Perhaps the season has been too cold. I shook the trees. It is just the time to get them. How hard they rattle down, like stones! There is a harmony between this stony fruit and these hard, tough limbs which bear it. I was sur- prised to see how much the hickory-tops had been bent and split, apparently by ice, tough as they are. They seem to have suffered more than evergreens do. ‘The husks of one tree scarcely gaped open at all, and could not be removed. I did not think at first why these nuts had not been gathered, but I suspect it may be because Puffer, who probably used to get them, has committed suicide.

P. M. — To Ministerial Swamp. I have seen more gray squirrels of late (as well as musquash); I think not merely because the trees are bare but because they are stirring about more, — nut- ting, etc. Martial Miles tells me of a snapping turtle caught in the river at Waltham, about October Ist, he thinks, which weighed fifty-five pounds (?). He sawit. There were two fighting. He says that a marsh hawk had his nest in his meadow several years, and though he shot the female three times, the male with but little delay returned with a new mate. He often watched these birds, and saw that the female could tell when the male was coming a long way off. He thought that he fed her and the young all together (?). She would utter a scream when she perceived him, and, rising into the air (before or after the scream ?), she turned over with her talons uppermost, while he passed some three rods above, and caught without fail the prey which he let drop, and then carried it to her young. He had seen her do this many times, and always without failing. The common milkweed (Asclepias Cornuti) and some thistles still discounting. I go across the great Tony Wheeler pasture. It is a cool but pleasant November afternoon. The glory of November is in its silvery, sparkling lights. I think it is peculiar among the months for the amount [of] sparkling white light reflected from a myriad of sur- faces. The air is so clear, and there are so many bare, polished, bleached or hoary surfaces to reflect the light. Few things are more exhilarating, if it is only moderately cold, than to walk over bare pastures and see the abun- dant sheeny light like a universal halo, reflected from the russet and bleached earth. The earth shines perhaps more than in spring, for the reflecting surfaces are less dimmed now. It is not a red but a white light. In the woods and about swamps, as Ministerial, also, there are several kinds of twigs, this year’s shoots of shrubs, which have a slight down or hairiness, hardly perceptible in ordinary lights though held in the hand, but which, seen toward the sun, reflect a cheering silvery light. Such are not only the sweet-fern, but the hazel in a less degree, alder twigs, and even the short huckleberry twigs, also lespedeza stems. It is as if they were covered with a myriad fine spiculz which reflect a dazzling white light, exceedingly warming to the spirits and imagination. This gives a character of snug warmth and cheerfulness to the swamp, as if it were a place where the sun con- sorted with rabbits and partridges. Each individual hair on every such shoot above the swamp is bathed in glowing sunlight and is directly conversant with the day god. The cinnamon-brown of withered pinweeds (how long ?) colors whole fields. It may be put with the now paler brown of hardhack heads and the now darker brown of the dicksonia fern by walls. . I notice this afternoon that the pasture white oaks have commonly a few leaves left on the lower limbs and also next the trunk. Winter-rye is another conspicuous green amid the withered grass fields. The rubuses are particularly hardy to retain their leaves. Not only low blackberry and high blackberry leaves linger still fresh, but the Rubus hispidus leaves last all winter like an evergreen. The great round-leaved pyrola, dwarf cornel, checkerberry, and lambkill have a lake or purplish tinge on the under side at present, and these last two are red or purplish above. It is singular that a blush should suffuse the under side of the thick- leaved pyrola while it is still quite green above. When walnut husks have fairly opened, showing the white shells within, — the trees being either quite bare or with a few withered leaves at present, — a slight jar with the foot on the limbs causes them to rattle down in a perfect shower, and on bare, grass-grown pasture ground it is very easy picking them up. As I returned over Conantum summit yesterday, just before sunset, and was admiring the various rich browns of the shrub oak plain across the river, which seemed to me more wholesome and remarkable, as more perma- nent, than their late brilliant colors, I was surprised to see a broad halo travelling with me and always opposite the sun to me, at least a quarter of a mile off and some three rods wide, on the shrub oaks. The rare wholesome and permanent beauty of with- ered oak leaves of various hues of brown mottling a hillside, especially seen when the sun is low, — Quaker colors, sober ornaments, beauty that quite satisfies the eye. The richness and variety are the same as before, the colors different, more incorruptible and lasting.’ Sprague of Cohasset states to the Natural History Society, September Ist, 58, that the light under the tail of the common glow-worm “remained for 15 minutes after death.” Who are bad neighbors? They who suffer their neighbors’ cattle to go at large because they don’t want their ill will,—are afraid to anger them. They are abettors of the ill-doers. Who are the religious? They who do not differ much from mankind generally, except that they are more con- servative and timid and useless, but who in their con- versation and correspondence talk about kindness of Heavenly Father. Instead of going bravely about their business, trusting God ever, they do like him who says “Good sir” to the one he fears, or whistles to the dog that is rushing at him.” And because they take His name in vain so often they presume that they are better than you. Oh, their religion is a rotten squash.

P. M. — To Hubbard’s place. See small water-bugs in Nut Meadow Brook in one place. Probably they were not to be found in the late cold weather, 12th, 13th, ete. See from Clamshell apparently two little dippers, one up-stream, the other down, swimming and diving in the perfectly smooth river this still, overcast day. Probably the bulk of the scarlet oak leaves are fallen. I find very handsome ones strewn over the floor of Pot- ter’s maple swamp. They are brown above, but still purple beneath. These are so deeply cut and the middle and lobes of the leaf so narrow that they look like the remnant of leafy stuff out of which leaves have been cut, or like scrap-tin. The lobes are remarkably sharp- pointed and armed with long bristles. Yes, they lie one above another like masses of scrap-tin.’