3 October 1859 – 9 October 1859

P. M. — To Bateman’s Pond; back by hog- pasture and old Carlisle road. Some faces that I see are so gross that they affect me like a part of the person improperly exposed, and it occurs to me that they might be covered, and, if necessary, some other, and perhaps better-looking, part of the person be exposed. It is somewhat cooler and more autumnal. A great many leaves have fallen and the trees begin to look thin. You incline to sit in a sunny and sheltered place. This season, the fall, which we have now entered on, com- menced, I may say, as long ago as when the first frost was seen and felt in low ground in August. From that time, even, the year has been gradually winding up its accounts. Cold, methinks, has been the great agent which has checked the growth of plants, condensed their energies, and caused their fruits to ripen, in September especially. Perchance man never ripens within the tropics.’ I see on a wall a myrtle-bird in its October dress, looking very much like a small sparrow. Also every- where about the edge of the woods this afternoon, sylvias rather large and of a greenish yellow above and beneath, perhaps white vent, and much dark brown above, getting their food on the white birches. The same in very distant places. Perhaps it is the birch louse they eat. What bird is this? ? It is quite unlike the sparrow-like myrtle-bird above described, unless some of them are of this color now. The Woodsia Ilvensis is partly withering or withered on the rocks, but not so much as the dicksonia. Yet it is evidently not evergreen. I see the ground strewn with Populus grandidentata leaves in one place on the old Carlisle road, where one third are fallen. These yellow leaves are all thickly brown-spotted and are very handsome, somewhat leopard-like. It would seem that they begin to decay in spots at intervals all over the leaf, producing a very pretty effect. Think of the myriad variously tinted and spotted and worm-eaten leaves which now combine to produce the general impression of autumn! The ground is here strewn with thousands, any one of which, if you carry it home, it will refresh and delight you to behold. If we have not the leopard and jaguar and tiger in our woods, we have all their spots and rosettes and stripes in our autumn-tinted leaves. The ash trees are at their height now, if not earlier. Many of their leaves have fallen. The dicksonia ferns by the old Carlisle road-side are now almost all withered to dark cinnamon, and the large cinnamon ferns in Buttrick’s wood are no longer noticed. Looking from the hog-pasture over the valley of Spencer Brook westward, we see the smoke rising from a huge chimney above a gray roof amid the woods, at a distance, where some family is preparing its evening meal. There are few more agreeable sights than this to ‘the pedestrian traveller. No cloud is fairer to him than that little bluish one which issues from the chimney. It suggests all of domestic felicity beneath. There be- neath, we suppose, that life is lived of which we have only dreamed. In our minds we clothe each unseen inhabit- ant with all the success, with all the serenity, which we can conceive of. If old, we imagine him serene; if young, hopeful. Nothing can exceed the perfect peace which reigns there. We have only to see a gray roof with its plume of smoke curling up amid the trees to have this faith. There we suspect no coarse haste or bustle, but serene labors which proceed at the same pace with the declining day. There is no hireling in the barn nor in the kitchen. Why does any distant prospect ever charm us? Because we instantly and inevitably im- agine a life to be lived there such as is not lived else- where, or where we are. We presume that success is the rule. We forever carry a perfect sampler in our minds. Why are distant valleys, why lakes, why moun- tains in the horizon, ever fair to us? Because we realize for a moment that they may be the home of man, and that man’s life may be in harmony with them. Shall I say that we thus forever delude ourselves? We do not suspect that that farmer goes to the depot with his milk. There the milk is not watered. We are constrained to imagine a life in harmony with the scenery and the hour. The sky and clouds, and the earth itself, with their beauty forever preach to us, saying, Such an abode we offer you, to such and such a life we encourage you. There is not haggard poverty and harassing debt. There is not intemperance, moroseness, meanness, or vulgarity. Men go about sketching, painting land- scapes, or writing verses which celebrate man’s oppor- tunities. To go into an actual farmer’s family at even- ing, see the tired laborers come in from their day’s work thinking of their wages, the sluttish help in the kitchen and sink-room, the indifferent stolidity and patient misery which only the spirits of the youngest children rise above, — that suggests one train of thoughts. To look down on that roof from a distance in an October evening, when its smoke is ascending peacefully to join the kindred clouds above, — that suggests a different train of thoughts. We think that we see these fair abodes and are elated beyond all speech, when we see only our own roofs, perchance. We are ever busy hiring house and lands and peopling them in our imaginations. There is no beauty in the sky, but in the eye that sees it. Health, high spirits, serenity, these are the great landscape-painters. Turners, Claudes, Rembrandts are nothing to them. We never see any beauty but as the garment of some virtue. Men love to walk in those picture-galleries still, because they have not quite for- gotten their early dreams. When I see only the roof of a house above the woods and do not know whose it is, I presume that one of the worthies of the world dwells beneath it, and for a season I am exhilarated at the thought. I would fain sketch it that others may share my pleasure. But commonly, if I see or know the occu- pant, 1 am affected as by the sight of the almshouse or hospital. Wild apples are perhaps at their height, or perhaps only the earlier ones. Those P. grandidentata leaves are wildly rich. So handsomely formed and floridly scalloped, to begin with, —a fine chrome yellow now richly spotted with dark brown like a leopard’s skin, — they cover the still green sward by the roadside and the gray road thick as a pave- ment, each one worthy to be admired as a gem or work of Oriental art. Among sound leaves I think of the fever-bush, Rhus radicans, beech, and shrub oak. It was mainly the frost of September 15 and 16 that put an end to the summer, that put the finishing stroke to the already withering grass, and left it to bleach in the fields, turning russet with blackberry vines intermixed, earlier than usual. The same frost suddenly cut off the mikania and browned the button-bushes, causing the upper leaves at length to fall. It must be the frost that ripens nuts, — acorns, for example, — browning them. Frost and cold paint the acorn and the chestnut. The hickory has spots with a central ring, evidently produced by an insect. Consider the infinite promise of a man, so that the sight of his roof at a distance suggests an idyll or pastoral, or of his grave an Elegy in a Country Church- yard. How all poets have idealized the farmer’s life! What graceful figures and unworldly characters they have assigned to them! Serene as the sky, emulating nature with their calm and peaceful lives. As I come by a farmer’s to-day, the house of one who died some two years ago, I see the decrepit form of one whom he had engaged to“‘carry through,” taking his property at a venture, feebly tying up a bundle of fagots with his knee on it, though time is fast loosening the bundle that heis. When I look down on that roof I am not reminded of the mortgage which the village bank has on that property, — that that family long since sold itself to the devil and wrote the deed with their blood. I am not reminded that the old man I see in the yard is one who has lived beyond his calculated time, whom the young one is merely “carrying through”’ in fulfillment of his contract; that the man at the pump is watering the milk. I am not reminded of the idiot that sits by the kitchen fire.

When I have made a visit where my ex- pectations are not met, I feel as if I owed my hosts an apology for troubling them so. If I am disappointed, I find that I have no right to visit them. I have always found that what are called the best of manners are the worst, for they are simply the shell without the meat. They cover no life at all. They are the universal slaveholders, who treat men as things. Nobody holds you more cheap than the man of man- ners. ‘They are marks by the help of which the wearers ignore you and remain concealed themselves. Are they such great characters that they feel obliged to make the journey of life incognito? Sailors swear; gentlemen make their manners to you. All men sympathize by their lower natures; the few, only, by their higher. The appetites of the mistress are commonly the same as those of her servant, but her society is commonly more select. The help may have some of the tenderloin, but she must eat it in the kitchen. P.M. — To Conantum. How interesting now, by wall-sides and on open springy hillsides, the large, straggling tufts of the dicksonia fern above the leaf-strewn greensward, the cold fall-green sward! They are unusually preserved about the Corner Spring, considering the earliness of this year. Long, handsome lanceolate green fronds, pointing in every direction, recurved and full of fruit, intermixed with yellowish and sere brown and shriv- elled ones. The whole clump, perchance, strewn with fallen and withered maple leaves and overtopped by now withered and unnoticed osmundas. Their lingering greenness so much the more noticeable now that the leaves (generally) have changed. They affect us as if they were evergreen, such persistent life and greenness in the midst of their own decay. I do not notice them so much in summer. No matter how much withered they are, with withered leaves that have fallen on them, moist and green they spire above them, not fearing the frosts, fragile as they are. ‘Their greenness so much the more interesting because so many have already fallen and we know that the first severer frost will cut off them too. In the summer greenness is cheap; now it 1s something comparatively rare and is the emblem of life to us. It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them. Not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose, for you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unprejudiced. You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. In what book is this world and its beauty described? Who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beauty? You have got to be in a different state from common. Your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are, and you will have no communication to make to the Royal Society. If it were required to know the position of the fruit-dots or the character of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so surely accomplished. In the one case, you take a sentence and analyze it, you decide if it is printed in large [sic] primer or small pica; if it is long or short, simple or compound, and how many clauses it is composed of; if the 1’s are all dotted, or some for variety without dots; what the color and com- position of the ink and the paper; and it is considered a fair or mediocre sentence accordingly, and you assign its place among the sentences you have seen and kept specimens of. But as for the meaning of the sentence, that is as completely overlooked as if it had none. This is the Chinese, the Aristotelean, method. But if you should ever perceive the meaning you would dis- regard all the rest. So far science goes, and it punc- tually leaves off there, — tells you finally where it is to be found and its synonyms, and rests from its labors. This is a fine and warm afternoon, Indian-summer- like, but we have not had cold enough before it. Birds are now seen more numerously than before, as if called out by the fine weather, probably many migrating birds from the north. I see and hear probably flocks of grackles with their split and shuffling note, but no red-wings for a long time; chip-birds (but with- out chestnut crowns; is that the case with the young ?), bay-wings on the walls and fences, and the yellow- browed sparrows. Hear the pine warblers in the pines, about the needles, and see them on the ground and on rocks, with a yellow ring round the eye (!), reddish legs, slight whitish bar on wings. Going over the large hill- side stubble-field west of Holden Wood, I start up a large flock of shore larks; hear their sveet sveet and sveet sveet sveet, and see their tails dark beneath. They are very- wary, and run in the stubble for the most part invisible, while one or two appear to act the sentinel on | rock, peeping out behind it perhaps, and give their note of alarm, when away goes the whole flock. Such a flock circled back and forth several times over my head, just like ducks reconnoitring before they alight. If you look with a glass you are surprised to see how alert these spies are. When they alight in some stubbly hollow they set a watch or two on the rocks to look out for foes. They have dusky bills and legs. The birds seem to delight in these first fine days of the fall, in the warm, hazy light, — robins, bluebirds (in families on the almost bare elms), phcoebes, and probably purple finches. I hear half-strains from many of them, as the song sparrow, bluebird, etc., and the sweet phe-be of the chickadee. Now the year itself begins to be ripe, ripened by the frost, like a persimmon.’ The maidenhair fern at Conantum is apparently un- hurt by frost as yet.

A. M. — To Boston. Examine the pigeon and sparrow hawks in the Natural History collection. My wings and tail are apparently the pigeon hawk’s. The sparrow hawks are decidedly red-brown with bluish heads and blue or slate sides; also are much more thickly barred with dark on wing-coverts, back, and tail than the pigeon hawk.

The pontederia seeds which I dropped into a pitcher of water have now mostly sunk. As the outside decays they become heavier than water.

P. M. — Boston. Read a lecture to Theodore Parker’s society. Aster cordifolius abundant and commonly in bloom in Roxbury. See the privet everywhere with dense pyramidal clusters of berries. Salsola kali common in bloom, with pretty crimson flowers. Chenopodium mariuimum perhaps in bloom. Senecio vulgaris still in bloom.