Log Search Results

  P.M.—To Cliffs.

  Frog or toad spawn in a pool in long worm-like or bowel-like strings, sometimes coiled up spirally.

  It is fine clear atmosphere, only the mountains blue. A slight seething but no haze. Shall we have much of this weather after this ? There is scarcely a flock of cloud in the sky. The heaven is now broad and open to the earth in these longest days. The world can never be more beautiful than now, for, combined with the tender fresh green, you have this remarkable clearness of the air . . . .

  At evening the water is quite white, reflecting the white evening sky, and oily smooth. I see the willows reflected in it, when I cannot see their tops in the twilight against the dark hillside . . .

  Huckleberry. Now for the tassels of the shrub oak; I can find no pollen yet about them . . .

  High winds all day racking the young trees and blowing off blossoms.

  Large devil’s-needle. Sassafras well open. How long? Celtis will probably shed pollen to-morrow; shoots already an inch long. Sorrel pollen. First veery strain. Green-briar leafed several days. Veronica serpyllifolia well out (how long?) at Ash Bank Spring. Saw the yellow-legs feeding on shore. Legs not bright-yellow. Goes off with the usual whistle . . .

  R. W. E.’s black currant (which the wild Ribes floridum is said to be much like), maybe a day.

  R. W. E. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] says that Agassiz tells him he has had turtles six or seven years, which grew so little, compared with others of the same size killed at first, that he thinks they may live four or five hundred years.

  P.M.—To Kalmia Swamp.

  Go across fields from R. W. E.’s to my boat at Cardinal Shore. In A. Wheeler’s stubble-field west of Deep Cut, a female (?) goldfinch on an oak, without any obvious black, is mewing incessantly, the note ending rather musically . . .

  The swamp is all alive with warblers about the hoary expanding buds of oaks, maples, etc., and amid the pine and spruce. They swarm like gnats now. They fill the air with their little tshree tshree sprayey notes . . .

  Pratt says he saw the first rhodora and cultivated pear out yesterday. Many are now setting out pines and other evergreens, transplanting some wildness into the neighborhood of their houses . . .

  The proofs, for which I did ask in the note which accompanied the ms, would have been an all sufficient “Bulletin.”

  I was led to suppose by Mr Emerson’s account,—and he advised me to send immediately—that you were not always even one month ahead. At any rate it was important to me that the paper be disposed of soon.

  I send by express this morning the remainder of the story—of which allow me to ask a sight of the proofs.

  Yrs. truly
  Henry D. Thoreau

  The creak of the cricket has been common on all warm, dry hills, banks, etc., for a week,—inaugurating the summer . . . (Journal, 13:300-301).