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Nathaniel Hawthorne writes to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

I will gladly come on Thursday. Thoreau is to be at my house, and I shall take the liberty to bring him with me, unless he has scruples about intruding on you. You would find him well worth knowing: he is a man of thought and originality; with a certain iron-poker-ishness, and uncompromising stiffness in his mental character, which is interesting, though it grows wearisome on close and frequent acquaintance.

(Hawthorne and his friends: Reminiscence and tribute, 28-29)

21 November 1850. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

I saw a herd of a dozen cows and young steers and oxen on Conantum this afternoon, running about and frisking in unwieldy sport like huge rats . . . As I looked on the Walden woods eastward across the pond [Fairhaven Pond], I saw suddenly a white cloud rising above their tops, now here, now there, marking the progress of the cars which were rolling toward Boston far below, behind many hills and woods.

(Journal, 2:106-108)

Thoreau also writes about this walk to Fairhaven Pond in his journal on 14 February 1851:

One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described, which made me say to myself that the landscape could not be improved. I did not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not know what these things can be; I begin to see such object only when I leave off understanding them, and afterwards remember that I did not appreciate them before. But I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands! What are these things? Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so reserved! We are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to ripple the water.

(Journal, 2:160-161)

21 November 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

y mother says that, visiting once at Captain Pulsifer’s at the North End, two sea-captains’ wives told the girl, when the things were carried out to be replenished, not to turn out their slops, as it would drown their husbands who were at sea.

Frank Brown showed me to-day the velvet duck (white winged coot) and the surf duck . . .

Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who lives where Hadley did, remembers when there were two or three times as many inhabitants in that part of the town as there are now . . .

(Journal, 3:126-128)

21 November 1852. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

1 was surprised this afternoon to find the river skimmed over in some places, and Fair Haven Pond one-third frozen or skimmed over, though commonly there is scarcely any ice to be observed along the shores . . .

(Journal, 4:413-414)

21 November 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

A fine misty rain all night and to-day . . .

Is not the dew but a humbler, gentler rain, the nightly rain, above which we raise our heads and unobstructedly behold the stars? The mountains are giants which tower above the rain, as we above the dew in the grass; it only wets their feet.

(Journal, 5:514-515)

21 November 1854. Philadelphia, Penn.

Thoreau lectures on “The Wild” at the Spring Garden Institute.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Looked from the cupola of the State-House, where the Declaration of Independence was declared . . . Was admitted into the building of the Academy of Natural Sciences by a Mr. Durand of the botanical department. Mr. [William Henry] Furness applying to him . . . In the narrow market-houses in the middle of the streets, was struck by the neat-looking women marketers with full cheeks . . .

(Journal, 7:73-75)

Philadelphia, Penn. The Philadelphia Public Ledger and Daily Transcript advertises:

Spring Garden Institute Lectures—The Second Lecture will be delivered on Tuesday Evening, 21st instant, at 7 1/2 o’clock, at the Institute Building, Broad and Spring Garden Sts., by Henry D. Thoreau, Esq. of Concord, Mass. Subject “The Wild.”

21 November 1857. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—Up Assabet.

Paddling along, a little above the Hemlocks, I hear, I think, a boy whistling upon the bank above me, but immediately perceive that it is the whistle of the locomotive a mile off in that direction. I perceived that it was distant, and therefore, the locomotive, the moment that the key was changed from a very high to a low one. Was it because distant sounds are commonly on a low key? . . .

(Journal, 10:193-195)

21 November 1858. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

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, etc . . . (Journal, 11:338-339).

21 November 1859. Concord, Mass.

Daniel Ricketson writes in his journal:

Left Mr. A’s [A. Bronson Alcott] hospitable roof after dinner to visit my friend Thoreau (Daniel Ricketson and His Friends, 313).

21 November 1860. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

If you cut a dense mixed wood of pine and oak in which no little pines have sown themselves, it is evident that a wood exclusively of oak sprouts may succeed, as I see is the case with part of R. W. E.’s hillside toward the pond . . .

P.M.—To Fair Haven Hill.

On what was Stow’s lot, southwest the Boiling Spring, adjacent to Wheeler’s field, I count the rings of four oak stumps which are from eighteen to twenty-two inches in diameter. They are all about 120, and the oaks are evidently all from the seed. This was both a pine and oak wood, and I suspect that about one hundred and twenty years [ago] pines were cut or burned or blown down or decayed there and these oaks succeeded . . .

(Journal, 14:255-257)

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