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  About 8 P.M.—To Cliffs, moon half full.

  As I go up the back road, I hear the loud ringing creak of crickets, louder singers on each apple tree by the roadside, with an intermittent pulsing creak. Not THe sound of a bird all the way to the woods. How dark the shadows of the pines and oaks fall across the woodland path! There is a new tree, another forest in the shadow. It is pleasant walking in these forest paths, with heavy darkness on one side and a silvery moonlight on the oak leaves on the other, and again, when the trees meet overhead, to tread the checkered floor of finely divided light and shade . . .

  Now I sit on the Cliffs and look abroad over the river and Conantum hills. I live so much in my habitual thoughts, a routine of thought, that I forget there is any outside to the globe, and am surprised when I behold it as now—yonder hills and river in the moonlight . . .

  August has been thus dog-days, rain, oppressive sultry heat, and now beginning fall weather . . .

  P.M.—Clematis Brook via Conantum . . . The Solidago nemoralis now yellows the dry fields with its recurved standard as little more than a foot high,—marching in the woods to the Holy Land, a countless host of crusaders. That field in the woods near Well Meadow, where I once thought of squatting, is full of them . . . I am again struck by the perfect correspondence of a day—say an August day—and the year. I think that a perfect parallel may be drawn between the seasons of the day and of the year. Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring . . .

  Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicines. In August live on berries, not dried meats and pemmican, as if you were on shipboard making your way through a waste ocean, or in a northern desert. Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons . . . Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn.  Drink of each season’s influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your special use. The vials of summer never made a man sick, but those which he stored in his cellar. Drink the wines, not of your bottling, but Nature’s bottling; not kept in goat-skins or pig-skins, but the skins of a myriad fair berries. Let Nature do your bottling and your pickling and preserving. For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her. With the least inclination to be well, we should not be sick. Men have discovered—or think they have discovered—the salutariness of a few wild things only, and not of all nature. Why, “nature” is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.  Some men think they are not well in spring, or summer, or autumn, or winter; it is only because they are not well in them . . .

  I improve the dry weather to examine the middle of Gowing’s Swamp . . .  Next comes, half a dozen rods wide, a dense bed of Andromeda calyculata,—the A. Polifolia mingled with it,—the rusty cotton-grass, cranberries,—the common and also V. Oxycoccus,—pitcher-plants, sedges, and a few young spruce and larch here and there,—all on sphagnum, which forms little hillocks about the stems of the andromeda . . .

  I see a bed of Antennaria margaritacea, now in its prime, by the railroad, and very handsome. It has fallen outward on all sides ray-wise, and rests on the ground, forming [a] perfectly regular circle, four feet in diameter and fifteen inches high, with a dark ash-colored centre, twenty inches in diameter, composed of the stems, then a wide circumference, one foot or more broad, of dense pearly masses of flowers covered with bees and butterflies . . .

  Hear the mole crickets nowadays. Collinsonia (very little left) not out (Journal, 10:9).

  Emerson [Ralph Waldo Emerson] says that he and Agassiz [Louis Agassiz] and Company broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! . . .

  Channing, [William Ellery Channing] thinking of walks and life in the country, says, ‘You don’t want to discover anything new, but to discover something old,’ i.e. be reminded that such things still are . . .