Log Search Results

  P.M.—To Walden.

  Storm drawing to a close. Crickets sound much louder after the rain in this cloudy weather . . .

  Paddled round the pond . . . Both fishes and plants are clean and bright, like the element they live in. Viewed from a hilltop, it is blue in the depths and green in the shallows, but from a boat it is seen to be a uniform dark green . . .

  Topping corn now reveals the yellowing pumpkins. Dangle-berries very large in shady copses now; seem to love wet weather; have lost their bloom. Aster undulatus. The decurrent gnaphalium has not long shown yellow. Perhaps I made it blossom a little too early.

  September is at hand; the first month (after the summer heat) with a burr to it, month of early frosts; but December will be tenfold rougher. January relents for a season at the time of its thaw, and hence that liquid r in its name.

  I am surprised to find the brook and ditches in Hubbard’s Close remarkably full after this long drought, when so many streams are dried up. Rice and others are getting out mud in the pond-hole opposite Breed’s. They have cut down straight through clear black muck, perfectly rotted, eight feet, and it is soft yet further. Button-bushes, andromeda, proserpinaca, hardhack, etc., etc., grow atop. It looks like a great sponge. Old trees buried in it. On the Walden road some maples are yellow and some chestnuts brownish-yellow and also sere . . .  As I go up Pine Hill, gather the shrivelled Vaccinium vacillans berries, many and good, and not wormy like huckleberries. Far and more abundant in this state than usual, owing to the drought . . .

  Unusually cold last night . . .

  The cardinals in this ditch make a splendid show now,though they would have been much fresher and finer a week ago. They nearly fill the ditch for thirty-five rods perfectly straight, about three feet high. I count at random ten in one square foot, and as they are two feet wide by thirty-five rods, there are four or five thousand at least . . .

   Detected a, to me, new kind of high blackberry on the edge of the cliff beyond Conant’s wall on Lee’s ground,—a long-peduncled (or pedicelled), leafy-racemed (somewhat panicced), erect blackberry. It has the aspect of R. Canadensis become erect, three or four feet high. The racemes (or panicles?) leafy, with simple ovate and broad-lanceolate leaves; loose, few flowered (ten or twelve); peduncles (or pedicels) one to two or more inches long, often branched, with bracts midway, in fruit, at least, drooping. Perhaps the terminal flowers open first . . .

  I see round-leaved cornel fruit on Heywood Peak, now half China-blue and half white, each berry . . . (Journal, 11:129).

  What were those insects, some winged, with short backs and say Half an inch long, others wingless and shorter, like little coils of brass wire (so marked), in dense droves together on trees and fences,—apparently harmless,—especially a week or ten days ago? . . .

  What is often called poverty, but which is a simpler and truer relation to nature, gives a peculiar relish to life, just as to be kept short gives us an appetite for food . . .

  Clear weather within a day or two after the thick dogdays. The nights have been cooler of late, but the heat of the sun by day has been more local and palpable . . . (Journal, 14:64-65).