Log Search Results | The Walden Woods Project

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—To Walden . . .

Went down to the pond-hole behind where I used to live. It is quite full of water. The middle or greater part is densely covered with target leaves, crowding one another and curling up on their edges . . .

I find many high blueberries, quite fresh, overhanging the south shore of Walden . . .

(Journal, 11:145-146)

5 September 1859. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Spent a part of the forenoon in the woods in the northwest part of Acton, searching for a stone suitable for a millstone for my lead-mill (Journal, 12:316).

Thoreau also writes to E.G. Dudley:

E. G. Dudley Esq.

Dear Sir

I will read a lecture to your company on the 9th of October, for the compensation named. I should prefer, however, to bring one which I call “Life Misspent,” instead of “Autumnal Tints.”

Yrs truly
Henry D. Thoreau

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 557; MS, Brown University, Providence, R.I.)

5 September 1860. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

P.M.—To Ball’s Hill . . .

Having walked through a quantity of desmodium under Ball’s Hill, by the shore there (Marilandicum or rigidum), we found our pants covered with its seeds to a remarkable and amusing degree. These green scales closely covering and greening my legs reminded me of the lemna on a ditch . . .

(Journal, 14:73-74)

5 September 1861.

Daniel Ricketson writes in his journal:

Clear and fine. Left Concord at 8 ½ A.M., my friend T. accompanying me to the depot; introduced to young Horace Mann, Mr. T.’s late companion to Minnesota; arrived home to dinner. I think T. seemed improving when I left him at Concord. Dr. D[enniston], though he faithfully examined his case, was unable to awaken in T. an interest in his mode of treating disease by the water practice. The Doctor kindly invited T. to come to Northhampton and stop a fortnight as a guest with him; discouraged his going to the West Indies. I hope T. may be improving and need no Doctor or absence from home.

(Daniel Ricketson and His Friends, 320-321)

6 and 7 October 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

Windy. Elms bare (Journal, 5:436).

6 April 1840. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes to David Greene Haskins (The Correspondence (2013, Princeton), 1:65; MS missing).

6 April 1843. Cambridge, Mass.

William Ellery Channing writes to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Now O! man of many lectures, behold that although I have rented a shanty, yet as it is fixed in the huge entrails of a march, how shall I, one admiring dryness, fly with draggled wings, into my soggy abode? Shall not als “water-rats,” Shylock-wise, possess the soul of the Red Lodge, in patience? Think of it, how the red eyes of the summer-rejoicing Juno shall convert this great puddle of the Lodge, into an ascending, Elijah-like mantle, to steam me and mine, into atmospheres most heavenly? But come, see also how no Trojan-horse waggon, proposes to absorb into its vast belly, all my goods & chattels, how Prometheus like, I am chained to these dun University shades! Strike; as with the blow of thunder, the Anacreontic, Basque-student Thoreau, and let him, like Tennyson’s white owl, warm his five wits, in profitable conjectures, about these affairs. In the Postscript, I shall put down —– doubted.

I hear, with regret, that our man of the world—Thoreau, fleeing afar from the beloved woods, will no longer pick the first of the Spring flowers,—Alas! yet I do believe, that his voyage will be prosperous, & that his bark will sweep the foam off many a new coast, & bring home a bushel of diamonds.

(Studies in the American Renaissance 1989, 185-186)

Channing attaches the following with his letter to Emerson:

My Dear Thoreau

I leave with you a schedule of repairs & improvements, to be made on the Red Lodge before I move into it, & upon the place generally.

Cellar, sand put in enough to make it dry—under-pinned with stone, pointed inside & out. New cellar stairs to be put.

Bank to be made round the house, round well, & in woodshed. (This is to [be] sodded after planting.)

House interior. Kitchen-floor painted, & the woodwork of the kitchen. All the plastering white-washed. Lock to be put on front-door. Glass reset where broken. New sill put to front-door & back-door, & steps if necessary. Leaky place about chimney, caused by pinning tip the house, to be made tight,—A new entry laid at front door.

Washroom—to be white-washed—& a spout made from sink long enough to carry off dirty water, so as to keep it from running into well.

Well. To be cleaned out, inner stones reset (as I understand the Captain told you originally)—an outside wall to be built up, high enough to keep out all wash; this outside wall to be filled round. A new pump to be put in & to pump up good, clean, fresh water.

The Acre to be measured, & fenced around with a new four rail fence. The acre to be less wide than long.

Privy.—To be moved from where it is now, behind tbc end of the barn, the filth carried off, & hole filled in. The privy to be whitewashed & have a new door, & the floor either renewed or cleaned up.—

Barn. (not done at once as I understood) New sill, & pinned up, so as to make it dry.

(The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 96-97)

6 April 1849. New Bedford, Mass.

New Bedford Daily Mercury reprints the New-York Daily Tribune article of 2 April (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1995, 172).

6 April 1852.

Concord, Mass. Thoreau writes in his journal:

Last night a snow-storm, and this morning we find the ground covered again six or eight inches deep—and drifted pretty badly beside. The conductor in the cars, which have been detained more than an hour, says it is a dry snow up-country. Here it is very damp.

(Journal, 3:392)

Boston, Mass. Thoreau lectures on “Life in the Woods” at Cochituate Hall (“Life in the Woods (II)“).

Thomas Wentworth Higginson later recalls the lecture:

The scene of the lecture was to be a small hall in a court . . . opening form Tremont street, opposite King’s Chapel, the hall itself being leased by an association of young mechanics, who had a reading-room opening out of it. The appointed day ushered in a furious snow-storm before which the janitor of the building retreated in despair, leaving the court almost blockaded. When Thoreau and I ploughed through, we found a few young mechanics reading newspapers; and when the appointed hour came, there were assembled only Mr. [Amos Bronson] Alcott, Dr. Walter Channing and at most three or four ticket-holders. No one wished to postpone the affair and Mr. Alcott suggested that the thing to be done was to adjourn to the reading-room, where, he doubted not, the young men would be grateful for the new gospel offered; for which he himself undertook to prepare their minds. I can see him now, going from one to another, or collecting them in little groups and expounding to them, with his lofty Socratic mien, the privileges they were to shar. “This is his life, this is his book; he is to print it presently; I think we shall all be glad, shall we not, either to read his book or to hear it?” Some laid down their newspapers, more retained them; the lecture proved to be one of the most introspective chapters from “Walden.” A few went to sleep, the rest rustled their papers; and the most vivid impression which I retain from the whole enterprise is the profound gratitude I felt to one auditor (Dr. Walter Channing), who forced upon me a five-dollar bill towards the expenses of the disastrous entertainment.

(Brains, no. 1 (December 1981):105)

Boston, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal and includes a clipping from an unidentified periodical:

Thoreau is here, and reads his lecture this evening, and passes the night with me.

Mr. Thoreau’s Lecture.—Those of our readers who wish to hear something fresh and invigorating in literature, should not fail to attend this evening at Cochituate Hall. No subject suits Mr. Thoreau better, as a text, than Life in the Woods, and perhaps no man in the world is better qualified form disposition and experience, to treat that subject profitably. Conventionalisms have about as much influence over him, as over a forest tree or the birds in its branches. And as with his freshness of thought he unites a rare maturity of scholarship, he can entertain any one who is not muffled in more than ordinary dullness.

(MS, Amos Bronson Alcott Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.)

Boston, Mass. Thoreau checks out Sylva, or a discourse of forest trees by John Evelyn from the Boston Society of Natural History (Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 24 (March 1952):24).

6 April 1853. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

6 A. M.—To Cliffs . . .

Now, 8.30 A. M., it rains . . .

P. M.—To Second Division Brook. Near Clamshell Hill, I scare up in succession four pairs of good-sized brown or grayish-brown ducks . . . I see, in J. P. Brown’s field, by Nut Meadow Brook, where a hen has been devoured by a hawk probably . . . Returning by Harrington’s, saw a pigeon woodpecker flash away . . . The robins, too, now toward sunset, perched on the old apple trees in Tarbell’s orchard, twirl forth their evening lays unweariedly.

(Journal, 5:93-98)

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