Log Search Results

  P.M.—Kossuth here.

  The hand-organ, when I am far enough off not to hear the friction of the machinery, not to see or be reminded of the performer, serves the grandest use for me, deepens my existence . . .

  P.M.—To Corner via Hubbard’s Bathing Place . . .

  A high blueberry by Potter’s heater piece . . .

  P.M.—To Saw Mill Brook . . .

  The willows on the Turnpike now resound with the hum of bees, and I hear the yellowbird and Maryland yellow-throat amid them . . .

  While at the Falls, I feel the air cooled and hear the muttering of distant thunder in the northwest and see a dark cloud in that direction indistinctly through the wood. That distant thunder-shower very much cools our atmosphere. And I make haste through the woods homeward via Hubbard’s Close. Hear the evergreen-forest note. The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird . . .

  Over meadows in boat at sunset to Island, etc.

  The rain is over. There is a bow in the east. The earth is refreshed; the grass is wet. The air is warm again and still. The rain has smoothed the water to a glassy smoothness. It is very beautiful on the water now . . .

   . . . It is surprising what an electrifying effect this shower appears to have had. It is like the christening of the summer, and I suspect that summer weather may be always ushered in in a similar manner,—thunder-shower, rainbow, smooth water, and warns night. A rainbow on the brow of summer. Nature has placed this gem on the brow of her daughter . . .

  Only the lower limbs of bass begin to leaf yet,—yesterday. A crow blackbird’s nest, about eight feet up a white maple over water,—a large, loose nest without, some eight inches high, between a small twig and main trunk, composed of coarse bark shreds and dried last year’s grass, without mud; within deep and size of a robin’s nest; with four pale-green eggs, streaked and blotched with black and brown. Took one. Young bird not begun to form . . .

 P.M.—To Andromeda Polifolia . . .

  I trod on a large black snake, which, as soon as I stepped again, went off swiftly down the hill toward the swamp, with head erect like a racer. Looking closely I found another left behind, partly concealed by the dry leaves. They were lying amid the leaves . . .

  I noticed the other day that the stump of the large oak at Clamshell Hill, cut down fifteen years ago or more, was quite rotten, while the trunk which lay by its side, having never been removed, was comparatively sound . . .

  P.M.—To Cedar Swamp up Assabet.

  There is at length a prospect of fair weather. It will clear up at evening this fourth clay of the rain. The river is nearly as lligli its it has been this spring . . .

  I leave my boat in Hosmer’s poke-logan and walk up the bank. A bluebird’s nest and five eggs in a hollow apple tree three feet from ground near the old bank swallow pit . . .

  E. Hosmer, as a proof that the river has been lower than now, says that his father, who was born about the middle of the last century, used to tell of a time, when he was a boy, when the river just below Derby’s Bridge did not run, and he could cross it dry-shod on the rocks, the water standing in pools when Conant’s mill (where the factory now is) was not running . . .

  I give you a little list of names of good men whom you may chance to see on your road. If you come into the neighborhood of any of them, I pray you to hand this note to them, by way of introduction, praying them, from me, not to let you pass by, without salutation, and any aid and comfort they can administer to an invalid traveler, one so dear and valued by me and all good Americans.

Yours faithfully

R. W Emerson