Log Search Results

Thoreau, the youth who writes this has implicit faith in your power of drawing inspirations from nature, in your thorough enjoyment of “Forest Life,” in your er for the eternal melodies that nature sounds forever, for the inner soul’s tympanum, if we will but remove the cotton wading which deadens and excludes them. But he has not faith in you ability to become an effective prophet and priest of this true worship, of the Divine in Nature, of the simply true you found us, (some dozens) clogged with custom, with the aggregated results of human contact, which may have been forced down to us, and upon us, through the centuries: for a moment as you came before use there seemed a glimpse to open (out of those clogging “clothes,” Carlyle, you know) into a lovely forest-land, where dwelt primitive simplicity, with the purest culture, intellectual and practical.

Ah, Thoreau, if you had left us with that hint, that one, it had been a suggestion to the advantage of our should [souls?]. But after, the crowd says (that is the same dozen say) that you winged but a stupid flight, on wings of Carlyle, or Emerson, through formless mist-clouds or smoke of burning brush-heaps, where snapped and crackled, wit or nonsense, as the case may be, and I am certain that you dropped us amid diagrams on Walden pond, upon that patch of cleared ground, barren to my apprehension of witty product, your Bean field—A as [sic] Thoreau, I’ve got the blues this morning. How is transcendentalism shop fallen. Simplicity, rurality is a drug on the market. Mechanism exults in the clank of machinery, on every back street mocks the mortified poet-philosopher. Routine triumphs; fine houses and furniture put on an elegantly impudent aspect; a philosopher having flatted out, philosophy may step in to the back-ground. We return with new zest to the “surface of things” and idly float on it [in] our light pleasant gondola not diving again for pearl-oysters in the next six months, I warrant me. [signed] Z.

  Apples and cherry trees begin to look green at a distance. I see the catkin of a female Populus tremuloides far advanced, i.e. become large like the willows. These low woods are full of the Anemone nemorosa, half opened at this hour and gracefully drooping,—sepals with a purple tinge on the under side, now exposed. They are in beds and look like hail on the ground, their now globular flowers spot the ground white . . .

  P.M.—To hill north of Walden.

  I smell the blossoms of the willows, the row of Salix alba on Swamp Bridge Brook, a quarter of a mile to windward, the wind being strong. There is a delightful coolness in the wind. Reduce neck-cloth. Nothing so harmonizes with this condition of the atmosphere—warm and hazy—as the dream of the toad . . .

  These are the warm-west-wind, dream-frog, leafing-out, willowy, haze days. Is not this summer, whenever it occurs, the vireo and yellowbird and golden robin being here ? The young birch leaves reflect the light in the sun . . .

  Looking at the birds at the Natural History Rooms, I find that I have not seen the crow blackbird at all yet this season . . .

  Sat on end of Long Wharf . . .

  Harris [Thaddeus William Harris] showed me a list of plants in Hovey’s Magazine (I think for ’42 or ’43) not in Bigelow’s Botany,—seventeen or eighteen of them, among the rest a pine I have not seen, etc., etc,. q.v . . .

  Planted melons.

  The black current will not bloom for five or six days. A large red maple just begun to leaf—its keys an inch and a half long—by Assabet Bridge. Castilleja show red,—one,—but will not blook under a week probably. The same of erigeron. Cornus alternifolia and paniculata begin to leaf. Scared up three quails in the stubble in G.M. Barrett’s orchard. . .

  See in Ludwigia palustris ditch on Hubbard’s land evidently toad-spawn already hatched, or flatted out . . . (Journal, 10:407-409).