Log Search Results

  A boy brought me what I take to be a very red Rana sylvatica, caught on the leaves the 6th . . .

  P.M.—To Flint’s Pond.

  It is a still, cloudy, thoughtful day . . .

  We sit by the shore of Goose Pond . . .

  “There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose present enhanced the beauty and ampleness of nature herself where they walked.”

  “A more copious air invests the fields and clothes with purple light, and they know their own sun and stars. They have the heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from under them; they look at the stars with an answering ray. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears are made to hear celestial sounds; the eyes to behold beauty not invisible. Did not he that made that which is within make that which is without also? May we not see God? It is but a thin soil where we stand. I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a wisp of straw, which reminded me of myself.”

  Hawthorne [Nathaniel Hawthorne] and family, Blake [H.G.O. Blake] and Brown [Theophilus Brown] from Worcester, J.T. Fields [James T. Fields] and wife and Alger [William Rounseville Alger] from Boston, and many of his townspeople and children of the schools attend the funeral. He is laid in the burying-ground back of the meeting house, near the North Primary School House.

  Afterwards interred in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, next to my lot and opposite Hawthorne’s.

  James P. Brown’s retired pond, now shallow and more than half dried up, seems far away and rarely visited, known to few, though not far off . . .

  Landed and walked over Conant’s Indian rye-field, and I picked up two good arrowheads . . . Went into the woods by Holden Swamp and sat down to hear the wind roar amid the tree-tops . . .

  Hitherto it had only rained a little from time to time, but now it began suddenly in earnest. We hastily rowed across to the firm ground of Fair Haven Hillside, drew up our boat and turned it over in a twinkling on to a clump of alders covered with cat-briars . . .

  A clear and beautiful day after frost.

  Looking over the meadow westward from Merrick’s Pasture Shore, I see the alders beyond Dodd’s, now quite bare and gray (maple-like) in the morning sun (the frost melted off, though I found a little ice on my boat-seat),—that true November sight,—ready to wear frost leaves and to transmit (so open) the tinkle of tree sparrows. How wild and refreshing to see these old black willows of the river-brink, unchanged from the first, which man has never cut for fuel or for timber! Only the muskrat, tortoises, blackbirds, bitterns, and swallows use them . . .

  Jacob Farmer says that he remembers well a particular bound (which is the subject of dispute between the above two men) from this circumstance: He, a boy, was sent, as the representative of his mother, to witness the placing of the bounds to her lot, and he remembers that, when they had fixed the stake and stones, old Mr. Nathan Barrett asked him if he had a knife about him, upon which he pulled out his knife and gave it to him. Mr. Barrett cut a birch switch and trimmed it in the presence of young Farmer, and then called out, “Boy, here’s your knife;” but as the boy saw that he was going to strike him when he reached his hand for the knife, he dodged into a bush which alone received the blow. And Mr. Barrett said that if it had not been for that, he would have got a blow which would have made him remember that bound as long as he lived, and explained to him that this was his design in striking him . . .