Henry David Thoreau

“ How handsome the leaves of the shrub oak, so clear and unspotted a green, so firm and enduring, glossy, uninjured by the wind, meed for mighty conquerors, lighter on the under-side, which contrast is important. . . . It must be the cuckoo that makes that half-throttled sound at night, for I saw one while he made it this morning, as he flew from an apple-tree when I disturbed him.—Those white water-lilies, what boats! I toss one into the pan half unfolded, and it floats upright like a boat. It is beautiful when half open, and also when fully expanded. ”

“ How impressive this artillery of the heavens! It rises higher and higher. At length the thunder seems to roll quite across the sky and all round the horizon, even where there are no clouds, and I row homeward in haste. How by magic the skirts of the cloud are gathered about us, and it shoots forward over our head, and the rain comes at a time and place which baffles all our calculations. Just before it the swamp white oak in Merrick's pasture was a very beautiful sight, with its rich shade of green, its top, as it were, incrusted with light. ”

“ So I cannot walk longer in those fields of Enna in which Proserpine amused herself gathering flowers.
The steam whistle at a distance sounds even like the hum of a bee in a flower. So man's works fall into Nature. The flies hum at mid-afternoon, as if peevish and weary at the length of the days. The river is shrunk to summer width, on the sides smooth, whitish water, or rather it is the light from the pads; in the middle, dark blue or slate, rippled. The color of the earth at a distance where a wood has been cut off is a reddish brown. ”

“ Here is a large meadow full of it, and yet very few in the town have ever seen it. It is startling to see a leaf thus brilliantly painted, as if its tip were dipped into some scarlet tincture, surpassing most flowers in intensity of color.
Seen from Anursnack the woods now appear full-leafed, smooth green, no longer hoary, and the pines a dark mulberry, not green. But you are still covered with lint as you go through the copses. Summer begins when the hoariness disappears from the forest as you look down on it, and gives place thus to smooth green, full and universal. ”

“ The pincushion galls on young white oaks are now among the most beautiful objects in the woods,—coarse, woolly, white, spotted with bright red or crimson on the exposed side. It is remarkable that a mere gall, which at first we are inclined to regard as something abnormal, should be made so beautiful, as if it were the flower of the tree; that a disease, an excrescence, should prove, perchance, the greatest beauty, as the tear of the pearl; beautiful scar let sins they may be. Through our temptations, aye, and our falls, our virtues appear. ”

“ Every poet's lyre loses its tension. It cannot bear the alternate contraction and expansion of the seasons.—How intense and suffocating the heat under some sunny woodsides where no breeze circulates!
The red lily with its torrid color and sun-freckled spots, dispensing, too, with the outer garment of a calyx, its petals so open and wide apart that you can see through it in every direction, tells of hot weather. It is of a handsome bell shape, so upright, and the flower prevails over every other part. It belongs not to spring. ”

“ The light is but a luminousness. My pencil seems to move through a creamy, mystic medium. The moonlight is rich and somewhat opaque, like cream, but the daylight is thin and blue, like skimmed milk. I am less conscious than in the presence of the sun, my instincts have more influence.
The farmer has improved the dry weather to burn his meadow. I love the smell of that burning, as a man may his pipe. It reminds me of a new country offering sites for the hearths of men. It is cheering as the scent of the peat fire of the first settler. ”

“ I do not wonder much that men have given the preference to this family of flowers notwithstanding their thorns. It is hardy and more complete in its parts than most flowers, its color, buds, fragrance, leaves, the whole bush, frequently its stem in particular, and finally its red or scarlet hips. Here is the sweet briar in blossom, which to a fragrant flower adds more fragrant leaves. . . .
As I walk through these old deserted wild or chards, half pasture, half huckleberry field, the air is filled with fragrance from I know not what source. ”

“ Methinks I saw the not yet extinguished lights of one or two fire flies in the darker ruts in the grass in Conant's meadow. The moon yields to the sun, she pales even in the presence of the dawn. It is chiefly the spring birds that I hear at this hour, and in each dawn the spring is thus revived. The notes of the sparrows, and the blue-birds and the robin, have a prominence now which they have not by day. The light is more and more general, and some low bars begin to look bluish as well as reddish. Elsewhere the sky is wholly clear of clouds. ”

“ Growing in stagnant and muddy water, it bursts up so pure and fair to the eye and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in and can be extracted from the slime and muck of earth. It is the resurrection of virtue. It is these sights and sounds and fragrances that convince us of our immortality. No man believes against all evidence. Our external senses consent with our internal. This fragrance assures me that though all other men fall, one shall stand fast, though a pestilence sweep over the earth, it shall at least spare one man. ”

“ In Conant's orchard I hear the faint cricket-like song of a sparrow, saying its vespers, as if it were a link between the cricket and the bird. The robin sings now, though the moon shines silvery, and the veery jingles its trill.
I hear the fresh and refreshing sound of falling water as I have heard it in New Hampshire. It is a sound we do not commonly hear.
How moderate, deliberate is Nature, how gradually the shades of night gather and deepen, giving man ample leisure to bid farewell to day, conclude his day s affairs, and prepare for slumber. ”

“ The dog is the tamed wolf, as the villager is the tamed savage. Near at hand the crickets are heard in the grass chirping from everlasting to everlasting. The humming of a dor-bug drowns all the noise of the village, so roomy is the universe. The moon comes out of the mackerel cloud, and the traveler rejoices. How can a man write the same thoughts by the light of the moon, resting his book on a rail by the side of a remote potato field, that he does by the light of the sun at his study table. ”

“ When the laborer lies on the grass or in the shade for rest, they do not too much tax or weary his attention. They are unobtrusive. I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one's eyes ache. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bounds no man has visited. They are like all great themes, always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects, or near and low they smite us with their lightnings and deafen us with their thunder. ”

“ This is the first half of June. Already the grass is not so fresh and liquid velvety a green, having much of it blossomed, and some even gone to seed, and it is mixed with reddish ferns and other plants, but the general leafiness, shadiness, and waving of grass and boughs characterize the season. The wind is not quite agreeable, because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. Meanwhile the crickets are strengthening their choir. The weather is very clear, and the sky bright. The river shines like silver. Methinks this is a traveler's month. The locust in bloom. The undulating rye. ”

“ Already I see reddening clouds reflected in the smooth mirror of the river, a delicate tint, far off and elysian, unlike anything in the sky as yet. The evergreens now look even black by contrast with the sea of fresh and light green foliage which surrounds them. Children have been to the cliffs and woven wreaths or chaplets of oak leaves which they have left, unconsciously attracted by the beauty of the leaves now. The sun goes down red and shorn of his beams, a sign of hot weather, as if the western horizon or the lower stratum of the air were filled with the hot dust of the day. ”

“ The white-weed colors some meadows as completely as the frosting does a cake. The waving June grass shows watered colors like grain. No mower s scythe is heard. The farmers are hoeing their corn and potatoes. . . . The clover is now in its glory, whole fields are rosed with it, mixed with sorrel, and looking deeper than it is. It makes fields look luxuriant which are really thinly clad. The air is full of its fragrance. I cannot find the Linnæa at Loring's, perhaps because the woods are cut down. Perhaps I am too late. The robins sing more than usual, may be because of the coolness. ”

“ Cattle walk along now in a brook or ditch for coolness, lashing their tails, and browse the edges; or they stand concealed for shade amid thick bushes. How perfectly acquainted they are with man.
I hear the scream of a great hawk sailing with a ragged wing against the high wood side, apparently to scare his prey, and so detect it, shrill, harsh, fitted to excite terror in sparrows, and to issue from his split and curved bill, spit with force from his mouth with an undulatory quaver imparted to it from his wings or motion as he flies. ”

“ For what purpose has Nature made a flower to fill the low lands with the odor of carrion. Just so much beauty and virtue as there is in the world, and just so much ugliness and vice, you see expressed in flowers. Each human being has his flower which expresses his character. In them nothing is concealed, but everything published. Many a villager whose garden bounds on the river, when he approaches the willows and cornels by the river's edge, thinks that some carrion has lodged on his shore, when it is only the carrion-flower he smells. ”

“ June 24, 1840. When I read Cudworth I find I can tolerate all, atomists, pneumatologists, atheists, and theists, Plato, Aristotle, Leueippus, Democritus, and Pythagoras. It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication, which charms me. It is so rare to find a man musing. But between them and their commentators there is an endless dispute. If it come to that, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it is, each takes me up into the serene heavens, and paints earth and sky. Any sincere thought is irresistible. ”

“ I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood-thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes, a New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen. All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood-thrush. ”

“ From the hill behind Minot's I see the birds flying against this red sky; one looks like a bat. Now between two stupendous mountains of the low stratum under the evening red, clothed in slightly rosaceous, amber light, through a magnificent gorge, far, far away, as perchance may occur in pictures of the Spanish coast viewed from the Mediterranean, I see a city, the eternal city of the West, the phantom city, in whose streets no traveler has trod, over whose pavement the horses of the sun have already hurried, some Salamanca of the imagination. ”

“ Under the cool, glossy green leaves of small swamp white oaks, and leaning against their scaly bark near the water, you see the wild roses five or six feet high looking forth from the shade, but almost every bush and copse near the river or in low land which you approach these days, emits the noisome odor of the carrion-flower, so that you would think that all the dead dogs had drifted to that shore. All things, both beautiful and ugly, agreeable and offensive, are expressed in flowers, all kinds and degrees of beauty, and all kinds of foulness. ”

“ The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind. To whomsoever this fact is not an awful, but beautiful mystery, there are no flowers in Nature.
White lilies continue to open in the house in the morning and shut in the night, for five or six days, until their stamens have shed their pollen, and they turn rusty, and begin to decay. Then the beauty of the flower is gone, and its vitality, so that it no longer expands with the light.
How perfect an invention is glass! There is a fitness in glass windows which reflect the sun morning and evening ”

“ Do not present a gleaming edge to ward off harm, for that will oftenest attract the lightning, but rather be the all-pervading ether which the lightning does not strike, but purify. Then will the rudeness or profanity of your companion be like a flash across the face of your sky, lighting up and revealing its serene depths. Earth cannot shock the heavens; but its dull vapor and foul smoke make a bright cloud-spot in the ether, and anon the sun, like a cunning artificer, will cut and paint it, and set it for a jewel in the breast of the sky. ”

“ One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. The truly beautiful and noble puts its lover, as it were, at an infinite distance, while it attracts him more strongly than ever. . . . What a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy, reserved tone.
The dense fields of blue-eyed grass now blue the meadows, as if, in this fair season of the year, the clouds that envelope the earth were dispersing, and blue patches begin to appear answering to the blue sky. ”