Journals: The First Step (Emerson and Thoreau) July 13, 1833
I carried my ticket from Mr. Warden to the Cabinet [museum] of Natural History in the Garden of Plants. How much finer things are in composition than alone. "Tis wise in man to make cabinets. When I was come into the Ornithological Chambers I wished I had come only there. The fancy-coloured vests of these elegant beings make me as pensive as the hues and forms of a cabinet of shells, formerly. It is a beautiful collection and makes the visitor as calm and genial as a bridegroom. The limits of the possible are enlarged, and the real is stranger than the imaginary. Some of the birds have a fabulous beauty. One parrot of a fellow called Psittacus erythropterus from New Holland deserves a special mention as a picture of Raphael in a gallery. He is the beau of all birds. Then the humming birds, little and gay. Least of all is the Trochilus Niger. I have seen beetles larger….
Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms,--the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,--an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me,--cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies; I say continually "I will be a naturalist."
Nov. 2 1833
Nature is a language, and every new fact that we learn is a new word; but rightly seen, taken all together, it is not merely a language, but the language put together into a most significant and universal book. I wish to learn the language, not that I may learn a new set of nouns and verbs, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
April 11 1834
Went yesterday to Cambridge and spent most of the day at Mount Auburn [cemetery[; got my luncheon at Fresh Pond, and went back again to the woods. After much wandering and seeing many things, four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see--not to eat, not for love, but only gliding; then a whole bed of Hepatica triloba, cousins of the Anemone, all blue and beautiful, but constrained by niggard nature to wear their last year's faded jacket of leaves; then a black-capped titmouse, who came upon a tree, and when I would know his name, sang chick-a-dee-dee; then a far-off tree full of clamorous birds, I know not what, but you might hear them half a mile; I forsook the tombs, and found a sunny hollow where the east wind would not blow, and lay down against the side of a tree to most happy beholdings. At least I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul. I saw no more my relation, how near and petty, to Cambridge or Boston; I heeded no more what minute or hour our Massachusetts clocks might indicate--I saw only the noble earth on which I was born, with the great Star which warms and enlightens it. I saw the clouds that hang their significant drapery over us. It was Day--that was all Heaven said. The pines glittered with their innumerable green needles in the light, and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle. The drab oak-leaves of the last year turned their little somersets and lay still again. And the wind bustled high overhead in the forest top. This gay and grand architecture, from the vault to the moss and lichen on which I lay,--who shall explain to me the laws of its proportions and adornments?
December 10 1836
Pleasant walk yesterday, the most pleasant of days. At Walden Pond I found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the "peep, peep" of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on this crystal drum.
August 2 1837
An enchanting night of south wind and clouds; mercury at 73° ; all the trees are wind-harps; blessed be light and darkness; ebb and flow, cold and heat; these restless of pulsations of nature which by and by will throb no more.
April 26 1838
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Cliff with Henry Thoreau. Warm, pleasant, misty weather, which the great mountain amphitheatre seemed to drink in with gladness. A crow's voice filled all the miles of air with sound. A bird's voice, even a piping frog, enlivens a solitude and makes world enough for us. At night I went out into the dark and saw a glimmering star and heard a frog, and Nature seemed to say, Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience. Ponder it, Emerson, and not like the foolish world, hanker after thunders and multitudes and vast landscapes, the sea or Nigra.
May 11 1838
Last night the moon rose behind four distinct pine-tree tops in the distant woods and the night at ten was so bright that I walked abroad. But the sublime light of night is unsatisfying, provoking; it astonishes but explains not. Its charm floats, dances, disappears, comes and goes, but palls in five minutes after you have left the house. Come out of your warm, angular house, resounding with few voices, into the chill, grand, instantaneous night, with such a Presence as a full moon in the clouds, and you are struck with poetic wonder. In the instant you leave far behind all human relations, wife, mother and child, and live only with the savages--water, air, light, carbon, lime, and granite. I think of Kuhleborn. I become a moist, cold element. "Nature grows over me." Frogs pipe; waters far off tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles, and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and existence. I sow the sun and moon for seeds.
September 8 1840
I went into the woods. I found myself not wholly present there. If I looked at a pine-tree or an aster, that did not seem to be Nature. Nature was still elsewhere: this, or this was but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that had passed by and was now at its glancing splendor and heyday,--perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if I stood in the field, then in the adjacent woods. Always the present object gave me this sense of the stillness that follows a pageant that has just gone by.
December 1840
Nature ever flows; stands never still. Motion or change is her mode of existence. The poetic eye sees in Man the Brother of the River, and in Woman the Sister of the River. Their life is always transition. Hard blockheads only drive nails all the time; forever remember; which is fixing. Heroes do not fix, but flow, bend forward ever and invent a resource for every moment. A man is a compendium of nature, an indomitable savage;…as long as he has a temperament of his own, and a hair growing on his skin, a pulse beating in his veins, he has a physique which disdains all intrusion, all despotism; it lives, wakes, alters, by omnipotent modes, and is directly related there, amid essences and billets doux; to Himmaleh mountain chains, wild cedar swamps, and the interior fire, the molten core of the globe.
September 5 1855
All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle.
August 1862
How shallow seemed to me yesterday in the woods the speech one often hears from tired citizens who have spent their brief enthusiasm for the country, that Nature is tedious, and they have had enough of green leaves. Nature and the green leaves are a million fathoms deep, and it is these eyes that are superficial.
March 1 1854
Here is our first spring morning according to the almanac. It is remarkable that the spring of the almanac and of nature should correspond so closely. The morning of the 26th was good winter, but there came a plentiful rain in the afternoon, and yesterday and today are quite springlike. This morning the air is still, and, though clear enough, a yellowish light is widely diffused throughout the east, now just after sunrise. The sunlight looks and feels warm, and a fine vapor fills the lower atmosphere. I hear the phoebe or spring note of the chickadee, and the scream of the jay is perfectly repeated by the echo from the neighboring wood. For some days past the surface of the earth, covered with water, or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring, methinks. And are not the frost in the morning more like the early frosts in the fall,--common white frosts?
As for the birds of the past winter: I have seen but three hawks,--one early in the winter and two lately; have heard the hooting owl pretty often late in the afternoon. Crows have not been numerous, but their dawing was heard chiefly in pleasanter mornings. Blue jay have blown the trumpet of winter as usual, but they, as all birds, are most lively in springlike days. The chickadees have been the prevailing bird. The partridge common enough. One ditcher tells me that he saw two robins in Moore's Swamp a month ago. I have not seen a quail, though a few have been killed in the thaws. Four of five downy woodpeckers. The white-breasted nuthatch four or five times. Tree sparrows one or more at a time, oftener than any bird that comes to us from the north. Two pigeon woodpeckers, I think, lately. One dead shrike, and perhaps one or two live ones. Have heard of two white owls,--one about Thanksgiving time and one in midwinter. One short-eared owl in December. Several flocks of snow buntings for a week in the severest storm, and in December, last part. One grebe in Walden just before it froze completely. And two brown creepers once in middle of February. Channing said he saw a little olivaceous-green bird lately.
March 2.
A Corner man tells me that Witherell has seen a bluebird, and Martial Miles thought that he might have heard one. I doubt it. It may have been given to Witherell to see the first bluebird, so much has been withholden from me.
What produces the peculiar softness of the air yesterday and today, as if it were the air of the south suddenly pillowed amid our wintry hills? We have suddenly a different sky,--a different atmosphere. It is as if the subtlest possible soft vapor were diffused through the atmosphere. Warm air has come to us from the south, but charged with moisture, which will yet distill in rain or congeal into snow and hail.
The sand foliage is vital in its form, reminding me [of] what are called the vitals of the animal body. I am not sure that its arteries are ever hollow. They are rather meandering channels with remarkably distinct sharp edges, formed instantaneously as by magic. How rapidly and perfectly it organizes itself! The material must be sufficiently cohesive. I suspect that a certain portion of clay is necessary. Mixed sand and clay being saturated with melted ice and snow, the most liquid portion flows downward through the mass, forming for itself instantly a perfect canal, using the best materials the mass affords for its banks. It digs and builds it in a twinkling. The less fluid portions clog the artery, change its course, and form thick stems and leaves. The lobe principles,--lobe of the ear (labor, lapsus?)
On the outside all the life of the earth is expressed in the animal or vegetable, but make a deep cut in it and you find it vital; you find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder, then, that plants grow and spring in it. The atoms have already learned the law. Let a vegetable sap convey it upwards and you have a vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea thus inwardly. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. The earth is pregnant with law.
The various shades of this sand foliage are very agreeable to the eye, including all the different colors which iron assumes,--brown, gray, yellowish, reddish, and clay-color. Perhaps it produces the greater effect by arranging the sands of the same color side by side, bringing them together.
March 11.
Fair weather after three rainy days. Air full of birds,--bluebirds, song sparrows, chickadee (phoebe notes), and blackbirds. Song sparrows toward the water, with at least two kinds of variations of their strain hard to imitation. Ozit, ozit, ozit, psate-te-te-te-te ter twe ter is one; the other began chip chip che we, etc. etc. Bluebirds' warbling curls in elms.
Shall the earth be regarded as a graveyard, a necropolis, merely, and not also as a granary filled with the seeds of life? Is not its fertility increased by this decay? A fertile compost, not exhausted sand.
March 12. A.M.--Up railroad to woods
We have white frosts these mornings. This is the blackbird morning. Their sprayey notes and conqueree ring with the song sparrows' jingle all along the river. Thus gradually they acquire confidence to sing. It is a beautiful spring morning. I hear my first robin peep distinctly at a distance on some higher trees,--oaks or ?,--on a high key. No singing yet. I hear from an apple tree a faint cricketlike chirp, and a sparrow darts away, flying far, dashing from side to side. A mouse or a ground squirrel on the snow near the edge of the wood,--probably the former. I hear a jay loudly screaming phe-phay phe-phay,--a loud, shrill chickadee's phebe. Now I see and hear the lark and I hear another far off singing. Sing when they first come. All sunrise, as rivers twinkle at their sources. Now is the time to be abroad and hear them, as you detect the slightest ripple in smooth water. As with tinkling sounds the sources of streams burst their icy fetters, so the rills of music begin to flow and swell the general quire of spring. Memorable is the warm light of the spring sun on russet fields in the morning.
A new feature is being added to the landscape, and that is expanses and reaches of blue water.
C. says he saw a gull today.
March 30. 6 a.m.--To Island
First still hour since the afternoon of the 17th. March truly came in like a lamb and went out like a lion this year. Remarkably and continuously pleasant weather from the very first day till the 18th. Apparently an early spring,--buds and birds well advanced,--then suddenly very severe cold and high winds cold enough to skim the river over in broad places at night, and commencing with the greatest and most destructive gale for many a year, felt far and wide; and it has never ceased to blow since till this morning. Vegetation is accordingly put back. The ground these last cold (thirteen) days have been about bare of snow, but frozen. Some had peas and potatoes in before it. First half of month very pleasant and mild spring weather, last half severe winter cold and high winds. The water at its highest,--not very high,--this month on the 17th. Ducks have been lurking in sheltered places not frozen. Robins feed along the edge of the river. At the Island I see and hear this morning the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker at the hollow poplar' had heard him tapping distinctly from my boat's place 1/4+ of a mile. Great flocks of tree sparrows and some F. hyemalis on the ground and trees on the Island Neck, making the air and bushes ring with their jingling. The former--some of them--say somewhat like this: a che che, ter twee twee, tweer tweer twa. It sounded like a new bird. The black ducks seem always to rise with that loud, hoarse croacking--quacking. The river early is partly filled with thin, floating, hardly cemented ice, occasionally turned on its edge by the wind and sparkling in the sun. If the sun had kept out of the way one day in the past fortnight, I think the river would have frozen to bear….
March 31. Weather changes at last to drizzling.
In criticising your writing, trust your fine instinct. There are many things which we come very near questioning, but do not question. When I have sent off my manuscripts to the printer, certain objectionable sentences or expressions are sure to obtrude themselves on my attention with force, though I had not consciously suspected them before. My critical instinct then at once breaks the ice and comes to the surface.
Here are more journal entries from Thoreau on the art of writing.
