9 a. m. On Conantum.—A quarter of a mile is distance enough to make the atmosphere look blue now. This is never the case in spring or early summer. It was fit that I should see an indigo-bird here, concerned about its young, a perfect embodiment of the darkest blue that ever fills the valleys at this season. The meadow-grass reflecting the light has a bluish cast also.
Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth; i. e., lay up a store of natural influences. Sing while you may, before the evil days come. He that hath ears, let him hear. See, hear, smell, taste, etc., while these senses are fresh and pure.
There is always a kind of fine æolian harp music to be heard in the air. I hear now, as it were, the mellow sound of distant horns in the hollow mansions of the upper air, a sound to make all men divinely insane that hear it, far away overhead, subsiding into my ear. To ears that are expanded what a harp this world is! The occupied ear thinks that beyond the cricket no sound can be heard, but there is an immortal melody that may be heard morning, noon, and night, by ears that can attend, and from time to time this man or that hears it, having ears that were made for music. To hear this the hardhack and the meadow-sweet aspire. They are thus beautifully painted, because they are tinged in the lower stratum of that melody.
I eat these berries as simply and naturally as thoughts come to my mind.
Never yet did I chance to sit in a house, except my own house in the woods, and hear a wood thrush sing. Would it not be well to sit in such a chamber within sound of the finest songster of the grove?
The quail, invisible, whistles, and who attends?
10 a. m.—The white lily has opened. How could it stand these heats? It has pantingly opened, and now lies stretched out by its too long stem on the surface of the shrunken river. The air grows more and more blue, making pretty effects when one wood is seen from another through a little interval. Some pigeons here are resting in the thickest of the white pines during the heat of the day, migrating, no doubt. They are unwilling to move for me. Flies buzz and rain about my hat, and the dead twigs and leaves of the white pine, which the choppers have left here, exhale a dry and almost sickening scent. A cuckoo chuckles, half throttled, on a neighboring tree, and now, flying into the pine, scares out a pigeon, which flies with its handsome tail spread, dashes this side and that between the trees helplessly, like a ship carrying too much sail in midst of a small creek, some great amiral; having no room to manœuvre,—a fluttering flight.
The mountains can scarcely be seen for the blue haze,—only Wachusett and the near ones. The thorny apple bush on Conantum has lately sent up branches from its top, resolved to become a tree; and these spreading (and bearing fruit), the whole has the form of a vast hour-glass. The lower part being the most dense by far, you would say the sand had run out.[245]
I now return through Conant’s leafy woods by the spring, whose floor is sprinkled with sunlight,—low trees which yet effectually shade you.
The dusty mayweed now blooms by the roadside, one of the humblest flowers. The rough hawkweed, too, by the damp roadside, resembling in its flower the autumnal dandelion. That was probably the Verbena hastata, or common blue vervain, which I found the other day by Walden Pond.