The fruit of the trilliums is very handsome. I found some a month ago, a singular red, angular-cased pulp, drooping, with the old anthers surrounding it three quarters of an inch in diameter; and now there is another kind, a dense crowded cluster of many ovoid berries turning from green to scarlet or bright brick-color. Then there is the mottled fruit of the clustered Solomon’s-seal, and also the greenish (with blue meat) fruit of the Convallaria multiflora dangling from the axils of the leaves.
Sept. 2. The dense fog came into my chamber early this morning, freighted with light, and woke me. It was, no doubt, lighter at that hour than if there had been no fog.
Not till after several months does an infant find its hands, and it may be seen looking at them with astonishment, holding them up to the light; and so also it finds its toes. How many faculties there are which we have never found![325] Some men, methinks, have found only their hands and feet. At least I have seen some who appeared never to have found their heads, but used them only instinctively, as the negro who butts with his,[326] or the water-carrier who makes a pack-horse of his. They have but partially found their heads.
We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart. The maturity of the mind, however, may perchance consist with a certain dryness.
There are flowers of thought, and there are leaves of thought; most of our thoughts are merely leaves, to which the thread of thought is the stem.
What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower—both yellow—to pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record, and it will be poetry. The sounds which I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my senses, these are significant and musical; at least, they only are heard.[327]
In a day or two the first message will be conveyed or transmitted over the magnetic telegraph through this town, as a thought traverses space, and no citizen of the town shall be aware of it. The atmosphere is full of telegraphs equally unobserved. We are not confined to Morse’s or House’s or Bain’s line.
Raise some sunflowers to attract the goldfinches, to feed them as well as your hens. What a broad and loaded, bounteously filled platter of food is presented this bon-vivant!
Here is one of those thick fogs which last well into the day. While the farmer is concerned about the crops which his fields bear, I will be concerned about the fertility of my human farm. I will watch the winds and the rains as they affect the crop of thought,—the crop of crops, ripe thoughts, which glow and rustle and fill the air with fragrance for centuries. Is it a drought? How long since we had a rain? What is the state of the springs? Are the low springs high?
I now begin to pluck wild apples.