Everything has its use, and man seeks sedulously for the best article for each use. The watchmaker finds the oil of the porpoise’s jaw the best for oiling his watches. Man has a million eyes, and the race knows infinitely more than the individual. Consent to be wise through your race.
Autumnal mornings, when the feet of countless sparrows are heard like rain-drops on the roof by the boy who sleeps in the garret.
Villages with a single long street lined with trees, so straight and wide that you can see a chicken run across it a mile off.
Sept. 19. The gerardia, yellow trumpet-like flower. Veiny-leaved hawkweed (leaves handsome, radical excepting one or two; know them well) (Hieracium venosum), flower like a dandelion. Canada snapdragon, small pea-like blue flower in the wood-paths, (Antirrhinum Canadense). Pine-weed, thickly branched low weed with red seed-vessels, in wood-paths and fields, (Sarothra gentianoides). Cucumber-root (Medeola). Tree-primrose. Red-stemmed cornel. The very minute flower which grows now in the middle of the Marlborough road.
I am glad to have drunk water so long, as I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven,—would keep sober always, and lead a sane life not indebted to stimulants. Whatever my practice may be, I believe that it is the only drink for a wise man, and only the foolish habitually use any other. Think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Wine is not a noble liquor, except when it is confined to the pores of the grape. Even music is wont to be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.[59]
I have seen where the rain dripped from the trees on a sand-bank on the Marlborough road, that each little pebble which had protected the sand made the summit of a sort of basaltic column of sand,—a phenomenon which looked as if it might be repeated on a larger scale in nature.
The goldenrods and asters impress me not like individuals but great families covering a thousand hills and having a season to themselves.
The indigo-weed turns black when dry, and I have been interested to find in each of its humble seed-vessels a worm.
The Deep Cut is sometimes excited to productiveness by a rain in midsummer. It impresses me somewhat as if it were a cave, with all its stalactites turned wrong side outward. Workers in bronze should come here for their patterns.
Those were carrots which I saw naturalized in Wheeler’s field. It was four or five years since he planted there.