in Thoreau’s Journal:

What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called? Many farmers have pastures there, and wood-lots, and orchards. It consists mainly of rocky pastures. It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill,the Laurel Pasture, the Hog-Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks Place, the Old Lime-Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark’s.

Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman’s Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called ? 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

For a week past we have had washing days. The grass waving, and trees having leaved out, their boughs wave and feel the effect of the breeze. Thus new life and motion is imparted to the trees. The season of waving boughs; and the lighter under sides of the new leaves are exposed. This is the first half of June.

Already the grass is not so fresh and liquid-velvety a green, having much of it blossom[ed] 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 in the breeze characterize the season. The wind is not quite agreeable, because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. Meanwhile the crickets are strengthening their quire. The weather is very clear, and the sky bright. The river shines like silver. Methinks this is a traveller’s month. The locust in bloom. The waving, undulating rye. The deciduous trees have filled up the intervals between the evergreens, and the woods are bosky now.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The chief want is ever a life of deep experiences….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is but a step from flowers to fruit.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

This is June–the month of grass & leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens & revealing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me– I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone & hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence & prompting. Our thoughts & sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as 2 cog-wheels fit into each other– We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time–from which we receive a prompting & impulse & instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.

A year is made up of a certain series & number of sensations & thoughts–which have their language in nature. Now I am ice–now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. I see a man grafting, for instance–What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner–or bread to the grafter–but a mood or certain train of thought to my mind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The world now full of verdure & fragrance and the air comparatively clear (not yet the constant haze of the dog days) through which the distant fields are seen reddened with sorrel & the meadows wet green full of fresh grass & the trees in their first beautiful bright untarnished & unspotted green.

May is the bursting into leaf––and early flowering with much coolness & wet and a few decidedly warm days ushering in summer  –– June verdure & growth––but agreeable, heat––

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The song of birds is more lively and seems to have a new character; a new season has commenced.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few and the sorrel not yet in its prime.  Perceive the meadow fragrance. 

The roads are strewn with red maple seed. The pine shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distant impression, even at some distance, of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Within little more than a fortnight the woods, from bare twigs, have become a sea of verdure, and young shoots have contended with one another in the race. The leaves have unfurled all over the country like a parasol.

Shade is produced, and the birds are concealed and their economies go forward uninterruptedly, and a covert is afforded to the animals generally.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Some incidents in my life have seemed far more allegorical than actual; they were so significant that they plainly served no other use. That is, I have been more impressed by their allegorical significance and fitness; they have been like myths or passages in a myth, rather than mere incidents or history which have to wait to become significant. Quite in harmony with my subjective philosophy.

This, for instance: that, when I thought I knew the flowers so well, the beautiful purple azalea or pinxter-flower should be shown to me by the hunter who found it. Such facts are quite above the level of the actual. They are all just such events as my imagination prepares me for, no matter how incredible. Perfectly in keeping with my life and characteristic. Ever and anon something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of. The limits of the actual are set some thoughts further off. That which had seemed a rigid wall of vast thickness unexpectedly proves a thin and undulating drapery. The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations. The fact that a rare and beautiful flower which we never saw, perhaps never heard of, for which therefore there was no place in our thoughts, may at length be found in our immediate neighborhood, is very suggestive.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The morning wind forever blows; the poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is evident that the virtues of plants are almost completely unknown to us, and we esteem the few with which we are better acquainted unreasonably above the many which are comparatively unknown to us.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It would be worth the while to ask ourselves weekly, Is our life innocent enough? Do we live inhumanely, toward man or beast in thought or act? 

To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe. The least conscious and needless injury inflicted on any creature is to its extent a suicide.  What peace –– or life –– can a murderer have? 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The fringed polygala near the Corner Spring is a delicate flower with very fresh tender green leaves & red-purple blossoms. 

Beautiful from the contrast of its clear red purple flowers with its clear green leaves.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The luxuriant and rapid growth of this hardy and valuable grass is always surprising. How genial must nature be to it! It makes the revolution of the seasons seem a rapid whirl.

How quickly and densely it clothes the earth!  ….The season of grass, now everywhere green and luxuriant.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Men will pay something to look into a travelling showman’s box, but not to look upon the fairest prospects on the earth. A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth.

The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood. Where men of enlarged views may be educated. An unchangeable kind of wealth, a real estate.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How perfectly new and fresh the world is seen to be, when we behold a myriad sparkles of brilliant, white sunlight on a rippled stream.

So remote from dust and decay, more bright than the flash of an eye.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This earth which is spread out like a map around me is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

After two or three days more of rainy weather, it is fair and warm at last.

Thermometer seventy-odd degrees above zero. When the May storm is over, then the summer is fairly begun.