in Thoreau’s Journal:

In the morning and evening, when waters are still and smooth, and dimpled by innate currents only,

not disturbed by foreign winds and currents of the air, and reflect more light than at noonday. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

He is the richest who has most use for nature as raw material of tropes and symbols with which to describe his life. If these gates of golden willows affect me, they correspond to the beauty and promise of some experience on which I am entering. If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry — all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.

The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Leaves generally are most beautiful when young and tender, before insects or weather has defaced them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How dead would the globe seem—especially at this season if it were not for these water surfaces…We are slow to realize water—the beauty & magic of it. It is interestingly strange forever….

I look round with a thrill on this bright fluctuating surface on which no man can walk—whereon is—no trace of foot step—unstained as glass.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When I hear a bird singing I cannot think of any words that will imitate it—

What word can stand in place of a bird’s note!  [But this did not stop him!]

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomenon to the preservation of Moral & intellectual health.

The discipline of the schools or of business—can never impart such serenity to the mind.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Green herbs of all kinds, — buttercups, etc., etc., etc., now make more or less show. Put this with the grassy season’s beginning.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Crossing that first Conantum field, I perceive a peculiar fragrance in the air (not the meadow fragrance), like that of vernal flowers or of expanding buds. The ground is covered with the mouse-ear in full bloom, and it may be that in part. It is a temperate southwest breeze, and this is a scent as of willows (flowers and leafets), bluets, violets, shad-bush, mouse-ear, etc., combined; or perhaps the last chiefly; at any rate it is very perceptible. The air is more genial, laden with the fragrance of spring flowers.

I, sailing in the spring ocean, getting in from my winter voyage, begin to smell the land. Such a scent perceived by a mariner would be very exciting. I not only smell the land breeze, but I perceive in it the fragrance of spring flowers. I draw near to the land; I begin to lie down and stretch myself on it. After my winter voyage I begin to smell the land.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Thermometer from 1 to 2 pm at +78º. 

Neighbors come forth to view the expanding buds in their gardens.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The Yellow lily is budded. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The smell of our fresh meadows—from which the flood has in some measure receded—reminds me of the scent of salt marshes to which it corresponds. 

A coarse grass is starting up all the greener & more luxuriant for the freshet—1 foot high.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This was a very warm as well as pleasant day, but at one o’clock there was the usual fresh easterly wind and sea-turn, and before night it grew quite cold for the season.

The regularity of the recurrence of this phenomenon is remarkable. I have noticed [it], at least, on the 24th late in the day, the 28th and the 29th about 3 p. m., and to-day at 1 p. M. It has been the order. Early in the afternoon, or between one and four, the wind changes (I suppose, though I did not notice its direction in the forenoon), and a fresh cool wind from the sea produces a mist in the air.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The art of life—of a poets life is—not having anything to do, to do something.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I approach a great nature with infinite expectation and uncertainty, not knowing what I may meet. It lies as broad and unexplored before me as a scraggy hillside or pasture. I may hear a fox bark, or a partridge drum, or some bird new to these localities may fly up. It lies out there as old, and yet as new. The aspect of the woods varies every day, what with their growth and the changes of the seasons and the influence of the elements, so that the eye of the forester never twice rests upon the same prospect.

Much more does a character show newly and variedly, if directly seen.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I stand under Lee’s Cliff. There is a certain summeriness in the air now, especially under a warm cliff like this, where you smell the very dry leaves, and hear the pine warbler and the hum of a few insects, —small gnats, etc.,—and see considerable growth and greenness. Though it is still windy, there is, nevertheless, a certain serenity and long-lifeness in the air, as if it were a habitable place and not merely to be hurried through.

The noon of the year is approaching. Nature seems meditating a siesta. The hurry of the duck migration is, methinks, over. But the woods generally, and at a distance, show no growth yet. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How pleasant in spring a still overcast warm day like this when the water is smooth! 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When the wind is still cool elsewhere, I glance up some warm southern slope, sunny and still, where the thinly scattered blades of green grass, lately sprung, already perchance begin to wave, and I am suddenly advertised that a new season has arrived.

This is the beginning of that season which, methinks, culminates with the buttercup and wild pink and Viola pedata.  It begins when the first toad is heard.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land.

There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. 

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I find but one red-maple fairly in blossom on a few twigs over the water today. I think therefore the 22nd will do for the very earliest.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When the outline & texture of white pine is thus seen against the water or the sky it is an affecting sight.