in Thoreau’s Journal:

I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The note of the chickadee heard now in cooler weather above many fallen leaves, has a new significance.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This is the end of the sixth day of glorious weather, which I am tempted to call the finest in the year, so bright and serene the air, such a sheen from the earth, so brilliant the foliage, so pleasantly warm (except perhaps this day, which is cooler), too warm for a thick coat, yet not sultry nor oppressive, so ripe the season and our thoughts. Certainly these are the most brilliant days in the year, ushered in perhaps by a frost morning, as this. As a dewey morning in summer, compared with a parched and sultry, languid one, so a frosty morning at this season compared with a merely dry or frosty one. These days you may say the year is ripened like a fruit by frost, and puts on the brilliant tints of maturity, but not yet the color of decay. It is not sere and withered as in November. See the heaps of apples in the fields and at the cider-mill, of pumpkins in the fields, and the stacks of cornstalks and the standing corn. Such is the season.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The red maples are now red & also yellow & reddening. The white maples are green & silvery also yellowing and blushing— The birch is yellow —the black willow brown. The elms sere brown & thin —the bass bare—the button bush which was so late is already mostly bare except the lower part protected — The swamp wht oak is green with a brownish tinge. The Wht ash turned mulberry The white maples toward Ball’s hill have a burnt white appearance— The white oak a salmon color & also red— Is that scarlet oak rosed?— Huckleberries & blackberries are red.

The leaves are falling…

October 8, 2016: Photo

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The moon is full. The tops of the woods in the horizon, seen above the fog, look exactly like long, low, black clouds, the fog being the color of the sky.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Perhaps the autumnal tints are as bright and interesting now as they will be….It is a warm, Indian-summerish afternoon….It is perfect autumn.

In Thoreau’s Journal: 

 The revolution of the seasons is a great and steady flow, a graceful, peaceful motion, like the swell on lakes and seas.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

There is not now that profusion, and consequent confusion, of events which belongs to a summer walk. There are few flowers, birds, insects, or fruits now, and hence what does occur affects us as more simple and significant,

as the cawing of a crow or the scream of a jay. The latter seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom through the vacancies occasioned by fallen maple leaves.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now the year itself begins to be ripe,

ripened by the frost like a persimmon.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Standing on the railroad, I look across the pond to Pine Hill, where the outside trees, and the shrubs scattered generally through the wood, glow yellow and scarlet through the green, like fires just kindled at the base of the trees, a general conflagration just fairly under way, soon to envelop every tree.

The hillside forest is all aglow along its edge, and in all its cracks and fissures, and soon the flames will leap upwards to the tops of the tallest trees.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, make almost as bright a patch in the meadow as the flowers did…

The prinos berries are in their prime, seven sixteenths of an inch in diameter. They are scarlet, somewhat lighter than the arum berries. They are now very fresh and bright, and what adds to their effect is the perfect freshness and greens of the leaves amid which they are seen.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

A severer frost last night. The young & tender trees begin to assume the autumnal tints more generally—plainly in consequence of the frost the last 2 mornings.

The sides of the bushy hills present a rich variety of colors like rug work—but the forest generally is not yet changed.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

I observe the peculiar steel-bluish purple of the night-shade, i., e., the tips of the twigs, while all beneath is green, dotted with bright berries over the water.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have said attaches to them, they are so simple and remote. Their knowledge is felt to be all terrestrial, and to concern the earth alone. This suggests that the same is the case with every object, however, familiar; our so-called knowledge of it is equally vulgar and remote. One might say that all views through a telescope or microscope were purely visionary, for it is only by his eye, and not by any other sense, not by the whole man, that the beholder is there where he is presumed to be. It is a disruptive mode of viewing so far as the beholder is concerned.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

They say that this has been a good year to raise turkeys it has been so dry. So that we shall have something to be thankful for.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As I sit there, I see the shadow of a hawk flying above and behind me. I think I see more hawks nowadays…I need only sit still a few minutes on any spot which overlooks the river meadows before I see some black circling mote beating along the meadow’s edge, now lost for a moment as it turns edgewise in a peculiar light, now reappearing farther or nearer.

September 24, 2016

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The large ferns are yellow or brown now.

September 25, 2016

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

I suspect that I know on what the brilliancy of the autumnal tints will depend. On the greater or less drought of the summer. If the drought has been uncommonly severe, as this year, I should think it would so far destroy the vitality of the leaf that it would attain only to a dull, dead color in autumn; that to be brilliant in autumn, the plant should be full of sap and vigor to the last.

September 25, 2014

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

In Cohush swamp the sumac leaves have turned a very deep red, but have not lost their fragrance.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The sumacs are among the reddest leaves at present.