in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now for the Aster Tradescanti along low roads, like the Turnpike, swarming with butterflies and bees. Some of them are pink. However unexpected are these later flowers! You thought that Nature had about wound up her affairs. You had seen what she could do this year, and had not noticed a few weeds by the roadside, or mistook them for the remains of summer flowers now hastening to their fall; you thought you knew every twig and leaf by the roadside, and no- thing more was to be looked for there; and now, to your surprise, these ditches are crowded with millions of little stars. They suddenly spring up and face you, with their legions on each side the way, as if they had lain in ambuscade there. The flowering of the ditches. Call them travellers’ thoughts, numerous though small, worth a penny at least, which, sown in spring and summer, in the fall spring up unobserved at first, successively dusted and washed, mingled with nettles and beggar-ticks as a highway harvest. A starry meteoric shower, a milky way, in the flowery kingdom in whose aisles we travel.

Let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an Aster Novae-Angliae or spectabilis here and there, to remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. The gardener with all his assiduity does not raise such a variety, nor so many successive crops on the same space, as Nature in the very roadside ditches. There they have stood, begrimed with dust and the wash of the road so long, and made acquaintance with passing sheep and cattle and swine, gathering a trivial experience, and now at last the fall rains have come to wash off some of that dust, and even they exhibit these dense flowery panicles as the result of all that experience, as pure for an hour as if they grew by some wild brook-side.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Asters various shades of blue and especially the smaller kinds of dense flowering white ones are more than ever—by the roadsides….The golden glow of autumn concentrated—more golden than the sun….The earth wears different colors or liveries at different seasons.  If I come by at this season a golden blaze will salute me here from a thousand suns.  How earnestly & rapidly each creature—each flower is fulfilling its part while its day lasts!  Nature never lost a day—nor a moment — As the planet in its orbit & around its axis—so do the seasons— —so does time revolve with a rapidity inconceivable.  

I must walk more with free senses–– It is as bad to study stars & clouds as flowers & stones–– I must let my senses wander as my thoughts––my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look––but I say that is rather to see––& the more you look the less you will observe––I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest––but suffer from a constant strain.  Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object.  Let it come to you….What I need is not to look at all––but a true sauntering of the eye.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This is the season of fogs.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Signs of frost last night in M. Miles’s cleared swamp. Potato vines black.

How much farther it is back to frost from the greatest heat of summer, i. e. from the 6th [of this month] back to the 1st of June, three months, than forward to it, four day

in Thoreau’s Journal:

As I go through the woods I see the the ferns have turned brown & give the woods an autumnal look––

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It requires a different intention of the eye in the same locality to see different plants…. I find that when I am looking for the former, I do not see the latter in their midst. How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge ! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.

He as it were tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

While the grass is fresh the earth is in its vigor. The greenness of the grass is the best symptom or evidence of the earth’s youth or health.

Perhaps it will be found that when the grass ceases to be fresh & green or after June—the birds have ceased to sing—& the fireflies too no longer in myriads sparkle in the meadows—

Perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf, regarding the grass-blades as leaves, for it is equally true that the leaves soon lose their freshness and soundness, and become the prey of insects and of drought…

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Staghorn sumach berries probably some time, but ours are injured by worms.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Sometimes a day serves only to hold time together.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is cooler these days and nights, and I move into an eastern chamber in the morning, that I may sit in the sun. The water, too, is cooler when I bathe in it, and I am reminded that this recreation has its period. I feel like a melon or other fruit laid in the sun to ripen. I grow, not gray, but yellow.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The Soapwort gentian out abundantly in Flints-Bridge Lane—ap. for a week—a surprisingly deep faintly purplish blue….it has the flowering of the sky.  The sky has descended & kissed the earth….Why come these blue flowers thus late in the year.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

To Walden

The seringo, too, has long been silent like other birds. The red prinos berries ripe in sunny places. Rose hips begin to be handsome. Small flocks of pigeons are seen these days. Distinguished from doves by their sharper wings and bodies. August has been a month of berries and melons, small fruits. First in the descent from summer’s culminating-point. There is a stillness in nature for want of singing birds, commenced a month or more ago; only the crickets’ louder creak to supply their place. I have not heard a bullfrog this long time. The small cornel, or bunch-berry, is in bloom now (!!) near the pond. What great tuft-like masses the cow-wheat makes now in sprout-lands!

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Let us know and conform only to the fashions of eternity.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The reflections are perfect.

in Thorau’s Journal:

Both a conscious and an unconscious life are good. Neither is good exclusively, for both have the same source. The wisely conscious life springs out of an unconscious suggestion. I have found my account in travelling in having prepared beforehand a list of questions which I would get answered, not trusting to my interest at the moment, and can then travel with the most profit. Indeed, it is by obeying the suggestions of a higher light within you that you escape from yourself and, in the transit, as it were see with the unworn sides of your eye, travel totally new paths.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The air is filled with mist, yet a transparent mist, a principle in it you might call flavor, which ripens fruits. This haziness seems to confine and concentrate the sunlight, as if you lived in a halo.  It is August.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

We did not come to a fence or wall for about 4 miles….heard some large hawks whistling much like a boy high over the meadow.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Goodyera Pubescens–Rattle-snake Plantain is ap. a little past its prime– It is very abundant on Clintonia swamp hill-side quite erect with its white spike 8 to 10 inches high on the sloping hillside the lower half or more turning brown–but the beautifully reticulated leaves which pave the moist shady hill-side about its base are the chief attraction. These oval leaves perfectly smooth like velvet to the touch about 1 1/2 inches long–have a broad longitudinal white white mid-rib & 4 to 6 white parallel veins very prettily & thickly connected by other conspicuous white veins transversely—& irregularly—all on a dark rich green ground.  

Is it not the prettiest leaf that paves the forest floor? As a cultivated exotic it would attract great attention for its leaf– Many of the leaves are eaten. Is it by Partridges? It is a leaf of firm texture partially not apt to be eaten by insects or decayed– & does not soon wilt. So unsoiled and undecayed– It might be imitated on carpets & rugs–some old withered stems of last year still stand.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

That first frost on the 17th was the first stroke of winter aiming at the scalp of summer. Like a stealthy and insidious aboriginal enemy, it made its assault just before daylight in some deep and far-away hollow and then silently withdrew. Few have seen the drooping plants, but the news of this stroke circulates rapidly through the village. Men communicate it with a tone of warning. The foe is gone by sunrise, but some fearful neighbors who have visited their potato and cranberry patches report this stroke. The implacable and irresistible foe to all this tender greenness is not far off, nor can we be sure, any month in the year, that some scout from his low camp may not strike down the tenderest of the children of summer. 

This foe will go on steadily increasing in strength and boldness, till his white camps will be pitched over all the fields, and we shall be compelled to take refuge in our strongholds, with some of summer’s withered spoils stored up in barns, maintaining ourselves and our herds on the seeds and roots and withered grass which we have embarned. Men in anticipation of this time have been busily collecting and curing the green blades all the country over, while they have still some nutriment in them. Cattle and horses have been dragging homeward their winter’s food.