This is a peculiar season, peculiar for its stillness. The crickets have ceased their song. The few birds are well-nigh silent. The tinted and gay leaves are now sere and dead, and the woods wear a sombre aspect.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Climbed the wooded hill by Holden’s spruce swamp, and got a novel view of the river and Fair Haven Bay through the almost leafless woods. How much handsomer a river or lake such as ours seen thus through a foreground of scattered or else partially leafless trees, through at a considerable distance this side of it, especially if the water is open, without a wooded shore or isles. It is the most perfect and beautiful of frames, which yet the sketcher is commonly carefully to brush aside. I mean a pretty thick foreground, a view of the distant water through the near forest, through a thousand little vistas, as we are rushing towards the former, that intimate mingling of wood and water which excites an expectation the the near and open view rarely realizes. We prefer that some part be concealed which our imagination may navigate.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild apple.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth…Our woods and fields are the perfection of parks and groves, and gardens and grottoes, and arbors, and paths and parterres, and vistas and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have. They are the common which each village possesses, the true paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and willfully wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The mere greenness, which was not remarkable in the summer, is positively interesting now. My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed….The bare outline of the polypody thrills me strangely.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now you easily can detect where larches grow….They are far more distinct than at any other season….Unlike the pines there is no green left to alternate with their yellow, but they are a uniform yellow….

These trees now cannot easily be mistaken for any other, because they are the only conspicuously yellow trees now left in the woods….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

These are my China asters, my late garden flowers.

It costs me nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil of your yard. We have only to elevate our view a little to see the whole forest as a garden.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Rain and wind, bringing down the leaves and destroying the little remaining brilliancy.

October 30, 2017

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The thickly fallen leaves make it slippery in the woods, especially climbing hills….

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

4 months of the green leaf make all our summer, if I reckon from June 1st to Oct 1st—the growing season & methinks there are about 4 months when the ground is white with snow That would leave two months for Spring & 2 for autumn. October the month of ripe or painted leaves—Nov. perchance the month of withered leaves.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This morning I awoke and found it snowing and the ground covered with snow….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Everything beautiful impresses us as sufficient to itself.

It is surprising how any reminiscence of a different season of the year affects us. When I meet with any such in my Journal, it affects me as poetry, and I appreciate that other season and that particular phenomenon more than at the time. The world so seen is all one spring, and full of beauty. You only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day’s experience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show.

Only the rarest flower, the purest melody, of the season thus comes down to us.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Some small husky white asters still survive.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The milkweed now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by a fine thread until a stronger puff of wind sets them free.

It is pleasant to see the plant thus dispersing its seeds.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I look up northwest to my mountains, as a farmer to his hill-lot or rocky pasture from his door…. My eyes it is alone that wander to these blue pastures which no drought affects. I am content to dwell here and see the sun go down behind my mountain fence.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now again as in the spring we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The clouds have lifted in the northwest, and I see the mountains in sunshine (all the more attractive from the cold I feel here), with a tinge of purple on them, —a cold, but memorable and glorious outline. This is an advantage of mountains in the horizon; they show you fair weather from the midst of foul.

October 19, 2017