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.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is a beautifully clear and bracing air with just enough coolness full of the memory of frosty morning––through which all things are distinctly seen & the fields look as smooth as velvet–– The fragrance of grapes is on the breeze

& the red drooping barberries sparkle amid the leaves…

the forests have a singularly rounded & bowery look clothing the hills quite down to the water’s edge & leaving no shore; the Ponds are like drops of dew amid and partly covering the leaves. So the great globe is luxuriously crowded without margin.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The maples begin to be ripe. How beautiful when a whole maple on the edge of a swamp is like one great scarlet fruit––full of ripe juices–– A sign of the ripening––every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire-is a-glow.

The flattened black berries of the cucumber root––with the triangular bases of its leaves tinged red beneath as a sort of cup for them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on it but it is reported in lines of beauty—in circling dimples—as it were the constant welling up of its fountain—the gentle pulsing of its life—the heaving of its breast.

The thrills of joy & those of pain are indistinguishable. How sweet the phenomena of the lake—! Everything that moves on its surface produces a sparkle. The peaceful Pond!

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The soapwort gentian cheers & surprises with solid bulbs of blue from the shade—the stale grown purplish.

It abounds along the river—after so much has been mown.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The Prinos berries now quite red. How densely they cover the bushes!

very handsome contrasting with the leaves.

September 17, 2016

in Thoreau’s Journal:

What produces this flashing air of autumn—a brightness as if there were not green enough to absorb the light—

September 17, 2016