in Thoreau’s Journal:

How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh crisp & rustling fallen leaves…How beautiful they go to their graves—how gently lay themselves down—& turn to mould! Painted of a thousand hues and fit to make the beds of us living.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The leaves have fallen so plentifully that they quite conceal the water along the shore—& rustle pleasantly when the wave which the boat creates strikes them—

On Sunday last I could hardly find the Corner spring—& suspected even it had dried up—for it was completely concealed by fresh fallen leaves & when I swept them aside & revealed it it was like striking the earth for a new spring.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I distinguish the dark moist layer of weeds deposited last night, on what had dried in the sun. The tall bulrush & wool grass is dry & yellow except a few in deep water.— but the rainbow rush—j. militaris is still green. The autumnal tints though less brilliant & striking are perhaps quite as agreeable—now that the frosts have somewhat dulled & softened. Now that the forest is universally imbrowned they make a more harmonious impression.

Wooded hill sides reflected in the water are particularly agreeable….Chicadees & jays are heard from the shore as in winter. Saw 2 or 3 ducks which fly up before & alight far behind.

October 17, 2016 Photo

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

I think the reflections are never purer and more distinct than now at the season of the fall of the leaf, just before the cool twilight has come, when the air has a finer grain. Just as our mental reflections are more distinct at this season of the year, when the evenings grow cool and lengthen and our winter evenings with their brighter fires may be said to begin.

October 16, 2016

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Am surprised to find an abundance of witch hazel now at the height of its change. The tallest bushes are bare, though in bloom; but the lowest are full of leaves many of the green, but chiefly clear and handsome yellow of various shades, from a pale lemon in the shade or within the bush, to a darker and warmer yellow without…

A great part of the pine needles have just fallen. See the pale brown carpet of them under this pine; how light it lies up on the grass and that great rock, and the wall, resting thick on its top and its shelves, and on the bushes and underwood. The needles are not yet flat and reddish, but a more delicate pale brown, and lie up light on joggle-sticks, just dropped. The ground is nearly concealed by them.

How beautifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil. They fall to rise again; as if they knew that it was not one annual deposit alone that made this rich mould in which pine-trees grow. They live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

If you stand fronting a hillside covered with a variety of young oaks, the brightest scarlet ones — uniformly deep, dark scarlet— will be the scarlet oaks. The next most uniformly reddish a peculiar dull crimson (or salmon?), are the white oaks.

Then the large-leaved and variously tinted red oaks, scarlet, yellow, and green, and finally the yellowish and half-decayed brown leaves of the black oak.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

In warmer autumns, if I remember rightly, [the hickories at Poplar Hill] last several weeks later than this in some localities, one succeeding another with its splendid glow, an evidence of the genialness of the season.

In cool and moist places, in a genial year, some are preserved green after others have changed, and by their change and glow they prolong the season of autumnal tints very agreeably.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Many maples have lost all their leaves—and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean grey wisps on the edge of the meadows where crowded together at a distance they are like smoke. This is a sudden and important change— Produced mainly I suppose by the rain of Sunday 10th. The autumnal tints have commonly already lost their brightness— It lasts but a day or two Corn spurrey & spotted Polygonum & Polygala

Fair Haven Pond methinks never looks so handsome as at this season. It is a sufficiently clear & warm rather Ind. Summer day—and they are gathering the apples in the orchard— The warmth is more required & we welcome & appreciate it all. The shrub oak plain is now a deep red—with grayish withered apparently white oak leaves intermixed — The chicadees take heart too & sing above these warm rocks. Birches hickories—aspens &c in the distance are like innumerable small flames on the hill sides about the Pond.

The Pond is now most beautifully framed with the autumn tinted woods & hills— The water or lake from however distant a point seen is always the center of the landscape. Fair Haven lies more open & can be seen from more distant points than any of our ponds. The air is singularly fine-grained—the sward looks short & firm. The mts are more distant from the rest of the earth & slightly impurpled. Seeming to lie up more. How peaceful nature— There is no disturbing sound, but far amid the Western hills, there rises a pure white smoke in constant volumes.

 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.