in Thoreau’s Journal:

A man must attend to nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little….

I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods….

in Thoreau’s Journal:

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. If a shower drives us for shelter to the maple grove or the trailing branches of the pine, yet in their recesses with microscopic eye we discover some new wonder in the bark, or the leaves, or the fungi at our feet.  We are interested by some new resource of insect economy, or, the chickadee is more than usually familiar.

We can study Nature’s nooks and corners then.

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 woods generally may now be said to be fairly beginning to turn (this with the first noticeable frost). The red maples, especially at a distance, begin to light their fires, some turning yellow, and within the woods many oak, e. g. scarlet and black and chestnut, and other leaves begin to show their colors. Those leaves of the young white oaks which have changed dull-salmon, crimson, scarlet (many incline to crimson) are mostly within the tree and partially concealed by the green leaves. They are handsomest looking up from below, the light through them.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

How distinctly each thing in nature is marked, as the day by a little yellow sunlight, so that the sluggard cannot mistake it.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The soapwort gentian cheers & surprises with solid bulbs of blue from the shore—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.

in Thoreau’s Journal:  

How perfectly each plant has its turn!  ––as if the seasons revolved for it alone.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The rippled blue surface of Fair Haven from the Cliffs—with its smooth white border where weeds preserve the surface smooth––a placid sliver plated rim–– 

The pond is like the sky with a border of whitish clouds in the horizon.  

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I love to see anything that implies a simpler mode of life and greater nearness to the earth.

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 nothing 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.  

in Thoreau’s Journal:

This is the season of fogs.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The conspicuous & handsome bluish masses of A puniceus erect or fallen stretch in endless rows along the brook — often as high as your head— Sometimes make islands in the meadows.

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:

There is the hobble-bush with its berries and large roundish leaves, now beginning to turn a deep dull crimson red.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

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:

Some hours seem not to be occasion for anything, unless for great resolves to draw breath and repose in, so religiously do we postpone all action therein.

We do not straight go about to execute our thrilling purpose, but shut our doors behind us, and saunter with prepared mind, as if the half were already done.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

China-like berries of cornel along the river now abundant, some cymes wholly white; also the panicled there and in swamps, though its little red (?) fingers stems are oftenest bare, but are pretty enough, perhaps, to take the place of the berries.

The black choke-berries, as also choke-cherries, are stale.  The two-leaved Solomon’s-seal has just begun to redden; so the largest one. The creeping juniper berries are now a hoary green but full-grown. The scarlet thorn is in many places quite edible and now a deep scarlet. Polygonum and medulla now. Green-briar only begins to turn. Viburnum nudum rather stale. Clintonia probably about gone. Carrion-flower in prime. Maple viburnum fully ripe, like the dentatum.  Aralia hispida getting old. Feverwort now. Rose hips generally beginning; and two primroses beginning. Elder in prime and cranberry. Smooth sumach stale.