The Blog of Henry David Thoreau: breathe the raspberry air of Maine...Thoreau's Journal: 03-Aug-1857

8.03.2014

breathe the raspberry air of Maine
...Thoreau's Journal: 03-Aug-1857

This was the midst of the raspberry season. We found them abundant on every carry on the East Branch and below, and children were carrying them from all sides into Bangor. I observed that they were the prominent dish on the tables, once a low scarlet mountain, garnishing the head of the table in a dish two feet across. Earlier the strawberries are equally abundant, and we even found a few still deep in the grass. Neither of these abound about Boston, and we saw that they were due to the peculiar air of the higher latitude. Though for six weeks before leaving home we had been scarcely able to lie under more than a single sheet, we experienced no hot weather in Maine. The air was uniformly fresh and bracing like that of a mountain to us, and, though the inhabitants like to make it out that it is as warm there as in Massachusetts, we were not to be cheated. It is so much the more desirable at this season to breathe the raspberry air of Maine.

1 comment:

michael jameson said...: it is grand to walk or travle across areas that have one sweet aroma its invasive as walking into a barn !, yet the smells could be oranges or there flower, pine,cedar, and a host of other varieties of that invade our senses, and we remember them forever!!!! michael jameson old antiqueguy@hotmail.com; Aug 3, 2010, 1:22:00 PM

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one of the native forces

“Thoreau was a surprising fellow—he is not easily grasped—is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces—stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force—he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame.”

~Walt Whitman as recorded by Horace Traubel

the simple print

The text is from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

Each blog post is an excerpt from that day's entry in the Journal, and although not necessarily the complete entry, it is an integral and intact section thereof.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great." -Emerson