There is some advantage, intellectually and spiritually, in taking wide views with the bodily eye and not pursuing an occupation which holds the body prone. There is some advantage, perhaps, in attending to the general features of the landscape over studying the particular plants and animals which inhabit it. A man may walk abroad and no more see the sky than if he walked under a shed. The poet is more in the air than the naturalist, though they may walk side by side. Granted that you are out-of-doors; but what if the outer door _is_ open, if the inner door is shut! You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. Any anomaly in vegetation makes Nature seem more real and present in her working, as the various red and yellow excrescences on young oaks. I am affected as if it were a different Nature that produced them. As if a poet were born who had designs in his head.[301] It is remarkable that animals are often obviously, manifestly, related to the plants which they feed upon or live among,—as caterpillars, butterflies, tree-toads, partridges, chewinks,—and this afternoon I noticed a yellow spider on a goldenrod; as if every condition might have its expression in some form of animated being.[302] Spear-leaved goldenrod in path to northeast of Flint’s Pond. _Hieracium paniculatum_, a very delicate and slender hawkweed. I have now found all the hawkweeds. Singular these genera of plants, plants manifestly related yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a natural _history_ in a new sense.[303] At Wharf Rock found water lobelia in blossom. I saw some smilax vines in the swamp, which were connected with trees ten feet above the ground whereon they grew and four or five feet above the surrounding bushes. This slender vine, which cannot stand erect, how did it establish that connection? Have the trees and shrubs by which it once climbed been cut down? Or perchance do the young and flexible shoots blow up in high winds and fix themselves?[304] On Cedar Hill, south side pond, I still hear the locust, though it has been so much colder for the last week. It is quite hazy in the west, though comparatively clear in other directions. The barberry bushes, with their drooping wreaths of fruit now turning red, bushed up with some other shrub or tree.