Cape Cod historian Ellis here provides a lightly edited transcript of Thoreau’s Journal as made available through the Thoreau Edition’s Online Journal Transcripts, covering Thoreau’s fourth and final trip to Cape Cod in June 1857. As readers of Thoreau’s travelogue may know, the book Cape Cod is primarily based on his first trip in the fall of 1849, supplemented by occasional materials from subsequent visits in June 1850 and July 1855.

Though Journal entries from his last trip, undertaken without a walking companion, contribute merely a few facts of natural history to the published narrative, they are rich in observation, wit, and rumination. Thoreau’s eye for social and cultural quirks among the locals he interviews, as well as his sense of poetry in motion on the vast salt-pummeled and shifting sandbar, is undiminished. “As I walked along close to the edge of the water, the sea oscillating like a pendulum before me, and each billow flowing with a flat white foaming edge, and a rounded outline up the sand, it reminded me of the white toes of blue-stockinged feet thrust forward from under the garments in an endless dance. It was a contra dance to the shore. Some waters would flow unexpectedly high and fill my shoes with water before I was aware of it. It is very exciting for a while to walk where half the floor before you is thus incessantly fluctuating” (47). So Thoreau writes in his entry for June 19, as if recalling an intoxicating ball.

Ellis supplies informed annotation throughout his booklet, as well as congenial illustrations. For all its modest, slender appearance, Ellis’s edition of the fourth Thoreau trip to Cape Cod is a worthy companion to any copy of the published Cape Cod.]