Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/110

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SUMMER.

sented to your senses. You are no longer in place. It is like conformity, walking in the ways of men.

June 11, 1852.—It commonly happens that a flower is considered more beautiful that is not followed by fruit. It must culminate in the flower.

The red-eye sings now in the woods perhaps more than any other bird.

As I climbed the cliffs, when I jarred the foliage, I perceived an exquisite perfume which I could not trace to its source. Ah, those fugacious, universal fragrances of the meadows and woods! odors rightly mingled!

The shrub oaks on the plain are so covered with foliage that, when I look down on them from the cliffs, I am impressed as if I looked down on a forest of oaks.

The oven-bird and the thrasher sing. The last has a sort of chuckle. The crickets begin to sing in warm, dry places.

Lupines, their pods and seeds. First, the profusion of color, spikes of flowers rising above and prevailing over the leaves; then the variety in different clumps, rose? purple, blue, and white; then the handsome palmate leaf, made to hold dew. Gray says the name is from lupus, wolf, because they "were thought to devour the fertility of the soil." This is scurrilous.