Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/60

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50
SUMMER.

that even they served for a language of the sentiments. Stigmariæ stood for a human sentiment in that race's flower language. Chickweed or a pine-tree is but little less wild. I assume to be acquainted with these, but what ages between me and the tree whose shade I enjoy. It is as if it stood substantially in a remote geological period.

June 5, 1860. . . . When I open my window at night, I hear the peeping of the hylodes distinctly through the rather cool rain (as also some the next a. m.), but not of toads; more hylodes than in the late very warm evenings when the toads were heard most numerously. The hylodes evidently love the cooler nights of spring. The toads, the warm days and nights of May. Now it requires a cool (and better if wet) night, which will silence the toads, to make the hylodes distinct.

June 6, 1852. First devil's needles in the air, and some smaller bright green ones on flowers. The earliest blueberries are now forming as green berries. The wind already injures the just expanded leaves, tearing them and making them turn black. . . . The side-flowering sandwort, an inconspicuous white flower like a chickweed.

June 6, 1853, 4.30 a. m. To Linnæa Woods. The Linnæa just out.