noble river just at evening,—one, perchance, which you have never explored,—and behold its placid waters, reflecting the woods and sky, lapsing inaudibly toward the ocean, to behold it as a lake, but know it as a river, tempting the beholder to explore it and his own destiny at once, haunt of water-fowl. This was above the factories, all that I saw. That water could never have flowed under a factory. How then could it have reflected the sky?
July 9, 1852. 4 a. m. To Cliffs. . . . An aurora fading into a general saffron color. At length the redness travels over partly from east to west, before sunrise, and there is little color in the east. The birds all unite to make the morning choir, sing rather faintly, not prolonging their strains. The crickets appear to have received a reinforcement during the sultry night.
There is no name for the evening red corresponding to aurora. It is the blushing foam about the prow of the sun's boat, and at eve, the same in its wake.—I do not often hear the blue bird now except at dawn.—I think we have had no clear winter skies, no skies the color of a robin's egg and pure amber . . . for some months.—These blueberries on Fair Haven have a very innocent, ambrosial taste, as if made of the ether itself, as they plainly are colored with it.
