Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/68

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58
SUMMER.

a man grafting, for instance. What this imports chiefly is not apples to the owner or bread to the grafter, but a certain mood or train of thought to my mind. That is what the grafting is to me. Whether it is anything at all, even apples or bread, to anybody else, I cannot swear, for it would be worse than swearing through glass. I only see those other facts as through a glass, darkly. . . .

Krigias, with their somewhat orange yellow, spot the dry hills all the forenoon, and are very common, but as they are closed in the afternoon, they are but rarely noticed by walkers.

June 6, 1860. . . . 6.30 p. m. Up Assabet. . . . Not only the foliage begins to look dark and dense, but many ferns, are fully grown, as the cinnamon and interrupted, and being curved over the bank and shore, add to the leafy impression of the season. The Osmunda regalis looks later and more tender, reddish brown still. It preserves its habit of growing in circles, though it may be on a steep bank, and one half the circle in the water. . . .

The trees commonly are not yet so densely leaved but that I can see through them, e. g., I see through the red oak and the bass (below Dome Kock), looking toward the sky. They are a mere network of light and shade after all. The oak may be a little the thicker.