Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/91

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SUMMER.
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a watering-pot which "gluts" the earth. He calls the kitchen-garden the "Olitory garden." In a dedication of his "Kalendarium Hortense" to Cowley, he inserts two or three good sentences or quotations, viz., "as the philosopher in Seneca desired only bread and herbs to dispute felicity with Jupiter." So of Cowley's simple, retired life. "Who would not, like you, cacher sa vie?" "delivered from the gilded impertinences of life."

June 9, 1853. 4.15 a. m. To Nashawtuck by boat. A prevalent fog, though not quite so thick as the last described. . . . Here and there deep valleys are excavated in it, as painters imagine the Red Sea for the passage of Pharaoh's host, wherein trees and houses appear, as it were, at the bottom of the sea. It is interesting to see the tops of the trees first and most distinctly before you see their trunks or where they stand on earth. Far in the northeast there is, as before, apparently a tremendous surf breaking on a distant shoal. It is either a real shoal, that is, a hill over which the fog breaks, or the effect of the sun's rays on it.

The first white lily bud. White clover is abundant and very sweet, on the common, filling the air, but not yet elsewhere as last year.

8 a. m. To Orchis Swamp. Well Meadow. Hear a goldfinch. This the second or third only