Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/132

122 too gradual?—After getting into the road I have no thought to record. All the way home the walk is comparatively barren.

June 13, 1852. 3 To Conantum The river has a summer mid-day look, smooth, with green shores, and shade from the trees on its banks.

What a sweetness fills the air now in low grounds or meadows, reminding me of times when I went strawberrying years ago. It is as if all meadows were filled with some sweet mint.

The Dracaena borealis (Bigelow), Clintonia borealis (Gray), amid the Solomon's-seals in Hubbard's Grove Swamp, a very neat and hand some liliaceous flower, with three large, regular, spotless green convallaria leaves, making a triangle from the root, and sometimes a fourth from the scape, linear, with four drooping, greenish-yellow, bell-shaped (?) flowers. It is a handsome and perfect flower, though not high-colored. I prefer it to some more famous. But Gray should not have named it from the Governor of New York. What is he to the lovers of flowers in Massachusetts? If named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. Rhode Island may as well name the flowers after her governors as New York. Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.