Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/158

148 flowers grow, there man's spirit is fed and poets grow. It cannot be high-colored, growing in the shade. Nature has taken no pains to exhibit it, and few that bloom are ever seen by mortal eyes.

There are few really cold springs. How few men can be believed when they say one is cold. I go out of my way to the Boiling Spring. It is as cold as the coldest well water. What a treasure is such a spring! Who divined it?

8 On river. No moon. A deafening sound from toads, and intermittingly from bull frogs. What I have thought to be frogs prove to be toads, sitting by thousands along the shore, and trilling short and loud, not so long a quaver as in the spring. Arid I have not heard them in those pools, now indeed mostly dried up, where I heard them in the spring. (I do not know what to think of my midsummer frog now.) The bull-frogs are very loud, of various degrees of baseness and sonorousness, answering each other across the river with two or three grunting croaks. They are not now so numerous as the toads. It is candle light. The fishes leap. The meadows sparkle with the coppery light of fire-flies. The evening star, multiplied by undulating water, is like bright sparks of fire continually ascending. The reflections of the trees are generally indistinct. There is a low mist slightly enlarging the river, through