Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/175

Rh about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. The truly beautiful and noble puts its lover, as it were, at an infinite distance, while it attracts him more strongly than ever. What a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy, reserved tone.

The dense fields of blue-eyed grass now blue the meadows, as if, in this fair season of the year, the clouds that envelope the earth were dispersing, and blue patches begin to appear answering to the blue sky. The eyes pass from these blue patches into the surrounding green as from the patches of clear sky into the clouds.

One of the night-hawk's eggs is hatched. The young is unlike any that I have seen, exactly like a pinch of rabbit's fur, or down of that color, dropped on the ground, not two inches long, with a dimpling, somewhat regular arrangement of minute feathers in the middle, destined to become the wings and tail. Yet it even half opened its eye, and peeped, if I mistake not. Was ever bird more completely protected, both by the color of its eggs, and of its own body that sits on them, and of the young bird just hatched? Accordingly the eggs and young are rarely discovered. There was one egg still, and by the side of it this little pinch of down flattened out and not observed at first.

A foot down the hill had rolled half the egg