Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/179

Rh they appear to run to leaves and bear very little fruit, having spent themselves in leaves by the time the dry weather arrives. It is those still earlier and more stinted plants which grow on dry uplands that bear the early fruit, formed before the droughts. But the meadows produce both leaves and fruit.

I begin to see the flowering fern at a distance in the river meadows.

The sun goes down red again, like a high-colored flower of summer; as the white and yellow flowers of spring are giving place to the rose, and will soon to the red lily, etc., so the yellow sun of spring has become a red sun of June drought, round and red like a midsummer flower, production of torrid heats.

June 18, 1840. I am startled when I consider how little I am actually concerned about the things I write in my journal.

A fair land, indeed, do books spread open to us, from the Genesis down,—but, alas! men do not take them up kindly into their own being, and breathe into them a fresh beauty, knowing that the grimmest of them belongs to such warm sunshine and still moonlight as the present.

June 18, 1852. The hornet s nest is built with many thin layers of his paper, with an interval of about one eighth of an inch between them, so that his wall is one or two inches thick.