Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/205

Rh snoring music of nature at night. How allied to the pad in place and color is this creature! His greenish back is the leaf, and his yellow throat, the flower, even in form, with his sesquipedality of belly. Through the summer he lies on the pads or with his head out, and in the winter buries himself at their roots(?). The bull paddock! His eyes like the buds of the Nuphar Kalmiana. I fancy his skin would stand water, without shrinking, forever. Gloves made of it for rainy weather, for trout fishers!

Frogs appear slow to make up their minds, but then they act precipitately. As long as they are here, they are here, and express no intention of removing. But the idea of removing fills them instantaneously, as Nature, abhorring, fills a vacuum. Now they are fixed and imperturbable like the sphinx, and now they go off with short, squatty leaps over the spatterdock on the irruption of the least idea.

June 20, 1853. Meadow-sweet out probably yesterday. It is an agreeable, unpretending flower. The bosky bank shows bright roses from its green recesses. Found two lilies open in the very shallow inlet of the meadow. Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, perfectly fresh and pure before the insects have