Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/225

Rh What is any man s discourse to me, if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of the crickets? In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and cheered in their discourse as it were by the flux of sparkling streams.

I cannot see the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity. My eye penetrates as far into the ether as that depth is inward from which my contemporary thought springs.

Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment and childlike mirthfulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.

June 23, 1851. It is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and booming of the night-hawks flying over high, open fields in the woods. They fly like butterflies, not to avoid birds of prey, but apparently to secure their own insect prey. Often you must look a long while before you can detect the mote in the sky from which the note proceeds.

The common cinquefoil, Potentilla simplex, greets me with its simple and unobtrusive yellow flower in the grass. The Potentilla argentea, hoary cinquefoil, also is now in blossom.