Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/24

14 into green, and think of the season now in its prime and heyday, it looks as if it were the blood mantling in the cheek of the beautiful year,—the rosy cheek of its health, its rude June health. The medeola has been out a day or two, apparently,—another green flower.

June 2, 1854. Up Assabet to Castilleja and Anursnack. While waiting for and S I look now from the yard to the waving and slightly glaucous-tinged June meadows, edged by the cool shade of shrubs and trees,—a waving shore of shady bays and promontories, yet different from the August shades. It is beautiful and Elysian. The air has now begun to be filled with a bluish haze. These virgin shades of the year, when everything is tender, fresh, and green, how full of promise!—promising bowers of shade in which heroes may repose themselves. I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves. The black willows are already beautiful, and the hemlocks with their bead-work of new green. Are these not king-bird-days,—these clearer first June days, full of light, when this aerial, twittering-bird flutters from willow to willow, and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail? The Azalea nudiflora is about done, or there was apparently little of it.—I see some breams'