Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/250

240 must not allow the reader to forget that it is evening or night, without my saying that it is dark. Otherwise he will, of course, presume a daylight atmosphere.

The earliest water surfaces, as I remember, as soon as the ice is melted, present as fair and matured scenes, as soft and warm, reflecting the sky through the clear atmosphere, as in midsummer, far in advance of the earth. The earliest promise of the summer, is it not in the smooth reflecting surface of woodland lakes in which the ice is just melted? Those liquid eyes of Nature, blue, or black, or even hazel, deep or shallow, clear or turbid, green next the shore, the color of their iris.

By boat up the Assabet.

The Nymphœa odorata, sweet water lily, pond lily, in bloom. A superb flower, our lotus, queen of the waters. Now is the solstice in still waters. How sweet, innocent, wholesome its fragrance, how pure its white petals, though its root is in the mud. It must answer in my mind for what the orientals say of the lotus flower. Probably the first a day or two since. To-morrow, then, will be the first Sabbath when the young men, having bathed, will walk slowly and soberly to church, in their best clothes, each with a lily in his hand or bosom, with as long a stem as he could get. At least I used to see