Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/253

Rh flowers, all kinds and degrees of beauty, and all kinds of foulness. For what purpose has Nature made a flower to fill the low lands with the odor of carrion. Just so much beauty and virtue as there is in the world, and just so much ugliness and vice, you see expressed in flowers. Each human being has his flower which expresses his character. In them nothing is concealed, but everything published. Many a villager whose garden bounds on the river, when he approaches the willows and cornels by the river's edge, thinks that some carrion has lodged on his shore, when it is only the carrion-flower he smells.

All shadows or shadowlets on the sandy bottom of the river are interesting. All are circular, almost lenticular, for they appear to have thickness. Even the shadows of grass blades are broken into several separate circles of shade. Such is the fabulous or Protean character of the water light. A skater insect casts seven flat or lenticular shades, four smaller in front, two larger behind, and the smallest of all in the centre. From the shadow on the bottom you cannot guess the form on the surface. Everything is transmuted by the water. The shadow, however small, is black within, edged with a sunny halo, corresponding to the day s twilight, and a certain liquidness is imparted to the whole by the incessant motion from the undulation of the surface. The oblong