Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/272

262 slope of the sandy railroad embankment, in as warm a place as can easily be found, where the heat was reflected oppressively from the sand at three o'clock  this hot day. Yet the green and living leaves felt rather cool than otherwise to the hand, but the dead ones at the root were quite warm. The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest exposure, as if it kept a cellar below from which cooling liquors were drawn up.

How awful is the least unquestionable meanness, when we cannot deny that we have been guilty of it. There seem to be no bounds to our unworthiness.

June 29, 1852. On the North River. The Rana halecina? shad-frog is our handsomest; bronze, striped with brown spots edged and intermixed with bright green. The frogs and tortoises striped and spotted for concealment. The painted tortoise s throat held up above the pads, streaked with yellowish, makes it the less obvious. The mud turtle is the color of the mud; the wood frog and the hylodes, of the dead leaves; the bull-frog, of the pads; the toad, of the earth, etc.; the tree-toad, of the bark.

In my experience nothing is so opposed to poetry, not crime, as business. It is a negation of life.