Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/277

Rh sundown afar off. It is a note which belongs to a New England summer evening. Though so late I hear the summer hum of a bee in the grass, as I am on my way to the river to bathe. After hoeing in a dusty garden all this warm afternoon, so warm that the baker says he never knew the like, and expects to find his horses dead in the stable when he gets home, it is very grateful to wend one's way at evening to some pure and cool stream, and bathe there.

What I suppose is the Aster miser, small-flowered aster, like a small many-headed white-weed, has now for a week been in bloom, a humble weed, but one of the earliest of the asters.

I first observed about ten days ago that the fresh shoots of the fir-balsam, Abies balsamifera, found under the tree wilted, or plucked and kept in the pocket or in the house a few days, emit the fragrance of strawberries, only it is some what more aromatic and spicy. It was to me a very remarkable fragrance to be emitted by a pine, a very rich, delicious, aromatic, spicy fragrance, which, if the fresh and living shoots emitted, they would be still more to be sought after.

June 30, 1852. Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all, that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one s native place, for