Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/356

346 water even the day before, is fatal to the morning's clarity. But in health, the sound of a cowbell is celestial music. O might I always wake to thought and poetry, regenerated! Can it be called a morning, if our senses are not clarified so that we perceive more clearly? if we do not rise with elastic vigor?

How wholesome these fogs which some fear. They are cool, medicated vapor baths mingled by Nature, which bring to our senses all the medical properties of the meadows; the touchstones of health. Sleep with all your windows open, and let the mist embrace you.

To the Cliffs. The fog condenses into fountains and streams of music, as in the strain of the bobolink which I hear, and runs off so. The music of the birds is the tinkling of the rills that flow from it. I cannot see twenty rods.

There is everywhere dew on the cobwebs, little gossamer veils or scarfs as big as your hand dropped from the shoulders of fairies that danced on the grass the past night. The to me beautiful rose-colored spikes of the hardback, Spirœa tomentosa; one is out.—I think it was this thin vapor that produced a kind of mirage when I looked over the meadow from the railroad last night toward Trillium wood, giving to the level meadow a certain liquid, sea-like look. Now the heads of herd's grass, seen through the dispersing fog, look like an ocean of grass.