Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/364

354 stream of dollars. I hear a few toads still. The bull-frogs trump from time to time. The whippoorwills are heard, and the baying of dogs.

The Rosa nitida, I think, has some time done; lucida generally now ceasing, and the Carolina (?) just begun.

July 8, 1857. Counted the rings of a white-pine stump sawed off last winter at Laurel Glen. It is three and a half feet in diameter and has one hundred and twenty-six rings.

July 9, 1840. In most men s religion the ligature which should be the umbilical cord connecting them with the source of life is rather like that thread which the accomplices of Cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from the temple of Minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of the goddess. Frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are left without an asylum.

The value of many traits in Grecian history depends not so much on their importance as history, as on the readiness with which they accept a wide interpretation, and illustrate the poetry and ethics of mankind. When they announce no particular truth, they are yet central to all truth. Even the isolated and unexplained facts are like the ruins of the temples which in imagination we restore, and ascribe to some Phidias or other master.