Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/371

Rh is now green with them, though perhaps the seed has often blown thither directly through the air.—I am surprised to see dense groves of young maples an inch or more high from seed of this year. They have sprung in pure sand where the seed has been drifted and moisture enough supplied, at the water's edge. The seed, now effete, commonly lies on the surface, having sent down its rootlet into the sand.

July 10, 1840. To myself I am as pliant as an osier, and my courses seem not so easy to be calculated as that of Encke's comet, but I am powerless to bend the character of another. He is like iron in my hands. I could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. He is material which no tool of mine will work. A naked savage will fell an oak with a firebrand, and wear a hatchet out of the rock, but I cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my fellow to beautify or deform it.

Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.

We know men through their eyes. You might say that the eye was always original and unlike another. It is the feature of the individual, and not of the family; in twins, still different. All a man's privacy is in his eye, and its expression he cannot alter more than he can alter his character. So long as we look a man in the eye, it