Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/373

Rh behind Minot's I see the birds flying against this red sky; one looks like a bat. Now between two stupendous mountains of the low stratum under the evening red, clothed in slightly rosaceous, amber light, through a magnificent gorge, far, far away, as perchance may occur in pictures of the Spanish coast viewed from the Mediterranean, I see a city, the eternal city of the West, the phantom city, in whose streets no traveler has trod, over whose pavement the horses of the sun have already hurried, some Salamanca of the imagination. But it lasts only for a moment, for now the changing light has wrought such changes in it that I see the resemblance no longer. A softer amber sky than in any picture. The swallows are improving this short day, twittering as they fly, the huckleberry-bird repeats his jingling strain, and I hear the notes of the song-sparrow more honest-sounding than most.—I am always struck by the centrality of the observer's position. He always stands fronting the middle of the arch, and does not suspect at first that a thousand observers from a thousand hills behold the sunset sky from equally favorable positions.

And now I turn and observe the dark masses of the trees in the east, not green, but black. While the sun was setting in the west, the trees were rising in the east.