Page:Summer - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/56

46 which the distant fields are seen, reddened with sorrel, the meadows wet-green, full of fresh grass, and the trees in their first beautiful, bright, untarnished, and unspotted green. May is the bursting into leaf and early flowering with much coolness and wet, and a few decidedly warm days ushering in summer; June, verdure and growth, with not intolerable, but agreeable heat. The young pitch pines in Mason's Pasture are a glorious sight now, most of the shoots grown six inches, so soft and blue-green, nearly as wide as high. It is Nature s front yard. The mountain laurel shows its red flower buds, but many shoots have been killed by frost.

There is a tract of pasture and wood land, orchard, and swamp in the north part of the town through which the old Carlisle road runs, which is nearly two miles square, without a single house, and with scarcely any cultivated land, four square miles

I perceive some black birch leaves with a beautiful crimson kind of sugaring along the furrows of the nerves, giving them a bright crimson color, either a fungus or the deposit of an insect. Seen through a microscope it sparkles like a ruby.

Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the calyx; the heavens, the corolla.