in Thoreau’s Journal:

1852 

The buck-bean in Hubbards meadow just going out of blossom. The yellow water ranunculus is an important flower in the river now rising above the white lily pads whose flower does not yet appear. I perceive that their petals washed ashore line the sand conspicuously. The green briar in flower. For a week past we have had washing days– The grass waving and trees having leafed out their boughs wave and feel the effect of the breeze. Thus new life & motion is imparted to the trees– The season of waving boughs–and the lighter under sides of the new leaves are exposed. This is the first half of June. Already the grass is not so fresh & liquid velvety as green–having much of its blossom & some even gone to seed–& it is mixed with reddish ferns & other plants–but the general leafiness–shadiness & waving of grass & boughs in the breeze characterise the season. The wind is not quite agreeable–because it prevents your hearing the birds sing. Meanwhile the crickets are strengthening their quire. The weather is very clear & the sky bright. The river shines like silver. Methinks this is a traveller’s month. The locust in bloom– The waving undulating rye. The deciduous trees have filled up the intervals between the (pines.) evergreens. & the woods are bosky now. Is that the Thalictrum Cornuti that shows green stems? at the Corner spring? Gathered strawberries on Fair Haven. rather acid yet.

1853

4:15 Am To Nawshawtuct by boat

A prevalent fog through not quite so thick as the last described–it is a little more local–for it is so thin SW of this hill that I can see the earth through it–but as thick as before NE–yet here & there deep valleys are excavated in it–as painters imagine the red sea for the passage of Pharaoh’s host–wherein trees and houses appear as it were at the bottom of the sea. What is peculiar about it is that it is the tops of the trees which you see first & most distinctly before you see their trunks–or where they stand on earth. Far in the NE there is as before apparently a tremendous surf breaking on a distant shoal. It is either a real shoal i.e. a hill over which the fog breaks or the effect of the sun’s rays on it.