in Thoreau’s Journal:

An aurora fading into a general saffron color. At length the redness travels over partly from east to west, before sunrise, and there is little color in the east. The birds all unite to make the morning hour, sing rather faintly, not prolonging their strains. The crickets appear to have received a reinforcement during the sultry night.

There is no name for the evening red corresponding to aurora. It is the blushing foam about the prow of the sun’s boat, and at eve, the same in its wake. ––I do not often hear the bluebird now except at dawn. ––I think we have had no clear winter skies, no skies the color of a robin’s egg and pure amber….for some months. ––

“The flower opens, and lo! another year.” [ancient Chinese saying]

There is something sublime in the fact that some of the oldest written sentences should thus celebrate the coming in of spring. How many times have the flowers opened and a new year begun! Hardly a more cheering sentence could have come down to us. How old is spring, a phenomenon still so fresh! Do we perceive any decay in Nature? How much evidence is contained in this short and simple sentence respecting the former inhabitants of this globe! It is a sentence to be inscribed on vessels of porcelain, suggesting that so many years had gone before, in observation as fit then as now.