JUNE 



21 



Exquisitely beautiful, and unlike anything we 

 have, is the first white lily just expanded in some 

 shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, per- 

 fectly fresh and pure before the insects have dis- 

 covered it. How admirable its purity! How 

 innocently sweet its fragrance ! How significant 

 that the rich black mud of our dead stream pro- 

 duces the water lily ! Out of that fertile slime 

 springs this spotless purity. It is remarkable that 

 those flowers which are most emblematic of purity 

 should grow in the mud. 



THOREAU: Summer. 



22 



Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen - hawks 

 circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and 

 descending, approaching and leaving one another, 

 as if they were the embodiment of my own 

 thoughts. 



THOREAU: Walden. 



How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lambkill 

 now just before sunset, small ten-sided rosy-crim- 

 son basins, about two inches above the recurved, 

 drooping, dry capsules of last year, and sometimes 

 those of the year before, two inches lower. 



THOREAU: Summer. 



