The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air--the
white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy
waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque
beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird
from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an
occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands
or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find
nothing, and away they go)--the vast space of the sky overhead so clear,
and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals
and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color'd
dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally
balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time,
(are they not showing off for my amusement?)--the pond itself, with
the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes--occasionally a flitting
blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly
by--the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade--the
quawk of some pond duck--(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in
the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)--then at some
distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw
it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the
creek--(what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen,
with short neck and long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and
awkward flight over there through the trees?)--the prevailing delicate,
yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over
all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the
sky, transparent and blue--and hovering there in the west, a mass of
white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"--the sky,
with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding--a
vast voiceless, formless simulacrum--yet may-be the most real reality
and formulator of everything--who knows?