An island in a pond.

May 25.

A fine, freshening air, a little hazy, that bathes and washes everything, saving the day from extreme heat. 

Walked to the hills south of Wayland by the road by Deacon Farrar’s. 

First vista just beyond Merron's (?), looking west down a valley, with a verdant columned elm at the extremity of the vale and the blue hills and horizon beyond. These are the resting-places in a walk. We love to see any part of the earth tinged with blue, cerulean, the color of the sky, the celestial color. 

I wonder that houses are not oftener located mainly that they may command particular rare prospects, every convenience yielding to this. The farmer would never suspect what it was you were buying, and such sites would be the cheapest of any. 

A site where you might avail yourself of the art of Nature for three thousand years, which could never be materially changed or taken from you, a noble inheritance for your children. The true sites for human dwellings are unimproved. They command no price in the market. 

Men will pay something to look into a travelling showman's box, but not to look upon the fairest prospects on the earth. A vista where you have the near green horizon contrasted with the distant blue one, terrestrial with celestial earth. The prospect of a vast horizon must be accessible in our neighborhood. Where men of enlarged views may be educated. An unchangeable kind of wealth, a real estate.

. . .

See Bunker Hill Monument and Charlestown from the Wayland hills, and westward, or west by south, an island in a pond.

What is the orange-yellow aster-like flower of the meadows now in blossom with a sweet-smelling stem when bruised ?

Now, at 8.30 o'clock P.M., I hear the dreaming of the frogs.  So it seems to me, and so significantly passes my life away. It is like the dreaming of frogs in a summer evening.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 25, 1851

Dreaming of the frogs. See June 13, 1851 ("The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,- the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog, and the bullfrog."); May 25, 1852 ("I hear the first troonk of a bullfrog.”) ; May 25, 1855 ("Hear . . . the summer spray frog, amid the ring of toads.”); May 25, 1859 ("Hear within a day or two what I call the sprayey note of the toad, different and later than its early ring.") May 25, 1860 ("5 P.M. the toads ring loud and numerously.”) See also May 13, 1860 ("It is so warm that I hear the peculiar sprayey note of the toad generally at night."); May 16, 1853 ("Nature appears to have passed a crisis. . .. The sprayey dream of the toad has a new sound"); June 12, 1855 (“I hear the toad, which I have called “spray frog” falsely, still. . . .A peculiarly rich, sprayey dreamer, now at 2 P. M.! . . . This rich, sprayey note possesses all the shore. It diffuses itself far and wide over the water and enters into every crevice of the noon, and you cannot tell whence it proceeds”)

So significantly passes my life away. See July 19, 1851 ("I may say I am unborn. If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle? If life is a waiting, so be it."); August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned."); November 12, 1859 ("I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream.")