The moon is now more than half full. When I come through the village at 10 o'clock this cold night, cold as in May, the heavy shadows of the elms covering the ground with their rich tracery impress me as if men had got so much more than they had bargained for, not only trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their shadows. At night they lie along the earth. They tower, they arch, they droop over the streets like chandeliers of darkness.
In my walk the other afternoon, I saw the sun shining into the depths of a thick pine wood, checkering the ground like moonlight and illuminating the lichen-covered bark of a large white pine, from which it was reflected through the surrounding thicket as from another sun. This was so deep in the woods that you would have said no sun could penetrate thither.
And now that there is an interregnum in the blossoming of flowers, so is there in the singing of the birds.
An interregnum in the singing of the birds. See May 13, 1855 ("I doubt if we shall at any season hear more birds singing than now."); June 25, 1854 (“Through June the song of the birds is gradually growing fainter.”); July 5, 1852 ( ("Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season."); August 6, 1852 ("Methinks there are few new flowers of late. An abundance of small fruits takes their place. Summer gets to be an old story. Birds leave off singing, as flowers blossoming."); August 20, 1854 ("When the red-eye ceases generally, then I think is a crisis, — the woodland quire is dissolved. That, if I remember, was about a fortnight ago. The concert is over.")
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