Remembering damp and early spring.

June 6. 

The aspect of the dry rocky hills already indicates the rapid revolution of the seasons. The spring, that early age of the world, following hard on the reign of water and the barren rocks yet dripping with it, is past. 

There is a growth confined to the damp and early spring.  How many plants have already dried - lichens and algae, which we can still remember, as if belonging to a former epoch, saxifrage, crowfoot, anemone, columbine, etc.

It is Lee's Cliff I am on. How dry and crisp the turf feels there now, not moist with melted snows, remembering, as it were, when it was the bottom of the sea.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1853

The spring, that early age of the world, following hard on the reign of water and the barren rocks yet dripping with it, is past. See April 28, 1852 ("This may, perhaps, be nearly the order of the world's creation. Such were the first localities afforded for plants, water-bottoms, bare rocks, and scantily clad lands, and land recently bared of water. Thus we have in the spring of the year the spring of the world represented.")