All creatures are more awake than ever.

May 11.

While at the Falls, I feel the air cooled and hear the muttering of distant thunder in the northwest and see a dark cloud in that direction indistinctly through the wood. That distant thunder-shower very much cools our atmosphere. I make haste through the woods homeward via Hubbard's Close.

Hear the evergreen-forest note. 

The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird.

The shower is apparently going by on the north. There is a low, dark, blue-black arch, crescent-like, in the horizon, sweeping the distant earth there with a dusky, rainy brush. There is an uncommon stillness here, disturbed only by a rush of the wind from time to time.

All men, like the earth, seem to wear an aspect of expectation. In the village I meet men making haste to their homes, for, though the heavy cloud has gone quite by, the shower will probably strike us with its tail. Now I have got home there is at last a still cooler wind with a rush, and at last a smart shower, slanting to the ground, without thunder.

The rain is over. There is a bow in the east. The earth is refreshed; the grass is wet. The air is warm again and still. The rain has smoothed the water to a glassy smoothness. The breadth of the flood not yet diminished. It is very beautiful on the water now.

It is surprising what an electrifying effect this shower appears to have had. It is like the christening of the summer. I suspect that summer weather may be always ushered in in a similar manner, — thunder-shower, rainbow, smooth water, and warm night.

A rainbow on the brow of summer. 

Nature has placed this gem on the brow of her daughter. Not only the wet grass looks many shades greener in the twilight, but the old pine-needles also. The toads are heard to ring more generally and louder than before. All creatures are more awake than ever.

Now, some time after sunset, the robins scold and sing, the Maryland yellow-throat is heard amid the alders and willows by the waterside, and the peetweet and black birds, and sometimes a kingbird, and the tree-toad.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 11, 1854

The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird. See May 11, 1853 ("The different moods or degrees of wildness and poetry of which the song of birds is the keynote.")

I suspect that summer weather may be always ushered in in a similar manner, — thunder-shower, rainbow, smooth water, and warm night. See May 17, 1852 (' Does not summer begin after the May storm?") See also March 13, 1855 ("Rainbow in east this morning."); April 9, 1855 ("With April showers, me thinks, come rainbows. Why are they so rare in the winter?"); April 18, 1855 ("Am overtaken by a sudden sun-shower, after which a rainbow. ");May 10, 1857 (" Before night a sudden shower with some thunder and lightning; the first."); May 13, 1860 ("The third sultry evening in my chamber. A faint lightning is seen in the north horizon."); May 20, 1856 ("Was awaked and put into sounder sleep than ever early this morning by the distant crashing of thunder, and now ... I hear it in mid-afternoon, muttering, crashing in the muggy air in mid-heaven,... like the tumbling down of piles of boards, and get a few sprinkles in the sun. Nature has found her hoarse summer voice again. . .")