Sunset rainbow.

August 7. 

When I think of the thorough drilling to which young men are subjected in the English universities, acquiring a minute knowledge of Latin prosody and of Greek particles and accents, so that they can not only turn a passage of Homer into English prose or verse, but readily a passage of Shakespeare into Latin hexameters or elegiacs, — that this and the like of this is to be liberally educated, — I am reminded how different was the education of the actual Homer and Shakespeare. The worthies of the world and liberally educated have always, in this sense, got along with little Latin and less Greek. 

At this season we have gentle rain-storms, making the aftermath green. The rich and moist English grass land looks very green after the rain, as if it were a second spring. 

If I were to choose a time for a friend to make a passing visit to this world for the first time, in the full possession of all his faculties, perchance it would be at a moment when the sun was setting with splendor in the west, his light reflected far and wide through the clarified air after a rain, and a brilliant rainbow, as now, o'erarching the eastern sky. 

Would he be likely to think this a vulgar place to live [sic], where one would weary of existence, and be compelled to devote his life to frivolity and dissipation? If a man travelling from world to world were to pass through this world at such a moment, would he not be tempted to take up his abode here? 

We see the rainbow apparently when we are on the edge of the rain, just as the sun is setting. If we are too deep in the rain, then it will appear dim. Sometimes it is so near that I see a portion of its arch this side of the woods in the horizon, tingeing them. Sometimes we are completely within it, enveloped by it, and experience the realization of the child's wish. The obvious colors are red and green. 

Why green? It is astonishing how brilliant the red may be. What is the difference between that red and the ordinary red of the evening sky? Who does not feel that here is a phenomenon which natural philosophy alone is inadequate to explain? The use of the rainbow, who has described it?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 7, 1852



At this season we have gentle rain-storms, making the aftermath green . . . as if it were a second spring. See note to August 4, 1853 ("The low fields which have been mown now look very green again in consequence of the rain, as if it were a second spring."). See also August 4, 1852 ("The singular thought-inducing stillness after a gentle rain like this. . . . A pleasant time to behold a small lake in the woods is in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm at this season, when the air and water are perfectly still."); August 4, 1854 ("A still, cloudy day with from time to time a gentle August rain. Rain and mist contract our horizon and we notice near and small objects.")


A moment when the sun was setting with splendor in the west, his light reflected far and wide through the clarified air after a rain, and a brilliant rainbow, as now, o'erarching the eastern sky. See  August 6, 1852 ("All men beholding a rainbow begin to understand the significance of the Greek name for the world, - Kosmos, or beaut");  August 9, 1851 ("It is a splendid sunset, a celestial light on all the land, so that all people come to their doors and windows to look on the grass and leaves and buildings and the sky, as the sun’s rays shine through the cloud and the falling rain we are, in fact, in a rainbow."); June 22, 1852 ("Thunder-showers to day and at sunset a rainbow. "); March 15. 1859 ("Two brilliant rainbows at sunset, the first of the year.");