The Antirrhinum Canadense, Canada snapdragon, in the Corner road; and the ragged orchis on Conantum.
8.30 p. m.—The streets of the village are much more interesting to me at this hour of a summer evening than by day. Neighbors, and also farmers, come a-shopping after their day’s haying, are chatting in the streets, and I hear the sound of many musical instruments and of singing from various houses. For a short hour or two the inhabitants are sensibly employed. The evening is devoted to poetry, such as the villagers can appreciate.
How rare to meet with a farmer who is a man of sentiment! Yet there was one, Gen. Joshua Buttrick, who died the other day, who is said to have lived in his sentiments. He used to say that the smell of burning powder excited him.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery “to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one’s self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.” He declared that “a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad.” “Honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve.[246] Tell me, Du Saillant, when you lead your regiment into the heat of battle, to conquer a province to which he whom you call your master has no right whatever, do you consider that you are performing a better action than mine, in stopping your friend on the king’s highway, and demanding his purse?”
“I obey without reasoning,” replied the count.
“And I reason without obeying, when obedience appears to me to be contrary to reason,” rejoined Mirabeau.[247]
This was good and manly, as the world goes; and yet it was desperate. A saner man would have found opportunities enough to put himself in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society, and so test his resolution, in the natural course of events, without violating the laws of his own nature. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government.[248] Cut the leather only where the shoe pinches. Let us not have a rabid virtue that will be revenged on society,—that falls on it, not like the morning dew, but like the fervid noonday sun, to wither it.
July 22. The season of morning fogs has arrived. I think it is connected with dog-days. Perhaps it is owing to the greater contrast between the night and the day, the nights being nearly as cold, while the days are warmer? Before I rise from my couch, I see the ambrosial fog stretched over the river, draping the trees. It is the summer’s vapor bath. What purity in the color! It is almost musical; it is positively fragrant. How faery-like it has visited our fields. I am struck by its firm outlines, as distinct as a pillow’s edge, about the height of my house. A great crescent over the course of the river from southwest to northeast. Already, 5.30 a. m., some parts of the river are bare. It goes off in a body down the river, before this air, and does not rise into the heavens. It retreats, and I do not see how it is dissipated. This slight, thin vapor which is left to curl over the surface of the still, dark water, still as glass, seems not [to] be the same thing,—of a different quality. I hear the cockerels crow through it, and the rich crow of young roosters, that sound indicative of the bravest, rudest health, hoarse without cold, hoarse with rude health. That crow is all-nature-compelling; famine and pestilence flee before it. These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog.
I saw the tall lettuce yesterday (Lactuca elongata), whose top or main shoot had been broken off, and it had put up various stems, with entire and lanceolate, not runcinate leaves as usual, thus making what some botanists have called a variety, β. linearis. So I have met with some geniuses who, having met with some such accident maiming them, have been developed in some such monstrous and partial, though original, way. They were original in being less than themselves.
Yes, your leaf is peculiar, and some would make of you a distinct variety, but to me you appear like the puny result of an accident and misfortune, for you have lost your main shoot, and the leaves which would have grown runcinate are small and lanceolate.