'Now the upper edge of that low blue bank is gilt where the sun has disappeared, leaving a glory in the horizon through which a few cloudy peaks send raylike shadows. Now a slight rosy blush is spreading north and south over the horizon sky and tingeing a few small scattered clouds in the east. A blue tinge southward makes the very edge of the earth there a mountain. That low bank of cloud in the west is now exactly the color of the mountain, a dark blue. We should think sacredly, with devotion. That is one thing, at least, we may do magnanimously...'
'May not every man have some private affair which he can conduct greatly, unhurriedly? The river is silvery, as if it were plated and polished smooth, with the slightest possible tinge of gold, tonight. How beautiful the meanders of a river, thus revealed! How beautiful hills and vales, the whole surface of the earth a succession of these great cups, falling away from dry or rocky edges to gelid green meadows and water in the midst, where night already is setting in! The thrush, now the sun is apparently set, fails not to sing.'--from Thoreau's Journal, 27 July 1852
Damion Searls recently edited a new edition of the journal (singular, even though 7000 pages of manuscript) for the NYRB. Interviewed recently in the Huffington Post, he said, 'It's kind of remarkable how many of these Thoreau journals end up sounding like Rilke poems in prose, or vice versa.'
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