The evening star and the moon had gone. Alertness and
peace lay camly couching together through the fluid universal shadows.
_Aug. 26_.--Bright has the day been, and my spirits an equal
_forzando_. Then comes the night, different, inexpressibly pensive,
with its own tender and temper'd splendor. Venus lingers in the west
with a voluptuous dazzle unshown hitherto this summer. Mars rises
early, and the red sulky moon, two days past her full; Jupiter at
night's meridian, and the long curling-slanted Scorpion stretching
full view in the south, Aretus-neck'd. Mars walks the heavens
lord-paramount now; all through this month I go out after supper and
watch for him; sometimes getting up at midnight to take another look
at his unparallel'd lustre. (I see lately an astronomer has made out
through the new Washington telescope that Mars has certainly one
moon, perhaps two.) Pale and distant, but near in the heavens, Saturn
precedes him.
MULLEINS AND MULLEINS
Large, placid mulleins, as summer advances, velvety in texture, of a
light greenish-drab color, growing everywhere in the fields--at first
earth's big rosettes in their broad-leav'd low cluster-plants, eight,
ten, twenty leaves to a plant--plentiful on the fallow twenty-acre
lot, at the end of the lane, and especially by the ridge-sides of the
fences--then close to the ground, but soon springing up--leaves as
broad as my hand, and the lower ones twice as long--so fresh and dewy
in the morning--stalks now four or five, even seven or eight feet
high.
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