13 July 1840 – 19 July 1840

Our discourse should be ex tempore, but not pro tempore.

We are as much refreshed by sounds as by sights, or scents, or flavors,—as the barking of a dog heard in the woods at midnight, or the tinklings which attend the dawn. As I picked blackberries this morning, by starlight, the distant yelping of a dog fell on my inward ear, as the cool breeze on my cheek.

These two days that I have not written in my Journal, set down in the calendar as the 17th and 18th of July, have been really an æon in which a Syrian empire might rise and fall. How many Persias have been lost and won in the interim? Night is spangled with fresh stars.