The tree-primrose (scabish)[212] (_Œnother biennais_), a rather coarse yellow flower with a long tubular calyx, naturalized extensively in Europe. The clasping bellflower (_Campanula perfoliata_, from the heart-shaped leaves clasping the stalk), an interesting flower. The _Convolvulus sepium_, large bindweed, make a fresh morning impression as of dews and purity. The adder’s-tongue arethusa, a delicate pink flower. How different is day from day! Yesterday the air was filled with a thick fog-like haze, so that the sun did not once shine with ardor, but everything was so tempered under this thin veil that it was a luxury merely to be outdoors,—you were less out for it. The shadows of the apple trees even early in the afternoon were remarkably distinct. The landscape wore a classical smoothness. Every object was as in [a] picture with a glass over it. I saw some hills on this side the river, looking from Conantum, on which, the grass being of a yellow tinge, though the sun did not shine out on them, they had the appearance of being shone upon peculiarly. It was merely an unusual yellow tint of the grass. The mere surface of water was an object for the eye to linger on. The panicled cornel, a low shrub, in blossom by wall-sides now. I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its _hypæthral_ character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, _under the ether_. I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent, out-of-doors. It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house or led a _domestic_ life. I trust it does not smell [so much] of the study and library, even of the poet’s attic, as of the fields and woods; that it is a hypæthral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf. The potatoes are beginning to blossom.