walt whitman's specimen days

i can’t get enough of walt whitman and so many of the other american writers who really focussed on the natural world around them and connected so deeply, almost spiritually to their environment. i just came across a wickedgood resource while scanning and skimming through bartleby’s great books online resource - walt whitman’s collected prose works published in 1892. in the section entitled “specimen days” whitman paints his experience of a day with such an economical yet rich palette that it is like haiku - savoured and revelled in for its simple resplendence!
here’s a sampler:

colours—a contrast
  
“such a play of colours and lights, different seasons, different hours of the day—the lines of the far horizon where the faint-tinged edge of the landscape loses itself in the sky.
as I slowly hobble up the lane toward day-close, an incomparable sunset shooting in molten sapphire and gold, shaft after shaft, through the ranks of the long-leaved corn, between me and the west.
 another day. — the rich dark green of the tulip-trees and the oaks, the gray of the swamp-willows, the dull hues of the sycamores and black-walnuts, the emerald of the cedars (after rain,) and the light yellow of the beeches.”

summer sights and indolencies
  
“june 10th. — as i write, 5 1/2 P. M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. we had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun.
for underlay, trees in fulness of tender foliage—liquid, ready, long-drawn notes of birds—based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. i have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. they pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds—and then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me i can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.”

needless to say, i’ve put this book on my wish list!!!