The reader easily goes within the shallowest
contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and promise
of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple, and hears the
faintest strains of the worshippers; but it will have to speak to
posterity, traversing these deserts, through the ruins of its
outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its proportions.
- - - - - - - -
But here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the
while been bodily, Nature, who is superior to all styles and
ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem Autumn, with
which no work of man will bear to be compared.
In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and
feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for
the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any
thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling
leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the
grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has
lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and
nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October
sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we
occupy, not far off geographically, -
"There is a place beyond that flaming hill,
From whence the stars their thin appearance shed,
A place beyond all place, where never ill,
Nor impure thought was ever harbored."
Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature, not his Father but
his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims kindredship with us,
and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.
I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon,
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief.
To an unskilful rhymer the Muse thus spoke in prose:
The moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute
rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their
mistress. Asters and golden-rods reign along the way, and the
life-everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of
their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. The
thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe
the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. But
behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit,
which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the
year, which it bears forever, annually watering and maturing it,
and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit.
