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.
