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.
Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a _natural_ life, round which
the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows.
