"And Now The Cold Autumnal Dews Are Seen
To Cobweb Ev'ry Green;
And By The Low-Shorn Rowens Doth Appear
The Fast-Declining Year."
We heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and even the water
had acquired a grayer hue.
The sumach, grape, and maple were
already changed, and the milkweed had turned to a deep rich
yellow. In all woods the leaves were fast ripening for their
fall; for their full veins and lively gloss mark the ripe leaf,
and not the sered one of the poets; and we knew that the maples,
stripped of their leaves among the earliest, would soon stand
like a wreath of smoke along the edge of the meadow. Already the
cattle were heard to low wildly in the pastures and along the
highways, restlessly running to and fro, as if in apprehension of
the withering of the grass and of the approach of winter. Our
thoughts, too, began to rustle.
As I pass along the streets of our village of Concord on the day
of our annual Cattle-Show, when it usually happens that the
leaves of the elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the
ground under the breath of the October wind, the lively spirits
in their sap seem to mount as high as any plough-boy's let loose
that day; and they lead my thoughts away to the rustling woods,
where the trees are preparing for their winter campaign. This
autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets
as regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster and
rustle by the wayside, is naturally associated in my mind with
the fall of the year. The low of cattle in the streets sounds
like a hoarse symphony or running bass to the rustling of the
leaves. The wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every
loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad
too appears to scud before it, - having donned his best pea-jacket
and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding
rigging of duck or kerseymere or corduroy, and his furry hat
withal, - to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among
the villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All
the land over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle
palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the
low of calves and the bleating of sheep, - Amos, Abner, Elnathan,
Elbridge, -
"From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain."
I love these sons of earth every mother's son of them, with their
great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from spectacle
to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be time between
sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more than
in haying-time.
"Wise Nature's darlings, they live in the world
Perplexing not themselves how it is hurled."
Running hither and thither with appetite for the coarse pastimes
of the day, now with boisterous speed at the heels of the
inspired negro from whose larynx the melodies of all Congo and
Guinea Coast have broke loose into our streets; now to see the
procession of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as august and grave as
Osiris, or the droves of neat cattle and milch cows as unspotted
as Isis or Io. Such as had no love for Nature
"at all,
Came lovers home from this great festival."
They may bring their fattest cattle and richest fruits to the
fair, but they are all eclipsed by the show of men. These are
stirring autumn days, when men sweep by in crowds, amid the
rustle of leaves, like migrating finches; this is the true
harvest of the year, when the air is but the breath of men, and
the rustling of leaves is as the trampling of the crowd. We read
now-a-days of the ancient festivals, games, and processions of
the Greeks and Etruscans, with a little incredulity, or at least
with little sympathy; but how natural and irrepressible in every
people is some hearty and palpable greeting of Nature. The
Corybantes, the Bacchantes, the rude primitive tragedians with
their procession and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of
the Panathenaea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have
their parallel now. The husbandman is always a better Greek than
the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still
survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in
commemorating it. The farmers crowd to the fair to-day in
obedience to the same ancient law, which Solon or Lycurgus did
not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.
It is worth the while to see the country's people, how they pour
into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their very
shirt and coat-collars pointing forward, - collars so broad as if
they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions
always tend to superfluity, - and with an unusual springiness in
their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another. The more supple
vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a
gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole
like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though
finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed; come to see the
sport, and have a hand in what is going, - to know "what's the
row," if there is any; to be where some men are drunk, some
horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props
under a table, and above all to see the "striped pig." He
especially is the creature of the occasion. He empties both his
pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a
day. He dearly loves the social slush. There is no reserve of
soberness in him.
I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and
succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of
vegetables.
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