Is it autumn? The recompense for bearing the heat and burden of the year’s long day is ours. What joy to contemplate the heaped-up treasures of a fruitful summer, and know they are yours by right of a worthy conquest wherein no one suffered wrong! Nor is Nature less beautiful or less communicative now. Indeed, I hold her even more so. The ruddy tints of the forest leaf mark the completion of a summer’s labor to which we have given little heed as it progressed; but the woodlands invite us now to see how beautiful as well as useful a tree may be, and open their doors to “an annual exhibition” at which the world may well wonder. I would rather have the autumn landscape before my door than its counterfeit on canvas hung upon the wall. It is a comfort to know that, be the former ever so gaudy, it can not be said to be unnatural. Thank the stars! critics are dumb, whatever the garb Nature sees fit to put on.
Is it winter? In a broad sense the world is now at rest, but one need not sit down and mope because of it. It is a happy lot to be able to lead a contemplative life; the better if it alternates with periods of activity. And never a winter so dead as to be unsuggestive, not even though the rigor of an arctic one be upon us. If the familiar river no longer flows by, brimming, blue, and sparkling, flecked with the white sails of busy craft or fretted with the tireless splash of hissing steamers, what of the rugged highway it becomes for the wild life that braves the north wind and its attendant storms? Whoso studies the flocks of dainty sparrows that throng the wide, wind-swept wastes in winter should have courage enough to face the world at all seasons. What a pulpit becomes a cake of ice whereon a tree-sparrow is singing! and I have heard hundreds of warbling sparrows when the day was cold and dreary beyond description.
“How cheerless are the leafless oaks!”—these the strange words of a storm-bound visitor. Cheerless? just now, perhaps; but wait, and what a network of ruggedness will bar the deep blue sky, and let in the welcome sunshine where the gnarly roots afford a tempting seat! It is winter now, and as welcome the warmth and sunshine in this little nook as were the coolness and shade in the leafy month of June.
And what a merry fate is his who is snow-bound! It is something to know even a little of what Whittier has pictured for all time. Every feature of a great snow-storm is a living poem that thrills us; and ever dearest of all the open fire. “Back-log studies,” think of them! Everything, down to the breaking of paths to the highway and the assurance received at last that the world still lasts—everything, when snow-bound, cuts a deep notch in the tally-stick of your memory.
The townsman may greet me with a pitying smile and turn with disdain from the pleasures wherewith I am pleased; but nothing that he offers in their place has yet tempted me to forsake the idols of my early days. What though I am rough as the gnarly black-oak’s bark, have I not Nature for my next neighbor?
A Midsummer Outing.
The gentle breeze that keeps the forest roof a-tremble whispers the promise of a cool day, but breaks it long before noontide. It is wise, therefore, to trust only to past experience, and, if you ramble at all during the dog-days, consider yourself in the tropics and act accordingly. Seek the shady nooks, and rest content to contemplate that which is nearest at hand. He has traveled much who spends an hour in the woods. The glamour of mystery rests as a veil over every tree and shrub, and who has yet shown why the wayside weeds are all so brilliant and beautiful? Where, except the damp shades of night, no cooling shadows ever fall, even the well-traveled highway is now resplendent with St.-John’s-wort, or white as with a snow-drift, where the blooming yarrow clusters; but the pitiless sun threatens the rambler here, and I turn to the little forest of sumach and locust which now nearly obliterates the boundaries of a long-neglected pasture. Everywhere is outspread the luxuriance of the tropics. Acres of lilies, ruddy and golden, set in a cloud of tall meadow-rue; and this wealth of gorgeous bloom upon which the eyes might feast the summer long, is hedged by a glossy thicket of smilax, broken here and there only to give place to a no less rank growth of pink roses. My neighbors hold the place a disgrace to its owner, but I have long since cut the word “weed” from my vocabulary.
In midsummer, it is too much like cataloguing to scan over-closely one’s surroundings. General impressions are all that one should aim at, and not fret if many a flower or bird should escape notice. When it is ninety in the shade, it is well to carry even a light load of thoughts. Lilies and yarrow, for instance, are enough for a hot July morning, and I am quite content to have further details go to those botanists, fearful bores, who
“Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”