It was so this morning when a flock of migrating bluebirds went over, calling down to me. They came out of the dawn, hovered idly over the barn and the tops of the cedars in the pasture, then faded into the blue about them and beyond them, where a fleet of great white clouds was drifting slowly far off to the south. But their plaintive voices floating down to me I still hear calling, with more yearning than a man, perhaps, should allow himself to know. For at the first sip of such sweet misery some poet chides,
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
For the far-off, unattained and dim,
While the beautiful, all about us lying,
Offers up its low perpetual hymn?”
As if longing were a weakness and not the heart’s hope; and our sighing— Shall I sigh for what I have? Or stop sighing? Some of my possessions I may well sigh over, but there are very few to sigh for, seeing none of them are farther off than the barn or the line fence, except a few books that I have lent my friends, and now and then a few dollars.
And such is the magic in the morning light that I see the beautiful all about me lying—in the bend of the road, on the sweep of the meadow, across the commonplace dooryard asleep in the sun; and such is the sweet silence of the autumn day that I hear the low perpetual hymn—in the lingering notes of the bluebirds, in the strumming of the crickets, in the curving stems of the goldenrods, the loud humming of the aster-dusted bees, even in the wavering red leaves of the maples singing in their fall.
It lacks an hour of mail-time, and the newspaper, and the world. The bluebirds are leaving before the mail-man comes, and everything with wings is flying with them, or is poised for flight as if there were no world, except a world for wings.
The day is warm, with little breezes on the wing, hardly larger than swallows. They stir the grasses of the knoll, and race with them up the slope, to fly on over the wavy crest, following the bluebirds off toward the deep-sea spaces among the drifting clouds. And the curving knoll itself is in motion, a yellow-brown billow heaving against the moving clouds where they ride along the sky. And over the knoll sweep the hawking swallows, white bellies and brown and glinting steel-blue backs aflash in the sun. Winging swallows, winging seeds, winging winds, winging clouds and spheres, and my own soul winging away into the beckoning blue where the bluebirds have gone!
But I shall return—to the mail-box on this rural free delivery route, to the newspaper, to the tariff, to the Turk. The Democratic State Committee is assembled this day in Springfield. I am not there. I also ran. I stumped the State for nomination to the National Senate, and landed here on Mullein Hill, Hingham. Here I set out. Through many years I have developed the safe habit of returning here. It was a magical chance Life offered me; a dream of beating the protective tariff devils. But Mullein Hill is clothed with dreams; and magical chances make this their stopping-place.