As it was the Sabbath, I was anxious to go to church with mother, Frank and Ned, but mother feared for me to take the sultry ride, and so I was to stay at home. To my surprise Carlotta asked leave to stay at home also, though she removed the flattering unction I had laid to my heart, that she staid to be with me, by telling mother she wished to spend the morning in her room. After breakfast the carriage came round, and mother, Ned and Frank, left for the church, which was a little country appointment, about four miles distant.
As soon as they were gone Carlotta went to her room, and, taking a book, I went out doors and lay down on the grass, beneath a large cedar at one end of the house.
There are four kinds of days in the year, coming one in each season, on which I feel an unaccountable, though not unpleasant melancholy. Days when I want to get far away to myself, and muse in undisturbed loneliness. Days when Memory, not Fancy, holds her court, and scenes and faces long forgotten spring up from her dusty sepulchres, and throng her shrine and ask for tears. Days that make a prison of the Present, a worthless bauble of the Future, and lift only to our heart’s embrace the golden Past, gone from life forever! Brighter than it ever really was, its pains forgotten, only its joys remembered! Like a dead friend, it is dearer now than ever, and we weep because we cannot turn life’s current back.
One of these days comes in winter, when, after a cloudy morning and noon, the sun sets cold and clear; when the wind with a hollow moan sweeps over the bare fields; when the long lines of wild ducks, clearly defined against the red sky, wind their way up the bends of the river, along whose banks the naked trees stretch their arms like the masts and yards of weird ships; when the blue birds, with their plaintive notes, huddle in the clumps of withered leaves on the oaks in the grove, and the very cows, plodding homeward, low mournfully, as if in response to Nature’s dreariness.
Another day is in Autumn, when Nature, wrapping herself in a hazy robe, seems to lift her hand and say, “Hush, do not break my slumber,” as she dozes into dreaminess. The sun himself half closes his glaring eye, and looks upon the world with a drowsy smile, and the purple sky droops upon the horizon as if Atlas were weary of his load. When the zephyrs are asleep, and the leaves on the trees are wan for want of exercise; when the crowing of the cock sounds like a yawn, and the little fly-catcher, perched, as is its custom, on a dead and leafless limb, breathes its one little song as if it was its last sigh. Such a day as Buchanan Read describes in his “Closing Scene;” the most exquisite verses ever penned by an American:
“All sights seemed mellowed and all sounds subdued,
The hills seemed farther, and the streams sang low,
As in a dream the distant woodman hewed
His winter log, with many a muffled blow.
******