The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel all the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the oozing spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of days ago. Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a strange sense of waiting. And above is the silence of the sky.
With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of the early village—undisturbed as they were by any world call, and gifted with a fervid and patient faith—must daily have grown in consciousness of a homely Presence ever reaching under their mortality the Everlasting Arm.
This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these graves—that some good, some divine is impendent—that the soul of the world is outstretching a kindred hand.
In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to human vision—the good that is mighty and never grows gray,—μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει.
The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests of these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal—their graves in the church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life beyond—that their output of lives and years of struggle bore no more lasting local fruit, however their seed may now be scattered to the upbuilding of our South and West, the conversion of China, and our ordering of the Philippines.
And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they—such men and women as they—still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in all institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality, surely! If such men and women had been less severe, less honest, less gifted for conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with an enthusiasm for justice, less clear in their vision of the eternal moralities, less simple and direct, less worthy inheritors of the great idea of liberty which inflamed generations of their ancestors, it is not possible that we should be here to-day doing our work to keep what they won and carry their winnings further. Their unswerving independence in thought and action and their conviction that the finger of God pointed their way—their theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading—made possible the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay spent.
So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills—what with the decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence of the spiritual—there is a resting-place of the Blessed—an Island of the Blessed as the old Greeks used to say—an abode of heroes fallen after strong fighting and enjoying rest forever.
UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY
He is the half part of a blessed man
Left to be finished by such a she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
Shakespeare