Harvest. It is remarkable that while spring, summer, winter, have all their home-bred names, we designate the other quarter of the year by its Latin title ‘autumn,’ ‘hærfest’ (= the German ‘Herbst’) having been appropriated to the ingathering of the fruits of this season, not to the season itself. In this indeed we are truer to the proper meaning of ‘harvest’ than the Germans, who have transferred the word from the former to the latter; for it is closely related with the Greek καρπός. Occasionally, however, as in the passages which follow, ‘harvest’ assumes with us also the signification of autumn.
These ben hervest trees [arbores autumnales, Vulg.] with out fruyt, twies deed, drawun up bi the roote.—Jude 12. Wiclif.
There stood the Springtime with a crown of fresh and fragrant flowers;
There waited Summer naked stark, all save a wheaten hat;
And Harvest smeared with treading grapes late at the pressing fat;
And lastly quaking for the cold stood Winter all forlorn.
Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, b. ii.
Hassock. Already in Phillips’s New World of Words, 1706, the ‘hassock’ was what it is now, ‘a kind of straw cushion used to kneel upon in churches;’ and some of us may remember to have seen in country churches ‘hassocks’ of solid tufts of coarse black grass which had so grown and matted together that they served this purpose sufficiently well. But this is only the secondary and transferred use of the word. It was once the name by which this coarse grass growing in these rank tufts was itself called; and this name, as Forby tells us, in Norfolk it still bears. See Way’s Promptorium, s. v. ‘Hassok.’
Land so full of hassocks as to be impossible to find the deer among them.—Hutchinson, Drainage of Land.
These hassocks, in bogs, were formerly taken up with a part of the soil, matted together with roots, shaped, trimmed, and dressed, a sufficient part of their shaggy and tufted surface being left to make kneeling much easier than on the pavement of the church or the bare-boarded floor of a pew.—Forby, East Anglia.