The October day is a dream, bright and beautiful as the rainbow, and as brief and fugitive. The same clouds and the same sun may be with us on the morrow, but the rainbow will have gone. There is a destroyer that goes abroad by night; he fastens upon every leaf, and freezes out its last drop of life, and leaves it on the parent stem, pale, withered, and dying.
Then come those closing days of dissolution, the saddest of the year, when all nature is filled with phantoms, and the gaunt and naked trees moan in the wind—every leaf a mockery, every breeze a sigh. The air seems weighed with a premonition of the dreariness to come. The landscape is darkened in a melancholy monotone, and death is written everywhere. You may walk the woods and fields for hours without a gleam of comfort or a cheering sound. We hear, perhaps, the hollow roll of the woodpecker upon some neighboring tree; but even he is clad in mourning: it is a muffled drum, and the resounding limb is dead. You sit beneath the old oak-tree, but it is a lifeless rustle that grates upon your ear, while you listen half beseechingly for some cheering note from the robins in the thicket near; but they are coy and silent now, and their flight is toward the southern hills. A villanous shrike must needs come upon the scene: he alights upon a limb near by, with blood upon his beak. Murder is in his eye, and his mission here is death. And now we hear a noisy crow o’erhead: he perches upon a neighboring tree in hungry scrutiny. And what is he but carrion’s bird, that revels in decay and death, with raiment black as a funeral pall? In the cold gray sky we see their scattered flocks blowing in the wind with sidelong flight, and in the field below that mocking cadaver, the man of straw, shaking his flimsy arms at them in wild contortions.
There is a hopeless despondency abroad in all the air, in which the summer medleys of the birds taunt us with their memories. We yearn for one such joyful sound to break the gloomy reverie. But what bird could swell his throat in song amidst such cheerlessness? No, Nature does not thus defeat her purpose. The hopefulness of Spring, the joyful consummation of Summer, have fled; their mission is fulfilled, and these are days for meditation on the past and future. All nature speaks of death; and there are voices of despair, and others eloquent with hope and trust. There are dead leaves that crumble into dust beneath our feet; but, if we look higher, there are others that conceal the promise of eternal life, where the undeveloped being, that perfect symbol, weaves his silken shroud, and awaits the coming of his day of full perfection. In the ground beneath he seeks his sepulchre, and he knows that at the appointed time he will burst his cerements and fly away. These are inobtrusive, silent testimonies; but they are here, and need only to be sought to unfold their prophecies.
But there comes a respite even in these late gloomy days. There is a lull in the work of devastation, in which the sunny skies and magic haze of October come back to us in the charming dreaminess of the Indian summer. A brief farewell—perhaps a day, perhaps a week; but however long, it is a parting smile that we love to recall in the dreariness that follows. The sky is luminous with soft sun-lit clouds, and the hazy air is laden with spring-like breezes, with now and then a welcome cricket-song or light-hearted bird-note, for, although long upon their way, the birds have not yet all departed. They twitter cheerily among the trees and thickets, and should you listen quietly you perhaps might hear an echo of spring again in the warble of the robin upon the dog-wood-tree. Here they have loitered by the way among the scarlet berries. Not only robins, but cedar-birds and thrushes are here, in successive flocks, from morn till night.
The fields are dull with faded golden-rods and asters, among whose downy seeds the frolicking chickadees and snow-birds hold a jubilee. The maze of twigs and branches in the distant hills has enveloped them in a smoky gray, and the sound of rustling leaves follows your footsteps in your woodland rambles. The fringe of yellow petals is unfolding on the witch-hazel boughs, and if you only knew the place, you might discover in some forsaken nook a solitary pale-blue lamp of fringed gentian still flickering among the withered leaves. Now a lively twittering and a hum of wings surprises you, and before you can turn your head a happy little troop of birds sweep across your path, and are away among the evergreens. They are white buntings, and their presence here is like a chill, for they come from the icy regions of the North, and they bring the snow upon their wings. The Indian summer is soon a thing of the past. Perhaps before another daybreak it will have flown. There is no dawn upon that morning. The night runs into a day of dismal, cheerless twilight, and the sky is overcast with ominous darkness. That angry cloud that left us, driven away before the conquering Spring, now lowers above the northward mountain; we see its livid face and feel its blighting breath—“a hard, dull bitterness of cold,” that sweeps along the moor in noisy triumph, that howls and tears among the trembling trees, and smothers out the last smouldering flame of faded Autumn.
The final leaf is torn from the tree. The lingering birds depart the desolation for scenes more tranquil, and I too with them, for nothing here invites my tarrying. The Autumn days are gone, grim Winter is at our door, and the covering snow will soon enshroud the earth, subdued and silent in its winter sleep.
