They are about to add a leaf's
thickness
to the depth of the soil.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen
leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had
acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from
the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly,
with paint, in a book, which should be entitled "October, or Autumnal
Tints,"--beginning with the earliest reddening woodbine and the lake
of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories, and
sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to
the latest oaks and aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You
would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the
autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves
themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. I have made but little
progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to
describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present
themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.
THE PURPLE GRASSES
By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps we are
reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla leaves
and brakes, and the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and
hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening pontederia.
The purple grass (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods
off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a
wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored
and interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia,
being a darker purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick.
On going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in
bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine
spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist
trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and
made little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect;
and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin
it was, and how little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a
favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like,
enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce these decided
effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass is
commonly of a sober and humble color.
With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the
place, of the rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the
most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on
waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above
the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to
swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his
notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know
that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and timothy. He
carefully gets the meadow-hay and the more nutritious grasses which
grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the
walker's harvest,--fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill,
perchance, grow also blackberries, John's-wort, and neglected,
withered, and wiry June-grass. How fortunate that it grows in such
places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually
cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many such
localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and
paint the earth with its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes, either
in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in
diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts.
In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the
highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the
seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves; and in
others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower
or blooming part.
The last is especially the case with the poke or garget (_Phytolacca
decandra_). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with
their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting
to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our
autumn. Every part is flower (or fruit), such is its superfluity of
color,--stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at
length yellowish, purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of
berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven
inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to
the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the
berries are a brilliant lake red, with crimson flame-like reflections,
equal to anything of the kind,--all on fire with ripeness. Hence the
_lacca_, from _lac_, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds,
flowers, green berries, dark-purple or ripe ones, and these
flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It
is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a
bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be
seen at this season of the year. On warm hillsides its stems are ripe
by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a
beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of
our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a
deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear
green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and
perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a
perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life
concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.
What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in
the midst of our decay, like the poke! I confess that it excites me to
behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on
it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their
juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of
purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one
with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they
never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the
singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign
countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may
be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are
berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal
with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,
to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend
the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems. And perchance amid
these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.
It lasts all through September.
At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its
prime: _Andropogon furcatus_, forked beard-grass, or call it
purple-fingered grass; _Andropogon scoparius_, purple wood-grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high,
with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the
top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high
by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes
go out of bloom, have a whitish, fuzzy look. These two are prevailing
grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The
culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple
tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have
the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,
and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like
ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest.
Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not
condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses
have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid
them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass
over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub oaks, glad to
recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad
swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into
windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe.
These two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish,
for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded; I had seen
them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their culms also
excites me like that of the poke-weed stems.
Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from
college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the
tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of the "Great Fields. "
Wherever I walk these afternoons, the purple-fingered grass also
stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths
than they have lately traveled.
A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his
head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have
cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to
his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he
may be overcome by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we
call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet
how long it stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so
many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple
companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on
them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and
blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.
Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt
that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him,
find some compensation in your appreciation of them? I may say that I
never saw them before; though, when I came to look them face to face,
there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now,
wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is the reign and
presidency of the andropogons.
Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August
sun, and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them,
reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence
of all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the
earth. All sap or blood is now wine-colored. At last we have not only
the purple sea, but the purple land.
The chestnut beard-grass, Indian-grass, or wood-grass, growing here
and there in waste places, but more rare than the former (from two to
four or five feet high), is still handsomer and of more vivid colors
than its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It
has a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright
purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy
leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant
hillsides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single
file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright,
representative of the race which they are named after, but for the
most part unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me
for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an
eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite
hunting-grounds.
THE RED MAPLE
By the twenty-fifth of September, the red maples generally are
beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing
for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. I notice a
small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green woodside
there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer,
and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns
invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens
its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season,
perhaps. I should be sorry if it were cut down. I know of two or three
such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be
propagated from, as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed
be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared
as much about them.
At present these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the
meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there.
Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson
when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the former
appear so much the brighter for it. They take you by surprise, as you
are going by on one side, across the fields, thus early in the season,
as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters,
of whose arrival you had not heard.
Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their
kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable
than whole groves will be by and by. How beautiful, when a whole tree
is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from
lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward
the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape?
Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon
occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity,
and get into the mythology at last.
The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a
singular preeminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I
am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for
the regiment of green-clad foresters around, and I go half a mile out
of my way to examine it. A single tree becomes thus the crowning
beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole
surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.
A small red maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some
retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully
discharged the duties of a maple there, all winter and summer,
neglected none of its economies, but added to its stature in the
virtue which belongs to a maple, by a steady growth for so many
months, never having gone gadding abroad, and is nearer heaven than it
was in the spring. It has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a
shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and
committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing,
perhaps, that a thousand little well-behaved maples are already
settled in life somewhere. It deserves well of Mapledom. Its leaves
have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, "When shall we
redden? " And now, in this month of September, this month of traveling,
when men are hastening to the seaside, or the mountains, or the lakes,
this modest maple, still without budging an inch, travels in its
reputation,--runs up its scarlet flag on that hillside, which shows
that it has finished its summer's work before all other trees, and
withdraws from the contest. At the eleventh hour of the year, the
tree which no scrutiny could have detected here when it was most
industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes,
revealed at last to the careless and distant traveler, and leads his
thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it
inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of
a maple,--_Acer rubrum_. We may now read its title, or _rubric_,
clear. Its _virtues_, not its sins, are as scarlet.
Notwithstanding the red maple is the most intense scarlet of any of
our trees, the sugar maple has been the most celebrated, and Michaux
in his "Sylva" does not speak of the autumnal color of the former.
About the second of October, these trees, both large and small, are
most brilliant, though many are still green. In "sprout-lands" they
seem to vie with one another, and ever some particular one in the
midst of the crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its
more intense color attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off
the palm. A large red maple swamp, when at the height of its change,
is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things, where I dwell,
so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both in form and
color. A great many are merely yellow; more, scarlet; others, scarlet
deepening into crimson, more red than common. Look at yonder swamp of
maples mixed with pines, at the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of
a mile off, so that you get the full effect of the bright colors,
without detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and see their
yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and
contrasted with the green. Some maples are yet green, only yellow or
crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a
hazelnut bur; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly
and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others,
of more irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out
some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to
rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath
upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving through the air, stratified
by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this
season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it
is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees being of
different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent treetop is
distinct, and where one laps on to another. Yet a painter would hardly
venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off.
As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this
bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top
of a maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the
hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the
most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any
flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. As I advance, lowering
the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of
the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily
increases, suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled
with such color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the
town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and
exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not
see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in
scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then.
Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round
with horse-sheds for.
THE ELM
Now too, the first of October, or later, the elms are at the height of
their autumnal beauty,--great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their
September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly
ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the
men who live beneath them. As I look down our street, which is lined
with them, they remind me both by their form and color of yellowing
sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to the village
itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and _flavor_ in the
thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright rustling yellow
piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any
crudity or greenness of thought or act prevail? When I stand where
half a dozen large elms droop over a house, it is as if I stood within
a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel as mellow as if I were the pulp,
though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. What is the late
greenness of the English elm, like a cucumber out of season, which
does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden
maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great
harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out these trees, if
only for their autumnal value. Think of these great yellow canopies
or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together,
making the village all one and compact,--an _ulmarium_, which is at
the same time a nursery of men! And then how gently and unobserved
they drop their burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their
leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our streets; and
thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! I see the market-man
driving into the village, and disappearing under its canopy of
elm-tops, with _his_ crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. I am
tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe,
and ready to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I foresee
that it will be chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn,
fit only for cob-meal,--for, as you sow, so shall you reap.
FALLEN LEAVES
By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in
successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal
leaf-harvest, the acme of the _Fall_, is commonly about the sixteenth.
Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have
seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind
rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly
form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even
without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as
small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously,
as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the hickory,
being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light
from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at
the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.
Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a
fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be
the touch that loosens the rock maple leaf. The streets are thickly
strewn with the trophies, and fallen elm leaves make a dark brown
pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian-summer day
or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than
anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no
frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and
wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits,
and causes them to drop.
The leaves of late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often
crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,--though
they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two,
especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all
bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there
it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and
making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would
rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like
a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs
that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant
trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll
over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just
as little as they did their shadows before.
Birds' nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are
already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have fallen in
the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being
heard. Boys are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure
of dealing with such clean, crisp substances. Some sweep the paths
scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them
with new trophies. The swamp floor is thickly covered, and the
_Lycopodium lucidulum_ looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense
woods they half cover pools that are three or four rods long. The
other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected
that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly
fallen leaves; and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was
like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for a new spring. Wet
grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp,
where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail,
I got into the water more than a foot deep.
When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the
sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the
leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and I set sail
with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be
full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out,
but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my
carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is
wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it
were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a
little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the
water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders, button-bushes,
and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and
at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind,
they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.
When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes
them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances getting
on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the
water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood turtle on the shore
is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the
wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound. Higher up they
are slowly moving round and round in some great eddy which the river
makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and
the current is wearing into the bank.
Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly
calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream,
and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly
find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers,
which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself.
See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in
this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's
skill, each nerve a stiff spruce knee,--like boats of hide, and of all
patterns,--Charon's boat probably among the rest,--and some with
lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients,
scarcely moving in the sluggish current,--like the great fleets, the
dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some
great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily
approaching together. How gently each has been deposited on the water!
No violence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance,
palpitating hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks,
too, the splendid wood duck among the rest, often come to sail and
float amid the painted leaves,--barks of a nobler model still!
What wholesome herb drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What
strong medicinal but rich scents from the decaying leaves! The rain
falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools
and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will
soon convert them into tea,--green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of
all degrees of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether
we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these
leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and
delicate tints as might make the fame of Oriental teas.
How they are mixed up, of all species, oak and maple and chestnut and
birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect
husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus
annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is
the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth
with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting.
They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil.
This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I
chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the
cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more
interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the
corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future corn-fields and forests,
on which the earth fattens. It keeps our homestead in good heart.
For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not
merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that
we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple,
the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the
rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with
which the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost
touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or
jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down!
The ground is all parti-colored with them. But they still live in the
soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that
spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years,
by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the
sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its
crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and
rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently
lay themselves down and turn to mould! --painted of a thousand hues,
and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last
resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily
they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot,
ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about
it,--some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering
beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they
rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how
contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to
lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new
generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach
us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with
their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as
ripe,--with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as
they do their hair and nails.
When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk
in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no
lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn?
Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has
been consecrated from of old. You need attend no auction to secure a
place. There is room enough here. The loosestrife shall bloom and the
huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The woodman and hunter shall be
your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as
they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves; this is your
true Greenwood Cemetery.
[Illustration: _Fallen Leaves_]
THE SUGAR MAPLE
But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for as one leaf
does not make a summer, neither does one falling leaf make an autumn.
The smallest sugar maples in our streets make a great show as early as
the fifth of October, more than any other trees there. As I look up
the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the
houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth
of October, when almost all red maples and some white maples are bare,
the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow
and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are
remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on
one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of
rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the
exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.
The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate
but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just
before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I
see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an
elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright
scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of
yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian
summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and
green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be
discerned amid this blaze of color.
Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some
straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar
maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring
merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most
beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and
more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting
them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar
in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.
Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally
distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden
harvest.
Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree
Society. " Do you not think it will make some odds to these children
that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are
steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the
truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed,
neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'
shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_
maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such
paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the
young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What
School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these
autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If
you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have
only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These
leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they
are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left
to set and dry there.
Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,
raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have
faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of
commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we
compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory? ) or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to
our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to
some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of
earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they
may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we
ever saw? Have we not an _earth_ under our feet,--aye, and a sky over
our heads? Or is the last _all_ ultramarine? What do we know of
sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like,--most of us
who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to
cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,--to the Nabobs,
Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why,
since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves
should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors;
and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our
trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular
chromatic nomenclature.
But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and
distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored
leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,
without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and
holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days,
celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals,
such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or
rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And
poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not
the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor
ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a
thousand bright flags are waving.
No wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,
and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like. Nature
herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but
in every hollow and on every hillside. When lately we looked into that
red maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their
vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies
beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the fabled fauns,
satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a
congregation of wearied woodchoppers, or of proprietors come to
inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we
paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did
there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling
surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made
haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows
and button-bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which,
perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did
not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as
Nature's,--should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be
interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its
scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the
annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let
them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all
her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can
read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it
to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring
States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can
understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag!
What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of
the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at
present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that
the ivy _never sere_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been
extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many maples and
hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty
roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can
display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark
the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village
that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw
loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,
elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,
evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in
a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides
through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a
picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as
is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. They
are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.
A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two
villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of
October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a
single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the
latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the
most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone
will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their
barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look
to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most
barren and forlorn doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to
an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned
wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one
another and call it a spiritual communication.
But to confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half
as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not
stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?
What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_
institution before the church,--this institution which needs no
repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired
by its growth? Surely they
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Themselves from God they could not free;
They _planted_ better than they knew;--
The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew. "
Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which
preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century-and-a-half
sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering
to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them
with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.
THE SCARLET OAK
Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its
leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves surpass those of all
other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from
an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have
seen of many others.
Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against
the sky,--as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib.
They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more
ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so
little leafy _terra firma_ that they appear melting away in the light,
and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are,
like those of full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple,
and lumpish in their outlines, but these, raised high on old trees,
have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and
sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating
more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least
possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of
skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the
light,--tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial
halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their
slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last
what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs,
they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest windows.
I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly
strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet.
They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes
and their bold, deep scallops reaching almost to the middle, they
suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a
lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or
else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves
have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another,
they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.
Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the
fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque
nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but
destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to
whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination
of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on
what is not leaf and on what is leaf,--on the broad, free, open
sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval
outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf;
but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep
scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If
I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these
leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.
Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded
promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side,
while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of
whose heads several fine streams empty in,--almost a leafy
archipelago.
But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the
form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental plane tree, so
this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose
extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and
sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of
man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the
sailor's eye, it is a much indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore
to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this
leaf we are all mariners,--if not vikings, buccaneers, and
filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are
addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we
succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and
secure havens in the ample bays. How different from the white oak
leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be
placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be
read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall
we go and be rajahs there?
By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their
prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling
their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze.
This alone of _our_ indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the
dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large
bushes) is now in its glory. The two aspens and the sugar maple come
nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their
leaves. Of evergreens, only the pitch pine is still commonly bright.
But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these
phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected
glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and
shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but
of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that
bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most
brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.
This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in
an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now,
the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark-scarlet,--every
leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet
dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.
Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago,
that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves
are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling
around it. It seems to say: "I am the last to blush, but I blush
deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We scarlet
ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight. "
The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in
these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their bright
tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this
phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent,
acorn-like taste, this strong oak wine, as I find on tapping them with
my knife.
Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how
rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches
intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect there.
The pine boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go
along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and
lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are mingled
with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene.
Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would
lose much of their effect.
The scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October
days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud they
become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest
part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in
Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and
in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is
brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them.
Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even
to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift
their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge
roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a
small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge
of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove,
and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red
amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the
sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the
forest army. Theirs is an intense, burning red, which would lose some
of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them;
for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at
this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their
reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree
becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun,
that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering
strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some
comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff,
to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire,
which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is
redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.
You see a redder tree than exists.
If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand
thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and
every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be
revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a
tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have
thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their
colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole
forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating
with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,
perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little
asters amid withered leaves.
These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me
nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are
protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,
and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your
yard.
