No More Learning

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.