No More Learning

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!