No More Learning

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!