No More Learning

* * * * *

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed
over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in
remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in
every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly
reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments
and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time
than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer
testament,--the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen
astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is
is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression
of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the
world,--healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the
Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no
fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many
times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all
plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,
but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in
doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on
a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a
cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us
well, at any rate,"--and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

* * * * *

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a
meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the
horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry
grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the
leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched
long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its
beams.
It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment
before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was
wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this
was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it
would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and
cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more
glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with
all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance
as it has never set before,--where there is but a solitary marsh hawk
to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his
cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the
marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying
stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered
grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never
bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The
west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of
Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman
driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine
more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our
minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening
light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.




AUTUMNAL TINTS


Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our
autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English
poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The
most that Thomson says on this subject in his "Autumn" is contained in
the lines,--

"But see the fading many-colored woods
Shade deepening over shade, the country round
Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,
Of every hue, from wan declining green
To sooty dark;"

and in the line in which he speaks of

"Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods. "

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our
own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never
chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this,
the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding
with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most
brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that
there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon
before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is
scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they
were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones.