No More Learning

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its
phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we
eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not
eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual
cattle-shows and horticultural exhibitions, we make, as we think, a
great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end,
fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round about and within
our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely
grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes
round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a
bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting.
October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

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.