No More Learning

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! how gently
lay themselves down and turn to mould! --painted of a thousand hues,
and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last
resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily
they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot,
ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about
it,--some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering
beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they
rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how
contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to
lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new
generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high!