No More Learning

To walk amid these upright, branching casks of
purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one
with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a
privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets
have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they
never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the
singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,
though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign
countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may
be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are
berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal
with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,
to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend
the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems. And perchance amid
these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.
It lasts all through September.

At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very
interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its
prime: _Andropogon furcatus_, forked beard-grass, or call it
purple-fingered grass; _Andropogon scoparius_, purple wood-grass; and
_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-grass. The first
is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high,
with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the
top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high
by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes
go out of bloom, have a whitish, fuzzy look. These two are prevailing
grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The
culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple
tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year.
Perhaps I have
the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,
and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like
ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest.
Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.
The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not
condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses
have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid
them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass
over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub oaks, glad to
recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad
swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into
windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe.
These two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish,
for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded; I had seen
them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their culms also
excites me like that of the poke-weed stems.

Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from
college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the
tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of the "Great Fields. "
Wherever I walk these afternoons, the purple-fingered grass also
stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths
than they have lately traveled.

A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his
head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have
cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to
his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he
may be overcome by their beauty. 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.