No More Learning

A delicate
but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with
scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just
before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I
see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an
elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright
scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of
yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian
summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost
leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and
green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There
is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be
discerned amid this blaze of color.

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,
when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some
straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar
maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring
merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those
which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most
beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and
more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting
them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because
they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color
unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar
in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.
Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally
distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden
harvest.

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October
splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree
Society. " Do you not think it will make some odds to these children
that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are
steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the
truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad.
Indeed,
neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the
schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'
shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_
maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is
very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such
paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the
young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What
School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of
painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and
paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these
autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various
tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If
you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have
only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These
leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they
are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left
to set and dry there.

Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from
those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,
raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have
faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of
commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we
compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory? ) or from ores
and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to
our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to
some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of
earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they
may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we
ever saw?