The season is always a little behind the sun in our climate, just as
the tide is always a little behind the moon. According to the calendar,
the summer ought to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it
is some weeks later; June is a maiden month all through. It is not high
noon in nature till about the first or second week in July. When the
chestnut-tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. By the first
of August it is fairly one o'clock. The lustre of the season begins to
dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the
birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching fall
are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance,
which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across
my hand! The first snowflake tells of winter not more plainly than this
driving down heralds the approach of fall. Come here, my fairy, and
tell me whence you come and whither you go? What brings you to port
here, you gossamer ship sailing the great sea? How exquisitely frail
and delicate! One of the lightest things in nature; so light that in
the closed room here it will hardly rest in my open palm. A feather is
a clod beside it. Only a spider's web will hold it; coarser objects
have no power over it. Caught in the upper currents of the air and
rising above the clouds, it might sail perpetually. Indeed, one fancies
it might almost traverse the interstellar ether and drive against the
stars. And every thistle-head by the roadside holds hundreds of these
sky rovers,--imprisoned Ariels unable to set themselves free. Their
liberation may be by the shock of the wind, or the rude contact of
cattle, but it is oftener the work of the goldfinch with its
complaining brood. The seed of the thistle is the proper food of this
bird, and in obtaining it myriads of these winged creatures are
scattered to the breeze. Each one is fraught with a seed which it
exists to sow, but its wild careering and soaring does not fairly begin
till its burden is dropped, and its spheral form is complete. The seeds
of many plants and trees are disseminated through the agency of birds;
but the thistle furnishes its own birds,--flocks of them, with wings
more ethereal and tireless than were ever given to mortal creature.
From the pains Nature thus takes to sow the thistle broadcast over the
land, it might be expected to be one of the most troublesome and
abundant of weeds. But such is not the case; the more pernicious and
baffling weeds, like snapdragon or blind nettles, are more local and
restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all.
In the fall, the battles of the spring are fought over again, beginning
at the other or little end of the series. There is the same advance and
retreat, with many feints and alarms, between the contending forces,
that was witnessed in April and May. The spring comes like a tide
running against a strong wind; it is ever beaten back, but ever gaining
ground, with now and then a mad "push upon the land" as if to overcome
its antagonist at one blow. The cold from the north encroaches upon us
in about the same fashion. In September or early in October it usually
makes a big stride forward and blackens all the more delicate plants,
and hastens the "mortal ripening" of the foliage of the trees, but it
is presently beaten back again, and the genial warmth repossesses the
land. Before long, however, the cold returns to the charge with
augmented forces and gains much ground.
The course of the seasons never does run smooth, owing to the unequal
distribution of land and water, mountain, wood, and plain.
An equilibrium, however, is usually reached in our climate in October,
sometimes the most marked in November, forming the delicious Indian
summer; a truce is declared, and both forces, heat and cold, meet and
mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the earlier season, this
poise of the temperature, this slack-water in nature, comes in May and
June; but the October calm is most marked. Day after day, and sometimes
week after week, you cannot tell which way the current is setting.
Indeed, there is no current, but the season seems to drift a little
this way or a little that, just as the breeze happens to freshen a
little in one quarter or the other. The fall of '74 was the most
remarkable in this respect I remember ever to have seen. The
equilibrium of the season lasted from the middle of October till near
December, with scarcely a break. There were six weeks of Indian summer,
all gold by day, and, when the moon came, all silver by night. The
river was so smooth at times as to be almost invisible, and in its
place was the indefinite continuation of the opposite shore down toward
the nether world. One seemed to be in an enchanted land, and to breathe
all day the atmosphere of fable and romance. Not a smoke, but a kind of
shining nimbus filled all the spaces. The vessels would drift by as if
in mid-air with all their sails set. The gypsy blood in one, as Lowell
calls it, could hardly stay between four walls and see such days go by.
Living in tents, in groves and on the hills, seemed the only natural
life.
Late in December we had glimpses of the same weather,--the earth had
not yet passed all the golden isles. On the 27th of that month, I find
I made this entry in my note-book: "A soft, hazy day, the year asleep
and dreaming of the Indian summer again. Not a breath of air and not a
ripple on the river. The sunshine is hot as it falls across my table."
But what a terrible winter followed! what a savage chief the fair
Indian maiden gave birth to!
This halcyon period of our autumn will always in some way be associated
with the Indian. It is red and yellow and dusky like him. The smoke of
his camp-fire seems again in the air. The memory of him pervades the
woods. His plumes and moccasins and blanket of skins form just the
costume the season demands. It was doubtless his chosen period. The
gods smiled upon him then if ever. The time of the chase, the season of
the buck and the doe, and of the ripening of all forest fruits; the
time when all men are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have
given pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills or in the
woods is a delight that both old and young feel,--if the red aborigine
ever had his summer of fullness and contentment, it must have been at
this season, and it fitly bears his name.
In how many respects fall imitates or parodies the spring! It is
indeed, in some of its features, a sort of second youth of the year.
Things emerge and become conspicuous again. The trees attract all eyes
as in May. The birds come forth from their summer privacy and parody
their spring reunions and rivalries; some of them sing a little after a
silence of months. The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows, crows,
all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring. The
cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons
reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel blooms. The
trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is humid, and the
moisture rises in the ground. Nature is breaking camp, as in spring she
was going into camp. The spring yearning and restlessness is
represented in one by the increased desire to travel.
Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have
their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints,
their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have
the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after
all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning,
the other the evening; one is youth, the other is age.
The difference is not merely in us; there is a subtle difference in the
air, and in the influences that emanate upon us from the dumb forms of
nature. All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to have
burned out. One recalls the notion of Herodotus that he is grown
feeble, and retreats to the south because he can no longer face the
cold and the storms from the north. There is a growing potency about
his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them in fall. One is the
kindling fire, the other the subsiding flame.
It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting unmistakably the
difference between sunrise and sunset; and it is equally a trial of his
skill to put upon canvas the difference between early spring and late
fall, say between April and November. It was long ago observed that the
shadows are more opaque in the morning than in the evening; the
struggle between the light and the darkness more marked, the gloom more
solid, the contrasts more sharp. The rays of the morning sun chisel out
and cut down the shadows in a way those of the setting sun do not. Then
the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning,--not so yellow and
diffused. A difference akin to this is true of the two seasons I am
speaking of. The spring is the morning sunlight, clear and determined;
the autumn, the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening, golden.
Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons? Are
there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall? In the
spring one vegetates; his thoughts turn to sap; another kind of
activity seizes him; he makes new wood which does not harden till past
midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to
August; my sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows where
meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head
again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a
frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man's thinking, I
take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the ripening of fruits and
leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air.
Then the earth seems to have become a positive magnet in the fall; the
forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is
negative to all intellectual conditions, and drains one of his
lightning.
To-day, October 21, I found the air in the bushy fields and lanes under
the woods loaded with the perfume of the witch-hazel,--a sweetish,
sickening odor. With the blooming of this bush, Nature says,
"Positively the last." It is a kind of birth in death, of spring in
fall, that impresses one as a little uncanny. All trees and shrubs form
their flower-buds in the fall, and keep the secret till spring. How
comes the witch-hazel to be the one exception, and to celebrate its
floral nuptials on the funeral day of its foliage? No doubt it will be
found that the spirit of some lovelorn squaw has passed into this bush,
and that this is why it blooms in the Indian summer rather than in the
white man's spring.
But it makes the floral series of the woods complete. Between it and
the shad-blow of earliest spring lies the mountain of bloom; the latter
at the base on one side, this at the base on the other, with the
chestnut blossoms at the top in midsummer.
A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear
afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the
sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of
gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of
the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and upon the spears of
grass, covering acres in extent,--the work of innumerable little
spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it.
Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching
from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence,
and leading off toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying
spider,--a fairy bridge from the visible to the invisible. Occasionally
seen against a deep mass of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging
particles of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a
stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide.