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, being
more local and restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all.
[Illustration: AMONG THE ROCKS]
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, blue-birds, meadow-larks, 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, etc. 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.
[Illustration: ON THE EDGE OF A CATSKILL "SUGAR BUSH"]
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 21st, 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.