_Oct. 20_.--A clear, crispy day--dry and breezy air, full of oxygen.
Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelope and fuse
me--trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost--the one I am looking
at most to-day is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue,
peculiar to autumn, and the only clouds are little or larger white
ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. All
through the earlier day (say from 7 to 11) it keeps a pure, yet vivid
blue. But as noon approaches the color gets lighter, quite gray for two
or three hours--then still paler for a spell, till sun-down--which last
I watch dazzling through the interstices of a knoll of big trees--darts
of fire and a gorgeous show of light-yellow, liver-color and red, with a
vast silver glaze askant on the water--the transparent shadows, shafts,
sparkle, and vivid colors beyond all the paintings ever made.
I don't know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these
skies, (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them
every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before,) have had
this autumn some wondrously contented hours--may I not say perfectly
happy ones? As I have read, Byron just before his death told a friend
that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then
there is the old German legend of the king's bell, to the same point.
While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the
trees, I thought of Byron's and the bell story, and the notion started
in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments
I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by
inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood, and let it float
on, carrying me in its placid extasy.)
What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like
of it?--so impalpable--a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not
sure--so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt. Hast Thou,
pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the
physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.) And
dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon
me?
_Night of Oct. 28._--The heavens unusually transparent--the stars out by
myriads--the great path of the Milky Way, with its branch, only seen
of very clear nights--Jupiter, setting in the west, looks like a huge
hap-hazard splash, and has a little star for companion.
Clothed in his white garments,
Into the round and clear arena slowly entered the brahmin,
Holding a little child by the hand,
Like the moon with the planet Jupiter in a cloudless night-sky.
_Old Hindu Poem._
_Early in November._--At its farther end the lane already described
opens into a broad grassy upland field of over twenty acres, slightly
sloping to the south. Here I am accustom'd to walk for sky views and
effects, either morning or sundown. To-day from this field my soul is
calm'd and expanded beyond description, the whole forenoon by the clear
blue arching over all, cloudless, nothing particular, only sky and
daylight. Their soothing accompaniments, autumn leaves, the cool dry
air, the faint aroma--crows cawing in the distance--two great buzzards
wheeling gracefully and slowly far up there--the occasional murmur of
the wind, sometimes quite gently, then threatening through the trees--a
gang of farm-laborers loading cornstalks in a field in sight, and the
patient horses waiting.