The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard;
The ants have cramm’d their garners with ripe grain,
And honey-bees have stored
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have winged across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Among the sunless shadows of the plain:
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a lone-rosary,
While all the wither’d world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into the distance, gray upon the gray.