In August the pale and delicate poetry of the Kentucky land makes
itself felt as silence and repose. Still skies, still woods, still
sheets of forest water, still flocks and herds, long lanes winding
without the sound of a traveller through fields of the universal
brooding stillness. The sun no longer blazing, but muffled in a
veil of palest blue. No more black clouds rumbling and rushing up
from the horizon, but a single white one brushing slowly against
the zenith like the lost wing of a swan. Far beneath it the
silver-breasted hawk, using the cloud as his lordly parasol. The
eagerness of spring gone, now all but incredible as having ever
existed; the birds hushed and hiding; the bee, so nimble once,
fallen asleep over his own cider-press in the shadow of the golden
apple. From the depths of the woods may come the notes of the
cuckoo; but they strike the air more and more slowly, like the
clack, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close
of harvest. The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go
in one long wave of sound, passing into silence. All nature is a
vast sacred goblet, filling drop by drop to the brim, and not to
be shaken. But the stalks of the later flowers begin to be stuffed
with hurrying bloom lest they be too late; and the nighthawk rapidly
mounts his stairway of flight higher and higher, higher and higher,
as though he would rise above the warm white sea of atmosphere and
breathe in cold ether.
Always in August my nature will go its own way and seek its own
peace. I roam solitary, but never alone, over this rich pastoral
land, crossing farm after farm, and keeping as best I can out of
sight of the laboring or loitering negroes. For the sight of them
ruins every landscape, and I shall never feel myself free till
they are gone. What if they sing? The more is the pity that any
human being could be happy enough to sing so long as he was a slave
in any thought or fibre of his nature.
Sometimes it is through the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where
float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the
crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit
from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds. They are all mine--these
Kentucky wheat-fields. After the owner has taken from them his
last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also--one that he did
not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me--the harvest of beauty.
Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores
of softly foaming emerald seas; or past the rank and file of fields
of Indian-corn, which stand like armies that had gotten ready
to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last
the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow
plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down
at their sides. There the white and the purple morning-glories
hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their
elfin trumpets.
This year as never before I have felt the beauty of the world.
And with the new brightness in which every common scene has been
apparelled there has stirred within me a need of human companionship
unknown in the past. It is as if Nature had spread out her last
loveliness and said: "See! You have before you now all that you
can ever get from me! It is not enough. Realize this in time. I
am your Mother. Love me as a child. But remember! such love can
be only a little part of your life."
Therefore I have spent the month restless, on the eve of change,
drawn to Nature, driven from her. In September it will be different,
for then there are more things to do on my small farm, and I see
people on account of my grapes and pears. My malady this August
has been an idle mind--so idle that a letter from Georgiana seems
its main event. This was written from the old home of Audubon on
the Hudson, whither they had gone sight-seeing. It must have been
to her much like a pilgrimage to a shrine. She wrote informally,
telling me about the place and enclosing a sprig of cedar from one
of the trees in the yard. Her mind was evidently overflowing on
the subject. It was rather pleasant to have the overflow turned
my way. I shall plant the cedar where it will say always green.
I saw Georgiana once more before he leaving. The sudden appearance
of her brother and cousin, and the new that she would return with
them for the summer, spurred me up to make another attempt at those
Audubon drawings.
How easy it was to get them! It is what a man thinks a woman will
be willing to do that she seldom does. But she made a confession.
When she first found that I was a smallish student of birds, she
feared I would not like Audubon, since men so often sneer at those
who do in a grand way what they can do only in a poor one. I had
another revelation of Georgiana's more serious nature, which is
always aroused by the memory of her father. There is something
beautiful and steadfast in this girl's soul. In our hemisphere vines
climb round from left to right; if Georgiana loved you she would,
if bidden, reverse every law of her nature for you as completely
as a vine that you had caused to twine from right to left.
Sylvia enters school the 1st of September, and Georgiana is to be
at home then to see to that. How surely she drives this family
before her--and with as gentle a touch as that of a slow south wind
upon the clouds.
Those poor fist drawings of Audubon! He succeeded; we study his
early failures. The world never studies the failures of those who
do not succeed in the end.
The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also--his mind
once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions!
How fine we should all look if every August the old plumage of our
natures would drop out and be blown away, and fresh quills take the
vacant places! But we have one set of feathers to last us through
our threescore years and ten--one set of spotless feathers, which
we are told to keep spotless through all our lives in a dirty world.
If one gets broken it stays; if one gets blackened, nothing will
cleanse it. No doubt we shall all fly home at last, like a flock
of pigeons that were once turned loose snow-white from the sky, and
made to descend and fight one another and fight everything else for
a poor living amid soot and mire. If then the hand of the unseen
Fancier is stretched forth to draw us in, how can he possibly
smite any one of us, or cast us away, because we came back to him
black and blue with bruises and besmudged and bedraggled past all
recognition?