Dallas Lore Sharp

“ A merciful man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his own winter bed.
Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. ”

“ One cannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, of fields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all full of song as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the seeds are done. The autumn wind goeth forth to sow, and with the most lavish of hands. He wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs them, rounds them, and angles them; they fly and fall, they sink and swim, they stick and shoot, they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake of a chance to grow. ”

“ There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October. A single, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacity for joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still ache for more. So it happens that June is only a memory of individual days, while October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a spirit, a soul, beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So much is already gone, so many things seem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the wooded hillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the very sunshine of October. ”

“ The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.
You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as if it were your own bed you were gathering—as really it is. He that rakes for his pig rakes also for himself. ”

“ Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing line toward the chicken-yard. ”

“ Above us, among the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe berries—a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas table.
But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! ”

“ Troops of migrating warblers flit into and through the trees, talking quietly among themselves as they search for food, moving all the while—and to a fixed goal, the far-off South. Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field; the odor of ripened fox grapes is brought with a puff of wind from across the pasture; the smell of mint, of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the sun. These are not the odors of death; but the fragrance of life's very essence, of life ripened and perfected and fit for storing till another harvest comes. ”

“ We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave the kind neighbor at his front gate, and travel on, not very far, but on alone into a wide quiet country where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of meeting with ourselves—the day's great adventure, and far to find; yet this is what we have come out to the hills for.
Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hens and a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; not for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it. Stay in town for that. There "you can even walk alone without being bored. ”

“ It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, this screen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of the fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October mood of things.
For it is the inner mood of things that has changed as well as the outward face of things. The very heart of the hills feels it. The hush that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. The blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not grown green again. No new buds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring. ”

“ There are men whose souls are like these hills, simple, strong, quiet men who can heal and restore; and there are books that help like the hills, simple elemental, large books; music, and sleep, and prayer, and play are healing too; but none of these cure and fill one with a quietness and confidence as deep as that from the hills, even from the little hills and the small fields and the vast skies of Hingham; a confidence and joy in the earth, perhaps, rather than in heaven, and yet in heaven too. ”

“ I have never seen anything in the woods, never had a glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidence in the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wild life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms in the midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of the fox.
At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always of taking every advantage. ”

“ But keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day in the year out into the woods—a whole day in the woods—with rake and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.
Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig. ”

“ If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, if one would be pressed to her beating heart, if one would feel the mother in the soul of things, let these October days find him in the hills, or where the river makes into some vast salt marsh, or underneath some ancient tree with fields of corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that reach and round themselves along the rim of the sky. ”

“ And so I dream. The woods are at my back, the level meadow and wide fields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy air glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles through the slanting reeds of the sun.
It is not the wind that weaves; it is a multitude of small spiders. ”

“ So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered woodlot I sit with idle hands, and no stars falling, and the universe turning all alone!
To wake up at forty a factory hand! a floor-walker! a banker! a college professor! a man about town or any other respectably successful, humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a square tight hole! There is an evil, says the Preacher, which I have seen under the sun—the man of about forty who has become moderately successful and automatic, but who has not, and now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. ”

“ There is none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, none of the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of the death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, none of the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars, none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without bound or break, eternal—none of these qualities in the sweet silence of October. ”

“ There are no daisies to laugh in October. A few late asters fringe the roadsides; an occasional bee hums loudly in among them; but there is no sound of laughter, and no shine of raindrops in the broken hoary seed-stalks that strew the way. If the daisy-buds laugh,—as surely they do in June,—why should not the wind sob and the rain weep—as surely they do—in October? There are days of shadow with the days of sunshine ”

“ You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond the furrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yours as if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak and maple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet and gold.
And so, until I get a new plough and a horse to pull it, I shall hire my neighbor—hire him to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough! ”

“ The cows are forced to carry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them on their foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or wayward breeze would go. Not a corner within the horizon but will get its needed seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field to the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again with the coming spring. ”

“ Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns of an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat, drink, and be merry among the cakes"—and when the autumn comes he still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out! No soul can be merry long on ice—nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks, nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities. He who builds great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice must never become a man's only crop ”

“ What the will, the thrill of men like Scott and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very poles! Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination! The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose! A living atom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world! A human mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmost shore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God can follow! ”

“ We understand each other; we are children of the same mother, nourished at the same abundant breast, the weed and I, and the woodchuck, and the wheeling hawk, and the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes against the sky—I am brother to them all. And this is home, this earth and sky—these fruitful fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed and river flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for no fairer home, none larger, none of more abundant or more golden corn. ”

“ Show me the bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only a few men keep bees,—only philosophers, I have found. They are a different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in euphony, rhythm, and tune. ”

“ Have I not found myself rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself that time wholly? Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it. The most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going around the corner ahead.
Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here into Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough away to save a man from all that passes along the road. ”

“ Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. One cannot sit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged to stand up—in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silence in life's desert of confusion and din. If October brought one nothing else but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough. For the silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm. ”

“ She is as fond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips—nor for carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two hearts at the table beating happily as one. Born in the country, she inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden parvus, minor, minimus—so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms wide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep down upon in the night.
For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting ”

“ To be greater than your possessions, than your accomplishments, than your desires—greater than you know, than anybody at home knows or will admit! So great that you can leave your plough in the turret that you can leave the committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the sun to hurry on, while you take your seat upon a stump, assured from many a dismaying observation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the sun will hasten on its course, and that the committees, even the committees, will meet and do business whether you attend or not! ”

“ It is now strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard fence—which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun. For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human nature and in all nature—to preserve a remnant, that no line perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear ”