IV APRIL In April I commence to scratch and dig in my 130 garden. 135 140 Today as I was raking off my strawberry bed, Georgiana, whom I have not seen since the night when she satirized me, called from the window: "What are you going to plant this year?" "Oh, a little of everything," I answered under my hat. "What are you going to plant this year?" "Are you going to have many strawberries?" "It's too soon to tell; they haven't bloomed yet. It's too soon to tell when they do bloom." Five more days of April, and then May! For the last half of this light-and-shadow month, when the clouds, like schools of changeable lovely creatures, seem to be playing and rushing away through the waters of the sun, life to me has narrowed more and 145 more, to the redbird, who gets tamer and tamer with habit, and to Georgiana, who gets wilder and wilder with happiness. The bird fills the yard with brilliant singing; she fills her room with her low, clear songs, hidden behind the window curtains, which are 150 now so much oftener and so needlessly closed. QUESTIONS FOR STUDY Why is April called the light-and-shadow month? V MAY In May I am of the earth, earthy. The soul loses its wild white pinions; the heart puts forth its short, powerful wings, heavy with heat and color, that flutter, but do not lift it off the ground. The month comes and goes, and not once do I think of raising 155 my eyes to the stars. The very sunbeams fall on the body as a warm, golden net, and keep thought and feeling from escape. Nature uses beauty now, not to uplift, but to entice. I find her intent upon the one general business of seeing that no type of 160 her creatures gets left out of the generations. Studied in my yard full of birds, as with a condensing glass of the world, she can be seen enacting among them the dramas of history. Yesterday, in the secret recess of a walnut, I saw the beginning of the Trojan 165 war. Last week I witnessed the battle of Actium 2 fought out in mid air. And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on a limb, and 170 has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his 1 Trojan war, a famous war of antiquity, the subject of Homer's great epic, the Iliad. 2 Actium, the famous battle between the great Roman rivals, Cæsar and Pompey. coat tails and crying out at me, "Hello! Adam,1 what were you made for?" "You attend to your business, and I'll attend 175 to mine," I answered. "You have one May; I have twenty-five!" He didn't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open 180 arms and the sound of a kiss. QUESTIONS FOR STUDY Lines 1-4. What does the author mean by his comparison of the wings of soul and heart? Do you think his feelings natural? VIII AUGUST 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 185 sound of a traveler 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 190 zenith like the lost wing of a swan. Far beneath it 1 Adam, the hero of the story, is unmarried at this time. 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 195 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, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close of harvest. The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go in 200 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 205 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 210 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 215 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 fiber of his nature. 220 Sometimes it is through the aftermath of fat wheatfields, 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 225 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 230 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 grown tired, as the gayest will, of their 235 yellow plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down at their sides. There the white and purple morning glories hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their elfin trumpets. 240 This year as never before I have felt the beauty of the world. QUESTIONS FOR STUDY Lines 181-240. This is one of the choicest descriptions of nature in the language. Try to see the beautiful picture, as you read. Line 202. Filling with what? |