October

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Nov 5, 1903

Nature likes compensations; and it has gone into a proverb that a cold summer brings a sunny October. It is here. May bursting her sides with laughter would not be worth half so much just now as this contemplative month of soft sunshine and universal peace. The mood of nature is just adapted to our own mood; for we are preparing to lay away the tools of the year, while we count up the profits of the months of labor. How curiously all sounds change, as well as all sights, and for that matter all smells. The rumble of the wagon in the valley that carries home Indian corn is wholly unlike that of the same wagon in summer, carrying corn to the cannery. The steam whistle comes up out of the village, and through the orchard, playing on the apples that hang thick all over the trees, as on a keyboard; while the birds sing only in monotones. Dogs bark to one another from farm home to farm home, and the cocks crow through the morning fog, a social, rather than defiant challenge. There is a ripe smell everywhere—a blending of quinces and Spitzenburgs and beech leaves—not

a stimulant, like the fragrance of lilacs or of roses, but a sedative. We do not care to hurry.

The most wonderful thing about October is that the most modest and overlooked things of summer now are most gifted. The pokeweed becomes a miracle of color, and the chickweed creeps over the ground, like a kindergarten let loose to play in the garden. There really is nothing left insignificant in the world. The highest achievement of human intellect is to find out the utilities and the adjustabilities of things. Perhaps with some of them the only object of existence is to be beautiful. The pokeweed, however, wrote one of Thoreau's finest pages. There are things about this October that must wait for a poet—perhaps they will wait till next October; but by and by every weed shall not only have its purple robe, its sublimed mission, its duty to perform, but also its poet to see that mission, and its scientist to record it. So far we have hardly touched the frontier of the wilderness of God.

During the summer can anything be more tame and uninteresting than an old-fashioned zigzag fence, where bushes compete with weeds, in the corners, and wild vines straggle about, sometimes climbing trees, and again dropping to the ground to crawl over piles of stones? Everything is elbowing its way with its neighbor, and all together constitute a picture of neglect, suggestive of shiftlessness over in that farmhouse half hid behind the orchard. But in October the wild grape suddenly becomes long lines of gold; the clematis hangs in brilliant festoons of flossy fruit; the Virginia creeper flashes in touches of scarlet and crimson in the tops of trees and in the fence corners; while the wild blackberry, as if envious of its neighbors, gives us not only scarlet but royal purple. All up and down this line of neglected vegetation there is a continuous succession of glorious beauty that will waken all the artistic conceptions that nature has planted in our souls. But an orchard! Ah, an orchard of Spitzenburgs, Spies, Baldwins! who can ever see one without becoming a poet? One may wander up and down these orchard avenues, as if in an enchanted land. The red-cheeked fruit is the sublimation of art, the ideal of beauty, as well as the essential of utility. These greenings have hung this way for two hundred years—generation after generation. These pippins were danced about in Yorkshire, by our sires as long ago as 1600. Who knows how much the apple has contributed to Saxon brain, blood, and character?

It is hard to say which is most beautiful, a water maple or a Norway maple. The latter in October is a glowing sunset, all yellow; the other is a blaze of scarlet, forty feet high. The sugar maple and the soft maple are close competitors, and yet, for sweetness and modest beauty combined, there is nothing in America quite equal to a beech grove. If all this glory of color came about at once, nature would be less interesting. You must note the delicate work that goes on day by day, the growth of color. It comes line after line, and precept after precept. It is the inspired Bible of the soil. May spends all her forces on shrubbery. Everything is in blossom; ozone fills the valley; lilacs and syringas blossom themselves into our characters. Who can be mean in May? June is a sort of halfway house. It is then that we see that the corn is swinging out its tassels, and the grass is ready for the reaper. July and August are the yellow months; yellow is the color of growth. Indian corn grows all night, and in the morning challenges you to stand up and measure height with it. September and October are the crimson months. Red is the color of ripeness; the year's work is done. So it is that the year has been an art gallery, for the poor as well as the rich. The little cottages that are hidden down the lane among the orchards are more glorified with purple woodbines than costliest palaces.

Nature has a tidy way of strewing beautiful leaves all over the earth—her most delicately woven summer fabrics. Folk—some folk—know no better than to scratch all day to get these leaves off the grass. Nature laughs at the fools, and shakes down more, or she catches up handfuls, with a chuckling gust of wind, and tosses them all about the slickened lawn. Other idiots burn piles of leaves, and so send back into the air the gift of the skies. There is not one other provision of nature more beautiful and beneficent than this gift of leaves, to lawn and field. They cover the sod from winter's freezing; and by and by they become humous, and then soil. Without them it would be impossible to keep up earth fertility. Leaves are not litter, unless trodden under foot and ground into mud; then they are soil. So goes the year. October is the golden gateway that will soon be swung open for winter. The wise man keeps even pace with the months, and is prepared to change with its changes. He also has his moods and his seasons.—The Independent.