LEAVES IN OCTOBER.
Reading edition
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BY EMILY HERRMANN.
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The forest leaves are falling
Throughout the quiet day,
And dreamy haze is shutting
The outer world away;
They move along the sunlight,
Upon their shining cars,
With golden edges burning,
Like lines of midnight stars.
Slowly and silently, falling,
Dreamily floating by,
Down on mosaic mosses
Their purple vestures lie.
Move they in stately sorrow,
Out from their palace-home,
Where they reveled, alike in star-light
And when the day had come?
Sink they, in sad bereavement,
Along Despair’s dim shore,
Because to their sheltering shadow,
The young birds come no more?
The sunshine and the starshine,
Will seek their summer homes
Full oft, in pleasant weather,
And find them in their tombs.
The little birds will seek their
Well-remembered shadow,
And build their nests above them,
In the meshes of the meadow.
Like travelers benighted,
Where heaping snow-drifts lie,
They’ll wither all the winter
Beneath the open sky.
Like fated generations
They vanish, in a light
That flings a treacherous beauty
Above its deadly blight.
Like altars, strangely lighted,
That burn in human souls,
They shed their sparkling showers
Before the blackening scrolls.
As roses we have tended,
Though fainting in the noon,
Still kept a pleasant fragrance
Until the eves of June.
Our forest, from the summer,
Is fading in the frost,
And the glories of his dying
Are more than she could boast.
Here in their mottled shadows,
With bended heart and knees,
Sweet thought comes to my spirit
From out the aged trees.
It seems, when flesh is failing,
And Life folds up her wing,
That soonest, in these crimson tents,
We’d hear the angels sing!
And many a bright and tangled thread,
Here Fancy ever weaves,
And Faith lifts up her trustful eyes
Above the falling leaves;
She knows that, to her native hills
No blight can ever come,
That trees, with leaves of healing, rise
Forever round her home!