VIII

I am glad to observe that all the poetry of the midsummer harvesting has not gone out with the scythe and the whetstone.  The line of mowers was a pretty sight, if one did not sympathize too deeply with the human backs turned up there to the sun, and the sound of the whetstone, coming up from the meadows in the dewy morning, was pleasant music.  But I find the sound of the mowing-machine and the patent reaper is even more in tune with the voices of Nature at this season.  The characteristic sounds of midsummer are the sharp, whirring crescendo of the cicada or harvest fly, and the rasping, stridulous notes of the nocturnal insects.  The mowing-machine repeats and imitates these sounds.  ’T is like the hum of a locust or the shuffling of a mighty grasshopper.  More than that, the grass and the grain at this season have become hard.  The timothy stalk is like a file; the rye straw is glazed with flint; the grasshoppers snap sharply as they fly up in front of you; the bird-songs have ceased; the ground crackles under foot; the eye of day is brassy and merciless; and in harmony with all these things is the rattle of the mower and the hay-tedder.

IX

’T is an evidence of how directly we are related to Nature, that we more or less sympathize with the weather, and take on the color of the day.  Goethe said he worked easiest on a high barometer.  One is like a chimney that draws well some days and won’t draw at all on others, and the secret is mainly in the condition of the atmosphere.  Anything positive and decided with the weather is a good omen.  A pouring rain may be more auspicious than a sleeping sunshine.  When the stove draws well, the fogs and fumes will leave your mind.  I find there is great virtue in the bare ground, and have been much put out at times by those white angelic days we have in winter, such as Whittier has so well described in these lines:—­

“Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament;
No cloud above, no earth below,
A universe of sky and snow.”

On such days my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same color, or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner world is a blank like the outer, and all my great ideals are wrapped in the same monotonous and expressionless commonplace.  The blackest of black days are better.

Why does snow so kill the landscape and blot out our interest in it?  Not merely because it is cold, and the symbol of death,—­for I imagine as many inches of apple blossoms would have about the same effect,—­but because it expresses nothing.  White is a negative; a perfect blank.  The eye was made for color, and for the earthy tints, and, when these are denied it, the mind is very apt to sympathize and to suffer also.

Then when the sap begins to mount in the trees, and the spring languor comes, does not one grow restless indoors?  The sun puts out the fire, the people say, and the spring sun certainly makes one’s intellectual light grow dim.  Why should not a man sympathize with the seasons and the moods and phases of Nature?  He is an apple upon this tree, or rather he is a babe at this breast, and what his great mother feels affects him also.