There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the a...ir, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives signs of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil moments. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journe...y. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The autumnal change of our woods has not yet made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetr...y.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part ...of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Already these brilliant trees throughout the street, without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and holida...y, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala- days, celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals, such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treeless ...waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
According to the record of an old inhabitant of Tyngsborough, now dead, whose farm we were now gliding past, one of the greatest f...reshets on this river took place in October, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple tree behind his house.... The revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river's banks, as on the Euphrates or the Nile. This apple tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called "Elisha's apple tree," from a friendly Indian who was anciently in the service of Jonathan Tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the Indian wars,--the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. He was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave caused the earth to settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, nature will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by methods yet more searching and unexpected. Thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »