As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint
just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset
sky; November the later twilight.
I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf
from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had acquired
its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to
the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint in a
book, which should be entitled, "_October, or Autumnal Tints_";--beginning
with the earliest reddening,--Woodbine and the lake of radical leaves, and
coming down through the Maples, Hickories, and Sumachs, and many
beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to the latest Oaks and
Aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You would need only to turn
over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever you
pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves themselves, unfaded, it would
be better still. I have made but little progress toward such a book, but I
have endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints in the order
in which they present themselves. The following are some extracts from my
notes.
THE PURPLE GRASSES.
By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps, we are
reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted Sarsaparilla-leaves and
Brakes, and the withering and blackened Skunk-Cabbage and Hellebore, and,
by the river-side, the already blackening Pontederia.
The Purple Grass (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its
beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.
Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods off, a
stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood, where
the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored and interesting,
though not quite so bright, as the patches of Rhexia, being a darker
purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick. On going to and
examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot
high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple
flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around me. Close at hand it
appeared but a dull purple, and made little impression on the eye; it was
even difficult to detect; and if you plucked a single plant, you were
surprised to find how thin it was, and how little color it had. But viewed
at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple,
flower-like, enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce
these decided effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass
is commonly of a sober and humble color.
With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place, of
the Rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most
interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on waste
strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above the edge
of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to swing his scythe;
for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his notice. Or, it may be,
because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists; for the same
eye does not see this and Timothy.
