XLVI

AS THE seasonal light decreases, and the arc of our northern sun becomes a mere geometric leftover of its midsummer sweep and exaltation, I watch the pond changing color from its autumnal blue to a kind of austere and silvery grey. Now that the water is becoming almost as cold as the air, the great fog-bank which used to gather on frosty nights is to be seen no more, though once or twice, after a night of bitter cold, I have seen vague wisps and thin tatters of trailing mist clearing off as the sun rose to begin his short-lived day. The other morning all the slopes were covered with frost, and the residual mists floated up the sides of the hills, and dissolved on the higher land into nothingness and light.

I have long had the notion that our northern ponds were at their bluest about a fortnight after the Vernal and, later, the Autumnal Equinox. The blue of early April, moreover, has always seemed to me brighter and more living than the colder and more severe blue of the clearer October air. In the full solar splendor of midsummer there is too much light in the sky to give us the blue of water at its best, and the pleasant, varied tones of summer are paler tones of the air and the mystery overhead. Now there has come a second paling and a second withdrawal, and though there is blue to be seen on the water, it is a blue which is near to silver and to steel.

A force of nature itself, the pond awaits the deeper cold and its own emergence from some first and iron night floored with a first darkness and motionlessness of ice. The trees of the shore are skeletons of winter, the grasses and sedges of the little beach have withered to spears of straw and russet brown, and on the tiny crescent of cold sand a submerged garland of matted oak-leaves checks the ripples blown ahead of a morning wind which has risen with the sun.

FARM DIARY

Deer-hunting season ends, to the relief and satisfaction of the farm. It is pleasant to think that we shall hear no more shots from the woods. / The state takes over a short length of our town road which is almost impassable in winter, sends us a junior steam-shovel and a state engineer, and our younger neighbors build the new length under the direction of our own village “road commissioner.” The job seems to be going on as a sort of working holiday, and the weather has been pleasant the whole week. A very busy and sociable scene. / Little John Oliver’s fourth birthday, and well do I remember his arrival! He came on a wintry morning of cloud-covered skies and a searching wind, and as Elizabeth and I walked down to the Olivers’, the cold wintry air was being continuously shaken by the distant and heavy thunders and rolling detonations of the firing from the forts along the coast. / I open the storm door and gaze out into the night. It is pitch dark and utterly silent, and past the streaming lamplight falls the snow.

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So draws to a close the country year. It is late at night, and musing here alone in the kitchen of the farm, my papers and pencils spread about on the table under the peaceful light, I venture to set down a statement of a country man’s unchanged belief. What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity. With the passing of a relation to Nature worthy both of Nature and the human spirit, with the slow burning down of the poetic sense together with the noble sense of religious reverence to which it is allied, man has almost ceased to be man. Torn from earth and unaware, having neither the inheritance and awareness of man nor the other sureness and integrity of the animal, we have become vagrants in space, desperate for the meaninglessness which has closed about us. True humanity is no inherent and abstract right but an achievement, and only through the fullness of human experience may we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers and brethren and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human peace and the full of human joy.