Attempt > Volume 1 and Select writings

248
THE ATTEMPT
Itotofar.
“ The melancholy days are come,
The saddest of the year.”
As the American poet plaintively sings : days when the pulse of age grows yet more
feehle, and the life of the sick man seems ready to ebb with the dying season, the fall
of the leaf, the fading glory and greenness of the earth. Gone are the waving boughs,
the breath of the blue wood violet, the odorous scents and gorgeous blooms of the
vanished summer: gone, too, are its sheeny skies, its amber sunsets, from whose
depths, as we gazed, there seemed to fall upon us the far-off light of the Golden City
—a gleam from the unfolding of its pearly gates.
We can wander no longer in paths where the hedgerows are thick with delicate
blossoms of the dog rose, the white stars of the wild raspberry, and clusters of snowy
privet. For the ripple of tiny springs in the long grass, we have now the dull plash
of rain down the busy street; instead of the note of the thrush from the fruity orchards,
only the chirp of the sparrow—little brown denizen of the housetops.
And the pleasant Autumn—“ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness ”—where
are its golden harvests, its dreamy twilights, its dropping leaves 1
“ Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store ?
Sometimes, whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Droused with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers ;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook ;
Or by a cider press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
*****
Full grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ;
Hedge crickets sing ; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
Grey mists wreathe the mountain peaks and glens, no longer clad in golden and
purple blooms of gorse and heather, with their ghostly vapours. Overflowing streams