How the half-mad vision of William Blake--how the far freer, far
firmer fantasy that wrote "Midsummer Night's Dream"--would have
revell'd night or day, and beyond stint, in one of our American
corn fields! Truly, in color, outline, material and spiritual
suggestiveness, where any more inclosing theme for idealist, poet,
literary artist?
What we have written has been at noon day--but perhaps better still
(for this collation,) to steal off by yourself these fine nights,
and go slowly, musingly down the lane, when the dry and green-gray
frost-touch'd leaves seem whisper-gossipping all over the field in
low tones, as if every hill had something to say--and you sit or lean
recluse near by, and inhale that rare, rich, ripe and peculiar odor
of the gather'd plant which comes out best only to the night air. The
complex impressions of the far-spread fields and woods in the night,
are blended mystically, soothingly, indefinitely, and yet palpably to
you (appealing curiously, perhaps mostly, to the sense of smell.) All
is comparative silence and clear-shadow below, and the stars are up
there with Jupiter lording it over westward; sulky Saturn in the east,
and over head the moon. A rare well-shadow'd hour! By no means the
least of the eligibilities of the gather'd corn!
A DEATH-BOUQUET
_Pick'd Noontime, early January, 1890_
Death--too great a subject to be treated so--indeed the greatest
subject--and yet I am giving you but a few random lines about it--as
one writes hurriedly the last part of a letter to catch the closing
mail.
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