Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 68.djvu/466
him. I asked her what the baby liked, and she said "to step." The prairie before the door was gay with flowers of hay, and I led her in. She argued with the birds, she leaned on clover walls and they fell, and dropped her. With jargon sweeter than a bell, she grappled buttercups, and they sank together, the buttercups the heaviest. What sweetest use of days! 'T was noting some such scene made Vaughan humbly say, "My days that are at best but dim and hoary." I think it was Vaughan. . . .
And these few fragmentary memorials—closing, like every human biography, with funerals, yet with such as were to Emily Dickinson only the stately introduction to a higher life—may well end with her description of the death of the very summer she so loved.
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,
Too imperceptible at last
To feel like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,
A courteous yet harrowing grace
As guest that would be gone.
And thus without a wing
Or service of a keel
Our summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
THE HAWKBIT.
How sweetly on the autumn scene,
When haws are red amid the green,
The hawkbit shines with face of cheer,
The favorite of the faltering year!
When days grow short and nights grow cold,
How fairly gleams its eye of gold
On pastured field and grassy hill,
Along the roadside and the rill!
It seems the spirit of a flower,
This offspring of the autumn hour,
Wandering back to earth to bring
Some kindly afterthought of spring.
A dandelion's ghost might so
Amid Elysian meadows blow,
Become more fragile and more fine
Breathing the atmosphere divine.
Charles G. D. Roberts.