Now, however, the rich wine reds, the vivid crimsons, and the deep
maroons that deepen on the one leaf into bluish purples and on the other
into violet-browns mingled, as they are yet with the vigorous
chlorophyl-green of the untinted leaf, these all are beginning to make
up the more permanent glory of the full tide of autumn color. Come with
me, if you will, at sunset to the scrubby hill where three years ago the
woodchoppers swept through like locusts, devouring every green thing
that lay in their path.
They left behind them only gray stumps, dead limbs, and devastation. Yet
hardly were their backs turned before the surgent vitality of spring
swept upward from the earth-sheltered roots and burgeoned from the gray
stumps in adventitious shoots that flushed purple with the excess of
young blood in them. Four feet they grew, these new shoots, that year,
and as much more the next, and now another forest of young oaks, black,
white, red, scarlet, and scrub romps where the elder forest stood in
majesty. Its leaves are fewer in number, but of enormous size and full
of the riot of young life, with all the vigor of the parent tree sent up
from the great deep roots.
Now their tide of sap is flowing back and the deep bronze-green is
turning to the richest crimson and lake. Through these the golden
radiance of the sun is drowned in a sea of bacchanal glory that makes
the eye drunk and bewildered with its wine of crimson fires. To look
toward it directly is to face a furnace of vivid liquid flames that
makes the whole world green with flying blots of complementary color as
you look away. Looking north or south to relieve the eye, you find that
the rich color is still caught cunningly in the curves and facets of the
leaves that glow like fire-rubies set in mosaics of chrysoprase,
almandite, garnet, and carnelian. Turn again so that your back is to the
sun and your eye rests among soft depths of umber lighted by rich reds
that do not dazzle and flanked by tans and beryl. It is a world of glow
and warmth and color that will long outlast the scarlets and yellows of
the other deciduous trees, and even in the dead of winter the sunset
fires will glow and flare in remembrances of these colors in the
still-clinging leaves.
THE DAY THAT SUMMER CAME BACK
The summer came back to-day, trailing gossamer garments over the pasture
and adding the romance of August to the glamour of the mid-October
woods. Where luminous purples hung deep in the shadows of the distance
it painted them with a soft gray-blue bloom like that upon the grape.
The undulating hills were as soft with it as if they were waves of the
sub-tropic reaches of the Gulf Stream, where a wonderful film of purple
efflorescence shimmers as far as eye may see.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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