OCTOBER

THERE comes a month in the weary year,
A month of leisure and peaceful rest,
When the ripe leaves fall and the air is clear—
October, the brown, the crisp, the blest.

My lot has little enough of bliss;
I drag the days of the odd eleven—
Counting the time that shall lead to this,
The month that opens the hunter’s heaven.

And oh, for the mornings crisp and white,
With the sweep of the hounds upon the track:
The bark-roofed cabins, the camp-fire’s light,
The break of the deer and the rifle’s crack.

Do you call this trifling? I tell you, friend,
A life in the forest is past all praise.
Give me a dozen such months on end—
You may take my balance of years and days.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,
And a pulse of evil that throbs and beats.
And men are withered before their prime
By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.

And lungs are poisoned, and shoulders bowed,
In the smothering reek of mill and mine;
And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—
But he shuns the shadow of oak and pine.

And of all to which the memory clings,
There is naught so dear as the sunny spots
Where our shanties stood by the crystal springs,
The vanished hounds and the lucky shots.

March 16, 1868