The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.  The reader easily goes within the shallowest contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and promise of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple, and hears the faintest strains of the worshippers; but it will have to speak to posterity, traversing these deserts, through the ruins of its outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its proportions.

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But here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the while been bodily, Nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem Autumn, with which no work of man will bear to be compared.

In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women.  In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy, not far off geographically,—­

     “There is a place beyond that flaming hill,
     From whence the stars their thin appearance shed,
     A place beyond all place, where never ill,
     Nor impure thought was ever harbored.”

Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature, not his Father but his Mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality.  From time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own.

     I am the autumnal sun,
     With autumn gales my race is run;
     When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
     Or the grape ripen under my bowers? 
     When will the harvest or the hunter’s moon,
     Turn my midnight into mid-noon? 
     I am all sere and yellow,
     And to my core mellow. 
     The mast is dropping within my woods,
     The winter is lurking within my moods,
     And the rustling of the withered leaf
     Is the constant music of my grief.

To an unskilful rhymer the Muse thus spoke in prose: 

The moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their mistress.  Asters and golden-rods reign along the way, and the life-everlasting withers not.  The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them.  The thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men.  But behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the year, which it bears forever, annually watering and maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit.