----Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride--the winter is come early! But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon our ungrateful heads.
Well it is even so, that the passionate dreams of youth break up and wither. Vanity becomes tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields to the riper judgment of manhood,--even as the August heats pass on, and over, into the genial glow of a September sun. There is a strong growth in the struggles against mortified pride; and then only does the youth get an ennobling consciousness of that manhood which is dawning in him, when he has fairly surmounted those puny vexations which a wounded vanity creates.
Now your heart is driven home; and that cherished place, where so little while ago you wore your vanities with an air that mocked even your grief, and that subdued your better nature, seems to stretch toward you over long miles of distance its wings of love, and to welcome back to the sister's and the father's heart, not the self-sufficient and vaunting youth, but the brother and son--the schoolboy Clarence. Like a thirsty child, you stray in thought to that fountain of cheer, and live again--your vanity crushed, your wild hope broken--in the warm and natural affections of the boyish home.
Clouds weave the SUMMER into the season of AUTUMN; and YOUTH rises from dashed hopes into the stature of a MAN.
There are those who shudder at the approach of Autumn, and who feel a light grief stealing over their spirits, like an October haze, as the evening shadows slant sooner, and longer, over the face of an ending August day.
But is not Autumn the Manhood of the year? Is it not the ripest of the seasons? Do not proud flowers blossom,--the golden-rod, the orchis, the dahlia, and the bloody cardinal of the swamp-lands?
The fruits too are golden, hanging heavy from the tasked trees. The fields of maize show weeping spindles, and broad rustling leaves, and ears half glowing with the crowded corn; the September wind whistles over their thick-set ranks with whispers of plenty. The staggering stalks of the buckwheat grow red with ripeness, and tip their tops with clustering tricornered kernels.