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Few sounds are heard through the winter days to break the deathlike silence that reigns around, excepting the sudden rending and cracking of the trees in the frosty air, the fall of a decayed branch, the tapping of a solitary woodpecker two or three small species of which still remain after all the summer-birds are flown and the gentle, weak chirp of the little tree-creeper, as it runs up and down the hemlocks and pines, searching the crevices of the bark for insects.
Days of old, Ye are not dead, though gone from me; Ye are not cold, But like the summer-birds gone o'er the sea. The sun brings back the swallows fast, O'er the sea: When thou comest at the last, The days of old come back to me. She ceased singing. Still she did not enter. I went into the closet, and found that the door was bolted.
There might come a later set, and later doings; but this last week of August sent the mere summer-birds fluttering. Madam Routh must be back in New York, to prepare for the reopening of her school; Mrs.
Alas! we turn in vain, And, turning, meet the self-same waste again The same drear wilderness of stern decay; Its former pride, the phantom of a day; A song of summer-birds within a bower; A dream of beauty traced upon a flower; A lute whose master-chord has ceased to sound; A morning-star struck darkling to the ground."
What a piece of chaos is this! Yet come here again, two months hence, and you shall find all this desolation clothed with beauty and with fragrance, one vast bower of soft green leaves and graceful tendrils, while summer-birds chirp and flutter amid these sunny arches all the livelong day. "Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness."
The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria with its summer-birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the, stars, the sea, the mountains, all were mere accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure.
For the swallow follows not summer more willingly than men of these dispositions follow the good fortunes of the great, nor more willingly leaves winter than these shrink from the first appearance of a reverse; such summer-birds are men.
There might come a later set, and later doings; but this last week of August sent the mere summer-birds fluttering. Madam Routh must be back in New York, to prepare for the reopening of her school; Mrs.
Here, a thousand wretched men, bowed with misery and branded with crime, were crowded together. All the day long, herds of these degraded beings might be seen in their coarse and faded uniform, burrowing in the earth, blasting and shaping the rocks that were to form new prison-walls, and filling the sweet air with groans and curses, which once thrilled only to the songs of summer-birds.
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