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Updated: April 30, 2025
It was evening in the country at harvest-time, at that moment towards sundown when the light, about to be withdrawn, glows with a fulness of gold which makes it seem impossible that it can ever die. The earth was heavy with fruition, every square field brimful of the ungathered harvest. The heavy corn swayed almost by reason of its own weight. A thunderstorm would beat it prostrate in an hour.
Not a path of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder giants had handled it carelessly.
The cornstalks were stacked in serried array, like Indian wigwams, and heaps of apples, red and yellow and russet brown, lay ungathered in the orchards. Through this rich and varied scene he sped swiftly, filled with all a Westerner's keen appreciation of a New England landscape, constantly contrasting the arid glories of deserts he had seen with the plenty about him.
When evening came, with a half-moon hanging faint in the limpid blue, and the stars looking large through the mist of ungathered tears those of nature, not the lovers; with a wind like the breath of a sleeping child, sweet and soft, and full of dreams of summer; the mountains and hills asleep around them like a flock of day- wearied things, and haunted by the angels of Rob's visions the lovers, taking leave only of the mother, stole away to walk through the heavenly sapphire of the still night, up the hills and over the rushing streams of the spring, to the cave of their rest no ill omen but lovely symbol to such as could see in the tomb the porch of paradise.
A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in one corner of the writing space, up to the cuts in MSS., and roses still ungathered peeped above the window-sill and drooped from either side.
Already some of the elms are becoming bare there are gaps in the foliage where the winds have carried away the leaves. On the bramble bushes the blackberries cluster thickly, unseen and ungathered in this wild spot. The happy hearts that go a-blackberrying think little of the past: yet there is a deep, a mournful significance attached to that joyous time.
An introductory poem, of graceful but half-ironical lamentation over the passing of youth, seems placed at the head of the little collection in studious depreciation of its importance. Had it not been for the necessity of publishing the official odes, it is probable enough that Horace would have left these few later lyrics ungathered.
I remember, however, an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were, to the flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna. There was an exquisitely executed piece of Correggio, about four saints, one of whom seemed to have a pet dragon in a leash.
But the fruits of victory are ungathered and the beneficence of peace is not yet attained. The call arises for a "doer of the work."
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