684 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



Now, to illustrate the other, I go away from America, with its broad and 

 and rich plantations, into the cloistered shades of English scholarship, and 

 I walk with the most thoughtful man who sings today, William Watson. 

 Now he sings about the ' 'Autumn" in this wise: 



' 'Thoti burden of all songs the earth hath sung, 

 Thou retrospect in time's reverted eyes, 

 Thou metaphor of everything that dies, 

 That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young. 



And therefore blest and wise. 

 O be less beautiful, or be less brief. 



Thou tragic tplendour, strange, and full of fear. 

 In vain her pageant shall the summer rear? 

 At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf. 

 Crumbles the gorgeous year. " 



This is a great verse, but here is a deeper toned melody: 



' ' For me, to dreams resigned, there come and go, 



'Tvvixt mountains draped, and hooded night and morn. 

 Elusive notes in Wandering wafture borne. 

 From undiscoverable lips that blow 



An immaterial horn; 

 And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees, 



Thy ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet — 

 O Past and Future in sad bridal met, 

 O voice of everything that perishes, 

 And soul of all regret. " 



This is more than fine writing. Yet is it the entire truth? There is 

 another rhyme, which come to us out of the very respectable past, which 

 reads: 



' ' The melancholy days have come, 

 The saddest of the year. " 



Now, my friends, which attitude of life is yours? The man who is sing- 

 ing, ' 'The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year," will think 

 it very irreverent, indeed, in us, that on this Sunday morning I should have 

 told you about a little girl who climed upon her grandfather's lap, and, look- 

 ing at his gray hairs, remarked, "The frost is on the pumpkins." But the 

 little girl is a greater poetess than Adelaide Proctor; greater even than 

 William Watson, and a fine interpreter of the Hoozier singer who sang, "The 

 frost is on the pumpkins, the fodder's in the shock." 



"Melancholy days have come?" No, not, "The melancholy days have 

 come," but "The golden days have come." The days of achievement have 

 come; the days of sweet, soft, golden haze have come; the days in which 

 God liberally fills the year with treasure from the golden streets of the New 

 Jerusalem. Days are here in which the sunset is a robe from the eternal, 

 containing all of the rich colors that He may find in His large and spacious 

 universe. Days are come in which the old earth is throbbing with that 

 music which comes from the unity of all things, and the purpose of every- 

 thing. Days are these, of garnering, and of corn in the shock. Days are 

 these, in which we are able to understand and learn more of the Peter with 

 whom we have been dealing, on these recent Sundays. Look at him here. 

 Take him here (lifting an ear of corn from the platform) from one of these 

 shocks, and find him growing as an ear on the stalk of corn. As we saw 

 last Sunday, take away the Simon. The Simon must come away from the 



