AUGUST DAYS 



yards In extent. The dog-star seems to invoke these 

 fermenting masses from the deep. They suggest 

 decay, but they are only the riot of the lower forms 

 of vegetable life. 



August, too, is the month of the mushrooms, — 

 those curious abnormal flowers of a hidden or sub- 

 terranean vegetation, invoked by heat and moisture 

 from darkness and decay as the summer wanes. Do 

 they not suggest something sickly arid uncanny in 

 Nature? her unwholesome dreams and night fan- 

 cies, her pale superstitions ; her myths and legends 

 and occult lore taking shape in them, spectral and 

 fantastic, at times hinting something libidinous and 

 unseemly: vegetables with gills, fibreless, bloodless; 

 earth-flesh, often offensive, unclean, immodest, often 

 of rare beauty and delicacy, of many shades and 

 colors — creamy white, red, yellow, brown, — now 

 the hue of an orange, now of a tomato, now of a 

 potato, some edible, some poisonous, some shaped 

 like spread umbrellas, some like umbrellas reversed 

 by the wind, — the sickly whims and fancies of 

 Nature, some imp of the earth mocking and tra- 

 vestying the things of the day. Under my evergreens 

 I saw a large white disk struggling up through the 

 leaves and the debris like the full moon through 

 clouds and vapors. This simile is doubtless sug- 

 gested to my mind by a line of a Southern poet, 

 Madison Cawein, which I look upon as one of the 

 best descriptive lines in recent nature poetry : — 



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