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| THE MELANCHOLY days are come, the saddest of the year, | |
| Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere. | |
| Heap’d in the hollows of the grove the wither’d leaves lie dead, | |
| They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit’s tread. | |
| The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, | 5 |
| And from the wood top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day. | |
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| Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprung and stood, | |
| In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? | |
| Alas! they all are in their graves—the gentle race of flowers | |
| Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours: | 10 |
| The rain is falling where they lie—but the cold November rain | |
| Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again. | |
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| The windflower and the violet, they perish’d long ago, | |
| And the brier-rose and the orchis died, amid the summer’s glow; | |
| But on the hill the golden rod, and the aster in the wood, | 15 |
| And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood, | |
| Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men, | |
| And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen. | |
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| And now when comes the calm mild day—as still such days will come, | |
| To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home; | 20 |
| When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still, | |
| And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill, | |
| The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore, | |
| And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more. | |
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| And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died, | 25 |
| The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side. | |
| In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf, | |
| And we wept that one so lovely should have a lot so brief; | |
| Yet not unmeet it was, that one, like that young friend of ours, | |
| So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers. | 30 |
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