"At all,
Came lovers home from this great festival."
They may bring their fattest cattle and richest fruits to the
fair, but they are all eclipsed by the show of men. These are
stirring autumn days, when men sweep by in crowds, amid the
rustle of leaves, like migrating finches; this is the true
harvest of the year, when the air is but the breath of men, and
the rustling of leaves is as the trampling of the crowd. We read
now-a-days of the ancient festivals, games, and processions of
the Greeks and Etruscans, with a little incredulity, or at least
with little sympathy; but how natural and irrepressible in every
people is some hearty and palpable greeting of Nature. The
Corybantes, the Bacchantes, the rude primitive tragedians with
their procession and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of
the Panathenaea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have
their parallel now. The husbandman is always a better Greek than
the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still
survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in
commemorating it. The farmers crowd to the fair to-day in
obedience to the same ancient law, which Solon or Lycurgus did
not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.
It is worth the while to see the country's people, how they pour
into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their very
shirt and coat-collars pointing forward, - collars so broad as if
they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions
always tend to superfluity, - and with an unusual springiness in
their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another. The more supple
vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a
gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole
like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though
finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed; come to see the
sport, and have a hand in what is going, - to know "what's the
row," if there is any; to be where some men are drunk, some
horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props
under a table, and above all to see the "striped pig." He
especially is the creature of the occasion. He empties both his
pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a
day. He dearly loves the social slush. There is no reserve of
soberness in him.
I love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and
succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of
vegetables. Though there are many crooked and crabbled specimens
of humanity among them, run all to thorn and rind, and crowded
out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the third chestnut in
the burr, so that you wonder to see some heads wear a whole hat,
yet fear not that the race will fail or waver in them; like the
crabs which grow in hedges, they furnish the stocks of sweet and
thrifty fruits still.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 190 of 221
Words from 99557 to 100076
of 116321
