All the eternal ornaments set down in dust will never live nor yet give birth. Pale, unenduring petals go to brown and there- fore live in the soft mines of earth. EPHRAIM DU BLÉ ENGRENIER
The leaves ripen for the harvest wind, yellow and red. But it is the trees he threshes; it is their branches that will be stored.
The dark lines of goldenness afire, shifted leftward by too much hastening away from us, reside in a region more of the red than of the yellow we have delighted in.
Of which an anecdote: We had backed further and further up the steps as the splendors before us continued. Gleaming processions passed this way and that: distantly, along the great Causeway of white marble, and further away, spiral- ling slowly to the top of the southern mountain, and nearby, back and forth across the columned bridges, along the ram- parts rising above the shining bay. None seemed headed in the same direction. The crowds watching, like the one in which we found ourselves, seemed like the passing throngs- in white, in gold, in armor or in many-colored silks-to be filling the wide air, in a full celebration that could not quite be called gratitude. We backed further on up the steps below a statue that rose behind us, perhaps their famous chryselephantine Saturn, golden-scythed. The high sun was far from its reddened setting. But it would only be after that lowering crimson, rhymed in the red fires of the Conquerors come that same evening that, as we fled past the base of the statue, past the stone pedestal on which it rested, we should discern it indeed to have been one of Mars, sword curved in the same flat crescent as scythe, gatherer of red rather than of yellow.
Hilda laid on the gold leaf. The copy she was making of “The Miracle of the Field” flourished and sprouted under her shining care. It was not that it was a copy, nor that it was not even after some lost original. It was that it was hers. This was true plenty.
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