A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport

aboundantly, in many places so wilde, and little regarded, that many have gone, and abiden there to distill the oyle thereof whereof great quantity now commeth over from thense unto us: and also in Lanquedocke, and Provence in France.
     
     

 
 The Kitchen Chair
     
     
    It was a breathless, gray day, leaving the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying, an afternoon soon after she had moved into a cottage at Grasmere to keep house for her brother William. She had brought a kitchen chair and a milking stool out into the fine weather, to write in her journal. There would be, in time, a garden where she sat, the public road to her left, the yellowing woods to her right. Tucking back a strayed strand of hair around her ear, opening her journal on her lap, she wrote: It is a breathless, grey day, that leaves the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying.
    Johnson preferred gray; William, grey.
    As in Horace, the words are in an order but are free to form associations of their own. Leaves, a verb, easily becomes a noun and takes up with golden, for golden leaves are what she's looking at. Leaves in the underworld are of gold, where the vegetation is all of metal, with mineral and crystal flowers. Autumn is Proserpina's return to the realm of artifice, where lifeless stone and iron pretend to be apple and pear. Autumnal decay is nature's grief over her departure.
    Until she wrote autumn, her sentence was in English. Then Latin began to sift in: quiet and its cousin tranquillity, as if the older language had the power to cast a spell on us when we write. Decaying, she knew, meant falling, and thus she can entwine two roots and tie in the English fall under autumn.  She cannot keep decay from meaning rot. Standing lies encoded in stately. The trees stand on their estate. Caesar (she imagines  him on a horse) brought bella into Gaul. When the Norse king William brought it to Hastings, it had become beau, and to its noun beaute we English added the full.
    Breathless is an apt word, even though it means both a stillness of wind on such a calm day as this, beautiful and voluptuously calm, and not breathing, as in death. With both meanings was Proserpina familiar.
    Gray is a deathly color, and yet it is clouds, which are water, high and cold, the source of life, that grizzle the sky.
    It is a breathless, gray day, that leaves the golden fall woods unanswering in their own stillness, kingly and comely in their dying.
     
     

 
 The Concord Sonata
     
     
AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON
    At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad  in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences, a paragraph which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
     
JOHN BURROUGHS
     
    Thoreau did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says: The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. This fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This