IV.

The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard; The ants have cramm’d their garners with ripe grain, And honey-bees have stored The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have winged across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Among the sunless shadows of the plain: Alone, alone, Upon a mossy stone, She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a lone-rosary, While all the wither’d world looks drearily, Like a dim picture of the drowned past In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away, Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last Into the distance, gray upon the gray.