WHEN on the breath of autumn breeze,
From pastures dry and brown,
Goes floating like an idle thought
The fair white thistle-down,
Oh then what joy to walk at will
Upon the golden harvest hill!
What joy in dreamy ease to lie
Amid a field new shorn,
And see all round on sun-lit slopes
The pil’d-up stacks of corn;
And send the fancy wandering o’er
All pleasant harvest-fields of yore.
I feel the day, I see the field,
The quivering of the leaves,
And good old Jacob and his house
Binding the yellow sheaves;
And at this very hour I seem
To be with Joseph in his dream.
I see the fields of Bethlehem
And reapers many a one,
Bending unto their sickles’ stroke,
And Boaz looking on;
And Ruth, the Moabite so fair,
Among the gleaners stooping there.
Again I see a little child,
His mother’s sole delight,
God’s living gift of love unto
The kind good Shunammite;
To mortal pangs I see him yield,
And the lad bear him from the field.
The sun-bathed quiet of the hills,
The fields of Galilee,
That eighteen hundred years ago
Were full of corn, I see;
And the dear Saviour takes his way
‘Mid ripe ears on the Sabbath day.
Oh, golden fields of bending corn,
How beautiful they seem!
The reaper-folk, the pil’d-up sheaves,
To me are like a dream.
The sunshine and the very air
Seem of old time, and take me there.
-Mary Howitt
