Another crop your acres yield,
Which I gather in a song,"

sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive
across his memory, as over the fields below him:

"Knows he who tills this lonely field,
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic crops his acres yield,
At midnight and at morn?"

The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered
its few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it
had fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since
awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad
meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish
current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few
maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.
Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and
the white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their
virgin breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches.
Clustering vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry
of the South and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes
of flowers the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along
the dusky windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet
splendor paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long,
from founts unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond
or wooded hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through
the plain, spreading at one point above the town into a little lake,
called by the farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must