in Thoreau’s Journal:

Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed

upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or

seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual

decay and death, this dying by inches, before the

whole tree at last lies down and turns to soil. As trees

shed their leaves, so deer their horns, and men their

hair or nails. The year’s great crop. I am more 

interested in it than in the English grass alone or in the

corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future corn-

fields on which the earth fattens. They teach us how

to die. How many flutterings before they rest quietly

in their graves! A myriad wrappers for germinating

seeds. By what subtle chemistry they will mount up

again, climbing by the sap in the trees. The ground

is all parti-colored with them.

For beautiful variety can any crop be compared

with them? The dogwood (poison sumach) blazing

its sins as scarlet, the early-blushing maple, the rich

chrome (?) yellow of the poplar, the mulberry ash,

the brilliant red huckleberry with which the hills’

backs are painted like sheep’s, – not merely the plain

flavidness of corn, but all the colors of the rainbow. The

salmon-colored oaks, etc ., etc. The frost touches

them, and, with the slightest breath of day or jarring

of earth’s axle, see in what showers they come floating

down, at the first earnest touch of autumn’s wand. They

stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years by

subtiler chemistry, and the sapling’s first fruits, thus

shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when,

in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.