noon
The green levels of stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water , and we wound among them , looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods that bordered them , the brooding woods , the pines and the liveoaks , misty with the motionless hanging moss , and misty also in that Southern air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing , mysterious , purple veil . Every line of this landscape , the straight forest top , the feathery breaks in it of taller trees , the curving marsh , every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke sadness . I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree that we gradually reached and left gradually behind ; and more than once I saw other blossoms , and the yellow of the trailing jessamine ; but the bird could not sing the silence away , and spring with all her abundance could not hide this spiritual autumn . Dreams , a land of dreams , where even the high noon itself was dreamy ; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery ! Whence came the melancholy of this ? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent , I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe ; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness . I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores , those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their hushed forests , and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes and disasters , but from the elements themselves .