Best of all he loved the fall.

The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods.

Leaves floating on the trout streams above the hills.

The high blue windless skies.

Now he will be part of them forever.

THE LAKE

In spring of youth it was my lot
 To haunt of the wide world a spot
 The which I could not love the less--
 So lovely was the loneliness
 Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
 And the tall pines that towered around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall
 Upon that spot, as upon all,
 And the mystic wind went by
 Murmuring in melody--
 Then--ah then I would awake
 To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,
 But a tremulous delight--
 A feeling not the jewelled mine
 Could teach or bribe me to define--
 Nor Love--although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
 And in its gulf a fitting grave
 For him who thence could solace bring
 To his lone imagining--
 Whose solitary soul could make
 An Eden of that dim lake.

Passeth the moon with her sickle of light,

Slowly, slowly fadeth she,

Weary of reaping the barren night

And the desolate shuddering sea.

“It is the story of the Common Man, of the ordinary men and women who in their countless thousands have trudged through life and then departed from it, leaving little visible trace.”