He had to move on

During Henry Ward Beecher’s summers in Salisbury in 1852 and 1853, he explored high and low. He wrote in his diary on Sept. 16, 1853: 

“The outlines of its horizon, its peaks and headlands, its mountains and gorges, its streams and valleys, have become familiar to us. It is a sad feeling that we have in going away.”

He started to get weepy:

 “Nature makes so many overtures to those who love her, and stamps so many remembrances of herself upon their affections, and draws forth to her bosom so much of our very self, that, at length, the fields, the hills, the trees, and the various waters, become a journal of our life. In riding over from Millerton to Salisbury (six miles), for the last time, probably, for years, we could not but remark what a hold the face of the country had got upon us. 

“This round hill on the left, as we draw near the lakes, it is our hill! Hundreds of times we have greeted it, and been greeted; we have bounded over it; in imagination we have built under those trees, and welcomed friends to our air-cottage. How often, at sunset, have we looked forth north, east, south and west, and harvested from each direction great stores of beauty and of joy. As we wound around its base, a three-quarters moon shining full and bright, the two lakes began to appear in silver spots through the trees.”

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It’s no surprise that Beecher (1813-1887) had a way with words. He was son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. A clergyman himself in Brooklyn, he took summers off.

Beecher anticipated the arrival of autumn: 

“Men will sit down beneath the shower of golden leaves that every puff of wind will soon cast down in field and forest, and remember the days of first summer and the vigor of young leaves; will mark the boughs growing bare, and the increasing spaces among the thickest trees, through which the heavens every day do more and more appear, as their leaves grow fewer and none spring again to repair the waste and sigh that the summer passeth and the winter cometh. How many suggestions of his own life and decay will one find!”

Among other locales here, Beecher admired Sage’s Ravine on Salisbury’s border with Sheffield, Mass. He declared the site was worth traveling from New York every month of the year to visit.

“Never have I climbed a more wild or beautiful ravine. It is dangerous, too,” he said.

Beecher in 1853 purchased Blossom Hill in Lenox, Mass.,  and renamed it Beecher Hill. That became his permanent summer retreat. 

The writer encourages readers to follow Beecher’s lead and explore the autumnal landscape before snow falls.