Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Harvest Moon lyrics

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes   And roofs of villages, on woodland crests   And their aerial neighborhoods of nests   Deserted, on the curtained window-panes Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes   And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!   Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,   With the last sheaves return the laboring wains! All things are symbols: the external shows   Of Nature have their image in the mind,   As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves; The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,   Only the empty nests are left behind,   And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.