But now we will go in the early morning before breakfast—
“To bathe our brain from drowsy night
In the sharp air and golden light.
The dew, like frost, is on the pane,
The year begins, though fair, to wane:
There is a fragrance in its breath,
Which is not of the flowers, but death.”
And we pass out of the window that opens into the garden under the tulip-tree standing so tall and still, with pale green and now yellow-touched leaves, that harmonise well with the pale sky against which you see them. The beech in the shrubbery has begun to “gather brown”; the tall dark elms that shut it in remind you vividly of the poet’s description of
“Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves.”
Against the thick box-trees underneath you love to see
“The sunflower, shining fair,
Ray round with flames her disc of seed,”
and some tall hollyhocks, still keeping up a brave cheer of rose-coloured and primrose and black blossoms upon their highest spike. The grass is glistening with heavy dew, sapphire, rose-diamond, pure brilliant, and yellow-diamond;—move a little, and one drop changes from one to the other of these. Walking across the lawn towards that rose-bed, you leave distinct green foot-prints upon the hoary grass. Perhaps the feeling that at last almost weighs upon you, and depresses you, is the intense, waiting stillness of everything. That apple-tree, bending down to the lawn with rosy apples, it seems so perfectly still and resting, that it quite makes you start to hear one of its red apples drop upon the path. The hurry and bustle and eager growth of the year has all gone by: these roses, that used to send out crowding bud after bud;—for some weeks a pause, a waiting, has come over them. This one purely white blossom, you watched it developing, unfolding so slowly, that it never seemed to change, taking a week for what would have taken no more than half a summer day, until at last it had opened fully, and hung down its head towards the brown damp mould. And there it seemed to stop. It seems not to have changed now for a week or two—why should it hurry to fade?—there were no more to come after it should go. Now half of it has detached itself, and lies in a little unbroken snowy heap on the ground. How quietly it must have fallen there! And the other half still stays on the tree, and leans down, and watches with a strange calm over the fallen white heaped petals,
“Innumerably frost impearled.”