Something of depression comes over you, I say, and there happens to be no cheery robin just now to put in a word, nor sedate rook sailing with still wings overhead across the pale sky, to give you even the poorer encouragement of his mere stoic caw. Why are you depressed? What is this strange sadness that seems to you to lurk under the exquisite calm and beautiful stillness of the Autumn morning?
Do you hardly know? I will tell you. That quiet is the quiet of Death coming on; that calm waiting and expectancy is the herald of its approach, the beauty is the hectic flush of the consumptive cheek. Death is sad for Life to contemplate; and we are so much akin to all this decay, that this quiet tells us of it almost more than the heavy bell that now and then stirs the air of the Summer morning. The coming death of the Summer leaves and the Summer flowers preaches to us a solemn sermon of our own death drawing near. Watch that leaf circling down from that silent tree, and listen to the echo in your own heart:
“We all do fade as a leaf.”
Yes, death, the sense of advancing death, is at the root of your sadness and depression. Death in its beauty, in a tender loveliness—death, the angel, not the skeleton, yet still DEATH. And,
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
“’Tis LIFE, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant,
More life, and fuller, that I want.”
And a great warrior, of long ago, one who had less cause than most to fear death, yet said:
“We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”
Well, this sadness must remain in some measure; the flowers must die, and the leaves must fall, and the robin’s attempts to cheer us bring the tears very near our eyes. “Sin entered into the world, and death by sin”: and the child of such a parent cannot bring joy as his attendant. Still, let us go on with our garden walk, and see whether, even in the face of nature, there be nothing else but only this peaceful waiting sadness.
Take these branches of the Lilac bushes, that we remember bending under their scented masses in the warm early Summer days. Bare and damp, bare of flowers, and only clad with sickly yellow leaves; but what else can we see in them? There is not one (examine them well) which has not already a full green bud of promise, developed even before the leaves, the old leaves, have fallen away. Look on the ground in the shrubberies. What are these little green points that begin just to break the mould? Ah, they are indeed the myriad white constellations of snowdrops already beginning to dawn, and the frail flower will sleep warm and safe in the bulb, under the patchwork counterpane of gold beech leaves, and bronze-purple pear-leaves, and silver-white poplar, and come out among the first to tell you that nature is not dead, but sleepeth. Look farther, on to the flower borders, at the base of the tall gaunt stalks of the once stately Queen of flowers. Lo, there already