There is always, I think, much more of sadness in the anticipation of Winter days than we find that they at all deserved when they are once fairly at home with us. The anticipation, the transition, is sad from Autumn profusion to Winter bareness. The month that severs the two is a month somewhat tinged with melancholy, and clad in a weeping robe of fogs and mists. There is a certain chill and gloom in wandering about the shrouded face of the so-lately rich Autumn fields,—
“When a blanket wraps the day,
When the rotten woodland drips,
And the leaf is stamped in clay,”—
there is something sad in passing through the sodden lanes, thickly carpeted with flat damp leaves, and strewn with the bright sienna chesnuts; here the gleaming nut, and there the three-fold shattered husk, brown-green, with cream-white lining.