You may find a sort of pleasing melancholy, of tender romance, in watching the first tints of Autumn stealing over the Summer, from the very first, when
“The long-smouldering fire within the trees
Begins to blaze through vents,”
until,—tree by tree, wood by wood, landscape by landscape,—they stand in their glory—
“The death-flushed trees, that, in the falling year,
As the Assyrian monarch, clothe themselves
In their most gorgeous pageantry to die.”
Then the first frosts, and the calm clear mornings, and the grey fresh blue of the evenings, with their sprinkling of intensely piercingly glittering stars. And then the deep spell upon the trees is broken, and we stand and watch while, now in a shower and now singly,
“The calm leaves float
Each to his rest beneath their parent shade,”
and the year seems just passing away like a beautiful dissolving view.
There is also something to keep you up, something of excitement and stir, and glow, in the brave October days, when a great wind comes roaring and booming over the land, and you see the tall ash trees toss up their wild arms in dismay, and a deep roar gathers in the elms, and a far hissing in the pines, and from that beech avenue,
“The flying gold of the ruined woodlands
Drives through the air.”
You can walk out, and press your hat on to your head, and button your coat, and labour up the rising downs, yielding no foot to the blustering screaming wind; and a glow and exhilaration tingles in your veins as you march on, with pace no whit slackened for all its vehement opposition.