But November has come; and the calm quiet hectic of September and the hale vigour of October have now passed away. The rain has sodden and struck down leaf after leaf, heaping the roadside, until you might count the leaves left upon the trees that edge the lanes. A sense of bareness and desolation oppresses you, and an aspect of dreariness and moist death has overspread the landscape. You walk into the garden: the dahlias are blackened with the frosts of October; the pinched geraniums, verbenas, heliotropes, lie wrecked on the beds; the few straggling chrysanthemums and scattered Michaelmas daisies—these are not enough to cheer you; for even these are drooping in the universal damp, and strung with trembling glittering diamonds of sorrowful tears. The dark sodden walnut-leaves thickly carpet the side paths, and the most cheerful thing in them is here and there the black wet walnut lying, with just a warm hint of the clean bright yellow shell within, betrayed through a torn fibrous gap. Day after day the fog sleeps over the land, and you see your breath in the morning in the cold damp air. You are brought face to face—earth stripped of its poetry and romance—face to face with Winter days.
And their approach seems gloomy. The light, and warmth, and the glory of the year have gone; but, as yet, the memory of them has not all quite departed. There are still the gleeful leaves lying, poor dead things, in the lanes; there are yet the unburied flowers, black on the garden-beds; the air is tepid; the trees are not entirely bare; the state is one of transition.
“The year’s in the wane,
There is nothing adorning,
The night has no eve,
And the day has no morning;—
Cold Winter gives warning.”
Yes, the approach of Winter days seems gloomy. We have more in our thought the chill drear outside of Winter, than his warm comfortable core, glowing as the heart of a burst pomegranate.
But November has now ended, and December has come. The early days of this month seem stragglers from that which has just gone out, and the same chill warm gloom prevails. There is a muggy closeness in the air; everything feels damp to the touch, and an oppressive scent of decay dwells in the gardens and the fields. You seem to see low fevers brooding over the lanes and alleys of the city, and you apprehend that “green Yule,” which “makes a fat kirkyard.” Your spirits, if your health be such as that they are a little dependent on the weather, seem drooping and languid and foggy too. And in this mood it is that you determine after lunch to call for a friend, and take a walk for a mile or two, with thick boots and trousers turned up, because of the drenched roads and the sticky fields. And you warm into a better mood with the walk and the talk, and make the mile or two five or six miles; indeed the sun is setting, and a deepening dusk in the sky shows a pale star here and there, while you are yet a mile from home. A sort of clearness and freshness seems to have come into the air since you started homewards; and you notice as you walk on, the frosty glitter in the stars, and you perceive that the road is actually growing rough and hard under your feet, and the road-side puddles are gathering a lace-work at their edge.
“By the breath of God frost is given:
And the breadth of the waters is straitened.”
And so either “the hoary frost of heaven” falls upon the earth, making a white feather of every straw, and a crisp fairy forest of the lawn, and a fernery of the windows, and hanging gardens of the spider’s webs, and a wondrous dreamland of the asparagus bed, a mist of white feather-foliage, with a lovely scattering of red fruit glowing among it here and there; or a black frost descends on the lands and waters, holding them with a gripe that grows closer, closer, and stiffens with more iron rigidity every day, until
“The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.”