THE END OF THE SEASONS.
The Summer is past, the Autumn is passing quite away, the Harvest is long ended, the fruit all garnered. And the year seems as desolate as Solomon in his sad time, having been clad in more than all his glory. It has gathered gardens, and orchards, and pools, and singers, and delights; and whatsoever its eyes desired it kept not from them, nor withheld its heart from any joy or beauty; and it rejoiced in all its labour. But now what a change! You may fancy that it has looked on all the works that it had wrought, and on the labour that it had laboured to do,—and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun! And so it hastens to cast away all its gathered store and cherished delights, and stands naked, desolate, bankrupt, under the cold searching gaze of the clear bright stars. Ah!
“Where is the pride of Summer, the green prime,—
The many, many leaves all twinkling? Three
On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime,
Trembling,—and one upon the old oak tree!”
Nature is always beautiful to those who always look for beauty in her. But perhaps she is least lovely when clad in a close thick fog. And it is thus that we have seen her continually of late. The wet black trees stood dim and ghostlike in the mist, and much like seaweed under tissue-paper. The hedges looked unreal and distant, as you passed between them on the pale road. Passengers and carriages loomed blurred and big and indistinct, out of the chill cloud in front of you, long after the wheels and the steps had been heard. Dull unglittering dew strung the branches that stretched over you, and gave a blunt light here and there in the hedge. You were isolated from your kind; scarce could you see one approaching until he was close upon you; and then, a few steps, and he was straightway swallowed up. It was not a fading morning mist; but a good November fog, one developing from cold blue to grey, and thence to yellow, and so on to tawny dun. Homeward-bound, you emerge from it into the railway-station. The train is late; the fire is pleasant; and you muse or doze away half-an-hour by the waiting-room fire. Presently a red spot dyes part of the mist; a behemoth mass is perceivable beside the platform; you get into a carriage, the whistle shrills, the train moves, and the station lights are gone in a minute,—and you also are swallowed up in the fog.
And as you pass, up the garden, home,—the chance is that you hurry on, where you would have paused to admire beauty. In the cold fog, the asparagus, hung with leaden mist-drops that chilly gleam here and there, bends and falls about its mounded bed; a black, wet, sere leaf or two clings to the ragged black sticks against that wall; the acacias drop pattering drops upon the broad fallen sycamore leaves: you might as well walk through water, as cross that lawn for a short cut to the warm mellow room, at whose window, which opens to the ground, stands she who chiefly makes that house, home. You are not sorry to shut the windows, and to have the curtains drawn, and to let the earth stand without, like a shrouded ghost, clad in winding-sheet of fog, while you enjoy the genial blaze, the cosy meal, the little ones on your lap after dinner, the gentle wifely smile that loves to see these loved.