"Now sets the year in roaring gray."
Can you help me to what follows? If it is a true poem it ought now to be able to sing itself to me at large from an outer world which at this moment is all gray and roaring. To-day the year is bowing itself out tempestuously, as if angry at having to go. Dear golden year! I am sorry to see its face so changed and withering: it has held so much for us both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and quite like spring. All the seasons have their marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this is an autumn march-wind; before long I shall be out into it, and up the hill to look over at your territory and you being swept and garnished for the seven devils of winter.
"Roaring gray" suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in "Maud" and "In Memoriam" as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend's funeral, would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John's old hats, and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of his small lyrics:
"Nightingales warbled without,
Within was weeping for thee."
The "old hat" was mentioned as something humorous: yet an old glove is the most accepted symbol of faithful absence: and why should head rank lower than hand? What creatures of convention we are!
There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a sleeper's head will bring away the dream. One of the stories which used to put a lump in my throat as a child was of an old backwoodsman who by that means found out that his dog stole hams from the storeroom. The dog was given away in disgrace, and came to England to die of a broken heart at the sight of a cargo of hams, which, at their unpacking, seemed like a monstrous day of judgment—the bones of his misdeeds rising again reclothed with flesh to reproach him with the thing he had never forgotten.
I wonder how long it was before I left off definitely choosing out a story for the pleasure of making myself cry! When one begins to avoid that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf of youth is flown.
To-day I look almost jovially at the decay of the best year I have ever lived through, and am your very middle-aged faithful and true.