The rainbow comes and goes,
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;—
But yet we know, where’er we go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
“I am sorry to mention it,” says the author of the Mirror of the Months, “but the truth must be told even in a matter of age. The year then is on the wane. It is ‘declining into the vale’ of months. It has reached ‘a certain age.’—It has reached the summit of the hill, and is not only looking, but descending, into the valley below. But, unlike that into which the life of man declines, this is not a vale of tears; still less does it, like that, lead to that inevitable bourne, the kingdom of the grave. For though it may be called (I hope without the semblance of profanation) ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ yet of death itself it knows nothing. No—the year steps onward towards its temporary decay, if not so rejoicingly, even more majestically and gracefully, than it does towards its revivification. And if September is not so bright with promise, and so buoyant with hope, as May, it is even more embued with that spirit of serene repose, in which the only true, because the only continuous enjoyment consists. Spring ‘never is, but always to be blest;’ but September is the month of consummations—the fulfiller of all promises—the fruition of all hopes—the era of all completeness.
“The sunsets of September in this country are perhaps unrivalled, for their infinite variety, and their indescribable beauty. Those of more southern countries may, perhaps, match or even surpass them, for a certain glowing and unbroken intensity. But for gorgeous variety of form and colour, exquisite delicacy of tint and pencilling, and a certain placid sweetness and tenderness of general effect, which frequently arises out of a union of the two latter, there is nothing to be seen like what we can show in England at this season of the year. If a painter, who was capable of doing it to the utmost perfection, were to dare depict on canvas one out of twenty of the sunsets that we frequently have during this month, he would be laughed at for his pains. And the reason is, that people judge of pictures by pictures. They compare Hobbima with Ruysdael, and Ruysdael with Wynants, and Wynants with Wouvermans, and Wouvermans with Potter, and Potter with Cuyp; and then they think the affair can proceed no farther. And the chances are, that if you were to show one of the sunsets in question to a thorough-paced connoisseur in this department of fine art, he would reply, that it was very beautiful, to be sure, but that he must beg to doubt whether it was natural, for he had never seen one like it in any of the old masters!”
In the “Poetical Calendar” there is the following address “to Mr. Hayman,” probably Francis Hayman, the painter of Vauxhall-gardens, who is known to us all, through early editions of several of our good authors, “with copper-plates, designed by Mr. Hayman.”
An Autumnal Ode.
Yet once more, glorious God of day,
While beams thine orb serene,
O let me warbling court thy stay
To gild the fading scene!
Thy rays invigorate the spring,
Bright summer to perfection bring,
The cold inclemency of winter cheer,
And make th’ autumnal months the mildest of the year.
Ere yet the russet foliage fall
I’ll climb the mountain’s brow,
My friend, my Hayman, at thy call,
To view the scene below:
How sweetly pleasing to behold
Forests of vegetable gold!
How mix’d the many chequer’d shades between
The tawny, mellowing hue, and the gay vivid green!
How splendid all the sky! how still!
How mild the dying gale!
How soft the whispers of the rill,
That winds along the vale!
So tranquil nature’s works appear,
It seems the sabbath of the year:
As if, the summer’s labour past, she chose
This season’s sober calm for blandishing repose.
Such is of well-spent life the time,
When busy days are past;
Man, verging gradual from his prime,
Meets sacred peace at last:
His flowery spring of pleasures o’er,
And summer’s full-bloom pride no more,
He gains pacific autumn, mild and bland,
And dauntless braves the stroke of winter’s palsied hand.