Entering upon the last week of August, I may call the year still Summer,—yes, still Summer, but the Autumn days are drawing near. “September”—directly I pen that word in the right-hand corner of my letters, a great gap seems to have opened between the Summer and me. Autumn days are here: the gladness and glee of the year have gone, and a tender sweet sadness and mellow lucid gloom seem to have gathered over the still calm expecting landscape. The corn is all cut and carried, the pale stubble fields, edged with the deep green hedges, lie a little blankly on the hill-side or in the valley; the brighter Summer-shoots of the elms and the apple-trees have all sobered down now into uniform darkness; the little blue harebells tremble in clusters on the dried sunny hedge-banks; the gossamers twinkle on the grass, late into the morning, with a thick dew that has not yet quite made up its mind to be frost. The partridges whirr up from under your feet as you throw your leg over that164 stile; the rooks wheel home much earlier to bed. The fungus tribe begins to look up, and after a shower you come suddenly, as you cross the meadow, upon a cluster of buff-white mushrooms, with the delicious rose-grey under their eaves, and gathering them for the wife at home, you wander here and there to catch the white gleam among the grass, and are pleased, when successful, as a child with his first Spring daisies. Quiet, tenderly-sad Autumn days, after the harvest is gathered in and the plums are picked!
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“Autumn! Forth from glowing orchards stepped he gaily, in a gown Of warm russet, freaked with gold, and with a visage sunny brown; And he laughed for very joy, and he danced from too much pleasure, And he sang old songs of harvest, and he quaffed a mighty measure.
But above this wild delight an overmastering graveness rose, And the fields and trees seemed thoughtful in their absolute repose; And I saw the woods consuming in a many-coloured death— Streaks of yellow flame, down-deepening through the green that lingereth;
Sanguine flushes, like a sunset, and austerely-shadowing brown. And I heard within the silence the nuts sharply rattling down; And I saw the long dark hedges all alight with scarlet fire, Where the berries, pulpy-ripe, had spread their bird-feasts on the briar.”
We have here, save for some little flaws, a perfect painting of the intensely still, calm, expecting attitude of nature, the absolute repose of the year, which rests by its work done, and asks, in a quiet peace, in a deep trust, of the All-wise and the All-loving, “What next?”
“Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only through the faded leaf, The chestnut pattering to the ground.”
Autumn days! I think they would be very sad indeed if we could only see decay in them, and if God had not put a little safe bud and germ of hope into every bulb and upon every branch—a promise of future life amid universal death: just as He put that green promise-bud into the heart of Adam and Eve, when such a dreadful death had gathered about the present and the future for them—declaring, to their seemingly victorious foe, of the woman’s seed, that
“It shall bruise thy head.”
A tiny dear little germ of a bud, and oh, how many hundred Summers and Winters passed before it developed into the166 glorious perfect flower! And so now there is yet a sadness, but only a cheery, gentle, tender sadness, about Autumn days to the heart that is waiting for God. And it seems to me wonderful that He should have given us one of His own minstrels to sit on the twigs as they grow bare and lonely-looking, and to express to us just the feeling that Autumn calls up within the heart, and that we yearn to have set to music for us. The little Robin waits his time; he does not cease, indeed, to trill his note in Spring, although we do not notice him then amid our blackbirds and thrushes and blackcaps and nightingales; for he is very humble-hearted, and content to be set aside when we can do without him. But Autumn days come, and the nightingale has fled, and the blackcap is far away, and the lark and the thrush and the blackbird are silent;—then the robin draws near. Close to our houses he comes, with his cheery warm breast, and kind bright eye, and his message from God. And then he interprets the Autumn to us, in those broken, tenderly-glad thrills of song, that, simple though they be, can sometimes disturb the heart with beauty that it cannot fathom, but that agitates and shakes it even to the sudden brimming of the eyes with tears. “Yes, it is sad,” he says, “to see the flowers dying, and the leaves falling, and the harvest over. It is sad—not a little sad—still, cheer up, cheer up; have a good heart. God has told me, and my little warm heart knows, that it is not all sad. I know it is not. I can’t tell why. But it can’t be all sad; for God sent me to sing in the Autumn days. He taught me my song, and I know that there is a great deal in it about peace and joy. And it must be right; for though my nest is choked up, and my little167 ones are flown, and my mate has left me, I can’t help singing it. Cheer up. It is sad, but not all sad. Peace and joy—joy and peace.”
“The morning mist is cleared away, Yet still the face of heaven is grey, Nor yet th’ autumnal breeze has stirred the grove, Faded, yet full, a paler green Skirts soberly the tranquil scene, The red-breast warbles round this leafy cove.
“Sweet messenger of ‘calm decay,’ Saluting sorrow as you may, As one still bent to find or make the best, In thee and in this quiet mead, The lesson of sweet peace I read, Rather in all to be resigned than blest.
“Oh cheerful, tender strain! the heart That duly bears with you its part, Singing so thankful to the dreary blast, Though gone and spent its joyous prime, And on the world’s Autumnal time, ’Mid withered hues and sere, its lot be cast,
“That is the heart for watchman true, Waiting to see what God will do.”
* * * * *
Let us walk out into the garden. I love an Autumn garden, and I think that at any season of the year a garden is a book in which we may read a great deal about God. On the Sunday evenings, therefore, I like to sit there, under a tree may be, with some peaceful heavenly book, sometimes to read, and sometimes to close over my thumb, and keep just as company while I meditate; and God’s works seem an apt comment on God’s Word, which I have heard or read that day.
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But now we will go in the early morning before breakfast—
“To bathe our brain from drowsy night In the sharp air and golden light. The dew, like frost, is on the pane, The year begins, though fair, to wane: There is a fragrance in its breath, Which is not of the flowers, but death.”
And we pass out of the window that opens into the garden under the tulip-tree standing so tall and still, with pale green and now yellow-touched leaves, that harmonise well with the pale sky against which you see them. The beech in the shrubbery has begun to “gather brown”; the tall dark elms that shut it in remind you vividly of the poet’s description of
“Autumn laying here and there A fiery finger on the leaves.”
Against the thick box-trees underneath you love to see
“The sunflower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disc of seed,”
and some tall hollyhocks, still keeping up a brave cheer of rose-coloured and primrose and black blossoms upon their highest spike. The grass is glistening with heavy dew, sapphire, rose-diamond, pure brilliant, and yellow-diamond;—move a little, and one drop changes from one to the other of these. Walking across the lawn towards that rose-bed, you leave distinct green foot-prints upon the hoary grass. Perhaps the feeling that at last almost weighs upon you, and depresses you, is the intense, waiting stillness of everything. That apple-tree, bending down to the lawn with rosy apples, it seems so perfectly still and169 resting, that it quite makes you start to hear one of its red apples drop upon the path. The hurry and bustle and eager growth of the year has all gone by: these roses, that used to send out crowding bud after bud;—for some weeks a pause, a waiting, has come over them. This one purely white blossom, you watched it developing, unfolding so slowly, that it never seemed to change, taking a week for what would have taken no more than half a summer day, until at last it had opened fully, and hung down its head towards the brown damp mould. And there it seemed to stop. It seems not to have changed now for a week or two—why should it hurry to fade?—there were no more to come after it should go. Now half of it has detached itself, and lies in a little unbroken snowy heap on the ground. How quietly it must have fallen there! And the other half still stays on the tree, and leans down, and watches with a strange calm over the fallen white heaped petals,
“Innumerably frost impearled.”
Something of depression comes over you, I say, and there happens to be no cheery robin just now to put in a word, nor sedate rook sailing with still wings overhead across the pale sky, to give you even the poorer encouragement of his mere stoic caw. Why are you depressed? What is this strange sadness that seems to you to lurk under the exquisite calm and beautiful stillness of the Autumn morning?
Do you hardly know? I will tell you. That quiet is the quiet of Death coming on; that calm waiting and expectancy is the herald of its approach, the beauty is the hectic flush of the consumptive cheek. Death is sad for Life to contemplate;170 and we are so much akin to all this decay, that this quiet tells us of it almost more than the heavy bell that now and then stirs the air of the Summer morning. The coming death of the Summer leaves and the Summer flowers preaches to us a solemn sermon of our own death drawing near. Watch that leaf circling down from that silent tree, and listen to the echo in your own heart:
“We all do fade as a leaf.”
Yes, death, the sense of advancing death, is at the root of your sadness and depression. Death in its beauty, in a tender loveliness—death, the angel, not the skeleton, yet still DEATH. And,
“Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.
“’Tis LIFE, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant, More life, and fuller, that I want.”
And a great warrior, of long ago, one who had less cause than most to fear death, yet said:
“We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”
Well, this sadness must remain in some measure; the flowers must die, and the leaves must fall, and the robin’s attempts to cheer us bring the tears very near our eyes. “Sin entered into the world, and death by sin”: and the child of such a parent cannot bring joy as his attendant. Still, let us go on with our171 garden walk, and see whether, even in the face of nature, there be nothing else but only this peaceful waiting sadness.
Take these branches of the Lilac bushes, that we remember bending under their scented masses in the warm early Summer days. Bare and damp, bare of flowers, and only clad with sickly yellow leaves; but what else can we see in them? There is not one (examine them well) which has not already a full green bud of promise, developed even before the leaves, the old leaves, h............