But now the quiet days of September are come. September, which is the Twilight of the year—rather, I would call it the first hint of twilight, when the flush and glow are sobering down, and a cast of thoughtfulness is deepening day by day upon the months. “Autumn has o’erbrimmed the clammy cells” of the bees; the fields, where the long rows of many sheaves stand, gradually grow bare; the intensely dark summer green of the elms and of the hedgerows out of which they rise, is interrupted here and there by a tenderer tinge; the spruce firs in the copses begin to appear more dark, distinct, and particular; the larches begin to show faint hearts, and to look more delicate beside their sombre brothers. There is rather the augury, the prescience, than the perceived presence of a change. I have fancied sometimes that the trees have224 plotted together and banded themselves by an agreement not to give in, this time, but to defy the utmost power of stripping, desolating Winter. And it is curious, with this idea, to watch them. Throughout September, they at least keep up appearances well, and from one to another the watchword is whispered,—
“Keep a good heart, O trees, and hold The Winter stern at bay!”

and for a time they moult no feather, drop no leaf; or, if one circles down here and there, it is huddled by in a corner, and they flatter themselves that none has noticed. But you watch with pitying love, knowing what the end must be. And you perceive how great the effort, the strain, becomes, to keep up appearances. Here and there, at last, despite of their utmost endeavour, the hidden fire bursts out; and finally, with a wild Autumnal wail, some weaker tree, in despair, gives up the unnatural and too excessive strain, and casts down a great profusion of yellow sickly foliage. There is a murmur among the stouter trees; but, in good truth, they are not sorry for the excuse, while, muttering that all is rendered useless now, like avowed bankrupts, they give up the effort to sustain appearances, and, as it were, with a sigh of relief and rest, resign them to the fate they vainly strove against and could not long avert. So the elm flames out into bars and patches, very yellow in the dark; and the chesnut is all tinged and burnt with brown; and the mulberry has slipped off all her leaves in a single night; and the ash and the sycamore blacken;225 and the white poplar leaves change to pale gold; and the pear to bronze; and the wild cherry to scarlet; and the maple to orange; and the bramble at their feet to bright crimson.

Not so yet, in the Twilight of the year. It is the month of tranquillity, of peaceful hush. If there be a hint of decay, it is but what has been called “calm decay”; it is but evening with the landscape, the Evening of the year. You might forget, as you looked at the resting stationary aspect226 of things, that the further change, the Night of Winter, was indeed drawing near. There seems no prophecy of those wild tossing October arms, with the stream of leaves hurrying away in the wind; no presage of the dull November days, when, from the scanty foliage of the trees, great drops plash down upon the decaying leaves beneath, and the whole wood looms out of the fog. Far less, in the full-bosomed, sober, rather air- than mist-mellowed woodlands, do you detect any foretelling of the time when all will stand, a bare thicket of gaunt boughs and naked twigs, dully shadowed in the ice, or made darker and more dreary by the great white fields of snow.

Of all this there is no hint given yet, nor need we yet awake to the knowledge that we have indeed bid the Summer farewell till next year. The evenings are still warm, warm with that cool warmth which is so delicious: it will be some time yet before we can see our breath as we talk: we can stay out well until eight or later, and hear through the open window the clatter of arranging tea-cups, and watch the lamp, still faint in the twilight, warm the room with a dim orange glow.

Therefore I shall sit here awhile on this garden seat, and muse in and upon the twilight. The scene and place are favourable for quiet thought. The lawn is smooth and shaven; at my feet lie beds of profuse geranium, verbena, calceolaria, petunia, in their rich Autumn prime, before any hint of frost has visited them. The air is quite heavy with the scent of the massed heliotrope. The colours, if sobered, are not yet lost in the fading light; the scarlets and purples are hushing227 and blending; the cherry colour, yellow, and white, have grown more distinct, and stand out more apparent upon the grass. Overhead, the sky is deepening to that dusk steel blue which soon discloses the very faint yet eye-catching glimmer of one white star. Across the quiet dome, and between the still, outstretched, motionless branches, the silent bats flit to and fro; there is a rustle of chafers in the lime. One sweet melancholy monotonous sound gives a background to the silence, an undertone that enhances, not in the least disturbs, the quiet. For the great charm of this garden, which lies on the slope of a hill, is, that near the foot of that hill swells and fails the ever-moving Sea. And looking from my garden seat through the near rose-bushes and above the taller growth lower down the slope, I see the broad silver shield, rising, as it seems to me on my hill-seat, up the circle of its horizon. An hour ago I was admiring the brilliancy and intensity of its colour, green shoaling into blue, and sparkling in the sun; now the faint light of the broad moon shares the sway of the decaying sunlight; and I see above and through the branches a space of pale bright grey. The jewel blue of afternoon has died out from it, but the more neutral tint accords better, I feel, with the sober hour and hushed sounds of twilight. How complete is the harmony and the balance of colour in all God’s pictures!

And I love these twilight studies, that are much like the paintings, so Robert Browning tells us, of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. Pictures in which—
“A common greyness silvers everything, All in a twilight.”

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This is essentially a twilight poem I always think; silver-grey; a quiet calmed heart that has settled down into a deep still sadness and disappointment. He longs for those higher aspirations which can here be but imperfectly expressed, knowing that it is not well unless we hold an ideal far above our fulfilment here; and that, if we have attained all we sought in our pursuit of the beautiful and the good, we have not intended nobly enough:—
“There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease And Autumn grows, Autumn in everything. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self, And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight piece.”

Is not the tone of thought here expressed one natural to us all at certain times, when for us life’s vivid lights and deep shadows have all toned into a uniform half tint? We all have such twilight hours: times when the sun has sunk, and our heart has gone down with it, and a grey depression settles gradually upon the soul. Times when we feel that our life is little, and low, and mean: when we yearn for a sympathy that earth has not to give; when we turn away disheartened and disgusted from our life and from ourselves, and turn the faces of what seemed our most faultless works to the wall, and care not if we never saw them again. Times when we go about to cause our heart to despair of all the labour which we took under the sun.229 Times when the failures of others seem better than our successes; times when we lament over the lowness of our aim, the meanness of our intention, the winglessness of our soul; and yet times when our very discontent with all that we are and have accomplished, our very disgust at our grovelling minds, prove our affinity with higher things than any of these that we have grasped here. Those anguished yearnings to be nobler prove that we are something nobler than we hold ourselves to be. The depression of the twilight marks our kindred with the golden glory of the sun. Thus may we cheer our hearts, that in their dull hours are wont to judge our aims by our attainments, and from the inadequacy of the performance, to conclude the lowness of the intention. The workman’s dissatisfaction with his own life’s work is the clear proof that his inmost self is nobler, not only than his attainments, but often even than his endeavours.

I awake from my abstraction, however, and look around. The twilight has deepened, the flowers are losing their colour, the surrounding objects their distinctness. One peculiar property, sometimes a charm, sometimes a dread, of this light neither clear nor dark, begins to be developed. I mean the uncertainty, the indefiniteness, the illusions of twilight. And how many analogies occur to my mind as I sit here musing on the twilight, and comparing with it the indistinctness and the ?nigma in which we are living here.

And first I think of God’s ancient people: how many of God’s promises to them were misconceived because of the twilight in which they were seen. And we might, thinking230 shallowly, wonder that the light of prophecy was such twilight, so dim, and the objects seen in it so undefined and uncertain. For instance, how obscure and almost confusing seems to us the light given to the Jews as to the spiritual nature of the Messiah’s kingdom. Through the twilight of prophecy we may very well fancy that a grand earthly kingdom of power and conquest loomed upon the hope and imagination of the people of Israel. Because of the hardness of their hearts, indeed, and the lowness of their spiritual standard, spiritual revelations had to be clothed for them in a body of flesh. The people that could worship the golden calf under the very cloud that rested upon Sinai, would have ill-received, we may be sure, a clear revelation of the manner of the Messiah’s kingdom. A kingdom not of this world, with no outward show of pomp and glory; a King despised and rejected of men, and nailed upon the accursed tree: how would those carnal hearts have received such a programme? Nay, how did this people, even in the Messiah’s time, receive it? Behold the shouting crowds, one preceding, one following the King of the Jews! Behold the waving palms, the strewn cloaks! Hear the “Hosannas” ring out as the concourse arrives in sight of the royal city; and the enthusiastic burst, “Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord!” What visions, we perceive, were seething and working in their minds—visions of restored freedom, and rule, and power, and the sway of Israel restored, as in those old glorious days, from the river even unto the sea. Grand, and splendid, and indistinct, that231 promised kingdom towered before them in the twilight; they threw loose reins on their imagination, and let it carry them whither it would.

But when the truth which they had so misconceived and misinterpreted stood close to them, and they perceived its entire difference from their excited dreams, mark the change—the revulsion. The King is crowned; His kingdom is proclaimed as being not of this world: the crowd are shouting still; but the cry is now, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Nay further yet. The discovery of the real proportions and character of that fabric which had appeared so majestic and superb through the twilight: this discovery had proved too much even for their faith who had formed the chosen court of the King Messiah. “We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel”; but, lo! the Shepherd is smitten, and the sheep are scattered.

Now, as it has been pointed out before this, an illusion of the twilight was converted by the impatience and the carnal hearts of the Jews, into a delusion. It was true that a mighty King was coming, that He should set up a kingdom great and glorious, one which should crumble widest kingdoms into the dust. It was true that the enemies of God’s people should fall before this kingdom which should have no end; true that this King was He which should redeem Israel. All this which was prophesied was no delusion: all was true: all came to pass.

But now let us search out the fault of the Jews, who were deluded by revelation, and blinded by partial light. They were told that these great things would be: they were232 bidden to prepare to receive them. Forthwith they decided in their own minds how and in what way God would bring them about; they gave form and shape to those indistinct half-seen masses after the pattern and desire of their own vain hearts; they decided that God would give them the exact reality of their own carnal dreams; they prepared their heart therefore to receive its own interpretation, and shut it close against any other. And so when the course of time brought them close to that which their fancy in the twilight had............