One who has much and often protested against the season of Autumn, her pathos, her chilly breakfast-time, her “tints,” her decay, and her extraordinary popularity, saw cause one year to make a partial recantation.  Autumn, until then, had seemed to be a practitioner of all the easy arts at once, or rather, she had taken the easy way with the arts of colour, sentiment, suggestion, and regret.

She had often encouraged and rewarded, also, the ingratitude of a whole nation for a splendid summer, somewhat officiously cooling, refreshing, allaying, and comforting the discontent of the victims of an English sun.  She had soothed the fuming citizen, and brought back the fogs of custom, effaced the skies, to which he had upturned no very attentive eye, muffled up his chin, and in many other ways curried favour.  Not only did she fall in with his landscape mood, but she made herself his housemate by his fireplaces, drew his curtains, shut out her own wet winds in the streets, and became privy to the commoner comforts of man, like a wild creature tamed and conniving at human sport and schemes.  “Domesticated” Gothic itself, or the governesses who daily by advertisement describe themselves by that same strange modern adjective, could not be more bent upon the flattery of man in his less heroic moments.

Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accomplice of daily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now accepted sense of a once noble word, comfortable.  Besides, her show of stormy forests is done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment, with dashings and underlinings—­we all know the sort of letter, for instance, which answers to the message and proclamation of Autumn, as she usually is in the outer world.  A complete sentimentalist is she, whether in the open country or when she looks in at the lighted windows, and goodnaturedly makes her voice like a very goblin’s outside, for the increasing of the bourgeois’ bien-etre.

But that year all had been otherwise.  Autumn had borne herself with a heroism of sunny weather.  Where we had been wont to see signals of distress, and to hear the voluble outpouring of an excitable temperament, with the extremity of scattered leaves and desperate damp, we beheld an aspect of golden drought.  Nothing mouldered—­everything was consumed by vital fires.  The gardens were strewn with smouldering soft ashes of late roses, late honeysuckle, honey-sweet clematis.  The silver seeds of rows of riverside flowers took sail on their random journey with a light wind.  Leaves set forth, a few at a time, with a little volley of birds—­a buoyant caravel.  Or, in the stiller weather, the infrequent fall of leaves took place quietly, with no proclamation of ruin, in the privacy within the branches.  While nearly all the woods were still fresh as streams, you might see that here or there was one, with an invincible summer smile, slowly consuming, in defiance of decay.  Life destroyed that autumn, not death.