When the autumn of a man's life is thus sweet and fruitful and serene, we see how outward nature merely hints and foreshows its master. In great, visible, palpable operations and results it images the fine and unmarked processes that go on in man. And yet, by its unfailing method, its annual return, the regular spring and bud and flower and fruit, it is a ceaseless, silent monitor. Measured by our own lives, how touching the fidelity of the year! Who is not rebuked by the honest apple-tree in his own garden? The plums are more like us. They are almost infallibly stung by the curculio. But how many a man who fights the curculio with all his fortune is himself stung all over by selfishness and pride! We might well be ashamed to walk in the woods. The mute obedience of the trees ought to be too impressive for us. Yes, in the long autumn nights they wrestle and roar. Their mighty voice thunders out and smites the heart of the awakening sleeper. But will you claim that it is their protest against the inevitable law, that they too are rebellious and forgetful and disdainful as we are? It seems to me only piercingly sad in its wildest tumult. It is the blind king feeling for his peers and crying out when he does not find them. "Lords of the world" shout the autumn woods, tossing their branches and groping blindly in the air--"men and women who are the latest born, the Benjamins of heaven, who are set over us to subdue and govern, ye alone, in all the wide creation, are false and heedless! What man of you all is as true and noble for a man as the oak upon your hill-top for an oak? The oak obeys every law, regularly increases and develops, stretches its shady arms of blessing, proudly wears its leafy coronal, and drops abundant acorns for future oaks as faithful; but who of ye all does not violate the law of your life--so that we, if we follow you, would be so death-struck with dry-rot that the trees would fail upon every hand and the earth become a desert!"