Then the first frosts, and the calm clear mornings, and the grey fresh blue of the evenings, with their sprinkling of intensely piercingly glittering stars. And then the deep spell upon the trees is broken, and we stand and watch while, now in a shower and now singly, “The calm leaves float Each to his rest beneath their parent shade,” and the year seems just passing away like a beautiful dissolving view. There is also something to keep you up, something of excitement and stir, and glow, in the brave October days, when a great wind comes roaring and booming over the land, and you see the tall ash trees toss up their wild arms in dismay, and a deep roar gathers in the elms, and a far hissing in the pines, and from that beech avenue, “The flying gold of the ruined woodlands Drives through the air.” You can walk out, and press your hat on to your head, and button your coat, and labour up the rising downs, yielding no foot to the blustering screaming wind; and a glow and exhilaration tingles in your veins as you march on, with pace no whit slackened for all its vehement opposition. But November has come; and the calm quiet hectic of September and the hale vigour of October have now passed away. The rain has sodden and struck down leaf after leaf, heaping the roadside, until you might count the leaves left upon the trees that edge the lanes. A sense of bareness and desolation oppresses you, and an aspect of dreariness and moist death has overspread the landscape. You walk into the garden: the dahlias are blackened with the frosts of October; the pinched geraniums, verbenas, heliotropes, lie wrecked on the beds; the few straggling chrysanthemums and scattered Michaelmas daisies--these are not enough to cheer you; for even these are drooping in the universal damp, and strung with trembling glittering diamonds of sorrowful tears. The dark sodden walnut-leaves thickly carpet the side paths, and the most cheerful thing in them is here and there the black wet walnut lying, with just a warm hint of the clean bright yellow shell within, betrayed through a torn fibrous gap. Day after day the fog sleeps over the land, and you see your breath in the morning in the cold damp air. You are brought face to face--earth stripped of its poetry and romance--face to face with Winter days. [Illustration] And their approach seems gloomy. The light, and warmth, and the glory of the year have gone; but, as yet, the memory of them has not all quite departed. There are still the gleeful leaves lying, poor dead things, in the lanes; there are yet the unburied flowers, black on the garden-beds; the air is tepid; the trees are not entirely bare; the state is one of transition. “The year’s in the wane, There is nothing adorning, The night has no eve, And the day has no morning;-- Cold Winter gives warning.”