This is a digression, however. Let us get back to Summer days, and the fallen grass, and the wide wheat-fields in flower. Many days have not passed before that flower falls, and the delicate paleness of the new-born ear passes away, and the corn-fields settle down to the grave work of the year. “Long grass swaying in the playing of the almost wearied breeze; Flowers bowed beneath a crowd of the tawny-armoured bees; Sumptuous forests, filled with twilight, like a dreamy old romance; Rivers falling, rivers calling, in their indolent advance.” That was all very well in the year’s early manhood, scarcely distinguishable from youth. But a more prosaic gravity has toned down those romantic feelings, and it has discovered that there is work, grave work--work sometimes a little wearisome and dull--to be done. The fairy lightness and greenness, the delicacy and exquisite freshness, of the year, have passed away. It is not Dream-land any longer--not a scene of faint rose-flushed or dazzling white blossom, but of hushed, sober colour, and of somewhat of monotony and sameness. The fair Bride fruit-trees are clad in dark garments now, and busy with their families of little unripe things, that have to be educated into ripeness and usefulness. The oaks are no more clad in “glad light green” or very red leaves, and the elms have toned down even the little brightening up of Summer growth at the end of their branches, all into that quiet, dust-dulled, dark hue. And so with all the trees; and under the tall growth of the copses there is not the play and dance of myriad butterflies of sunlight in soft meadows of shade; but the shadow is almost gloomy, and the stillness is quite solemn. Thin tall grass or broad grave ferns have taken the place of the sheets of glad primroses, and bright wood anemones, and azure hyacinths, and rich orchis. There is no disguising it: the freshness and first energy of things has spent itself and gone, the landscape is dulled and dustied. A little while ago every day was different; now every day seems much the same. There is not the constant progression, the still developing beauty, the ever new delights of every new day. New birds to greet, new clothing for the meadows, new carpets for the woods, new glories for the trees: all these “Faded in the distance, where the thickening leaves were piled.” And the year has done with its extravagantly profuse promises, its eager pressing on to some ideal and impossible beauty not yet attained, never to be attained, though it would not believe this, in those old inexperienced days, when it cast away blossom and freshness of leaf as things that did but impede it, in the impatience of its hurry after that Perfection which is a dream on earth, though it be true in Heaven. True also in Him, in whom earth and Heaven have met; this stooping to the tangible, and that raised to the sublime.