Entering upon the last week of August, I may call the year still Summer,--yes, still Summer, but the Autumn days are drawing near. “_September_”--directly I pen that word in the right-hand corner of my letters, a great gap seems to have opened between the Summer and me. Autumn days are here: the gladness and glee of the year have gone, and a tender sweet sadness and mellow lucid gloom seem to have gathered over the still calm expecting landscape. The corn is all cut and carried, the pale stubble fields, edged with the deep green hedges, lie a little blankly on the hill-side or in the valley; the brighter Summer-shoots of the elms and the apple-trees have all sobered down now into uniform darkness; the little blue harebells tremble in clusters on the dried sunny hedge-banks; the gossamers twinkle on the grass, late into the morning, with a thick dew that has not yet quite made up its mind to be frost. The partridges whirr up from under your feet as you throw your leg over that stile; the rooks wheel home much earlier to bed. The fungus tribe begins to look up, and after a shower you come suddenly, as you cross the meadow, upon a cluster of buff-white mushrooms, with the delicious rose-grey under their eaves, and gathering them for the wife at home, you wander here and there to catch the white gleam among the grass, and are pleased, when successful, as a child with his first Spring daisies. Quiet, tenderly-sad Autumn days, after the harvest is gathered in and the plums are picked! [Illustration] “Autumn! Forth from glowing orchards stepped he gaily, in a gown Of warm russet, freaked with gold, and with a visage sunny brown; And he laughed for very joy, and he danced from too much pleasure, And he sang old songs of harvest, and he quaffed a mighty measure. But above this wild delight an overmastering graveness rose, And the fields and trees seemed thoughtful in their absolute repose; And I saw the woods consuming in a many-coloured death-- Streaks of yellow flame, down-deepening through the green that lingereth; Sanguine flushes, like a sunset, and austerely-shadowing brown. And I heard within the silence the nuts sharply rattling down; And I saw the long dark hedges all alight with scarlet fire, Where the berries, pulpy-ripe, had spread their bird-feasts on the briar.” We have here, save for some little flaws, a perfect painting of the intensely still, calm, expecting attitude of nature, the absolute repose of the year, which rests by its work done, and asks, in a quiet peace, in a deep trust, of the All-wise and the All-loving, “What next?” “Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only through the faded leaf, The chestnut pattering to the ground.”