“Sweet messenger of ‘calm decay,’ Saluting sorrow as you may, As one still bent to find or make the best, In thee and in this quiet mead, The lesson of sweet peace I read, Rather in all to be resigned than blest. “Oh cheerful, tender strain! the heart That duly bears with you its part, Singing so thankful to the dreary blast, Though gone and spent its joyous prime, And on the world’s Autumnal time, ’Mid withered hues and sere, its lot be cast, “That is the heart for watchman true, _Waiting to see what God will do_.” * * * * * Let us walk out into the garden. I love an Autumn garden, and I think that at any season of the year a garden is a book in which we may read a great deal about God. On the Sunday evenings, therefore, I like to sit there, under a tree may be, with some peaceful heavenly book, sometimes to read, and sometimes to close over my thumb, and keep just as company while I meditate; and God’s works seem an apt comment on God’s Word, which I have heard or read that day. [Illustration] But now we will go in the early morning before breakfast-- “To bathe our brain from drowsy night In the sharp air and golden light. The dew, like frost, is on the pane, The year begins, though fair, to wane: There is a fragrance in its breath, Which is not of the flowers, but death.” And we pass out of the window that opens into the garden under the tulip-tree standing so tall and still, with pale green and now yellow-touched leaves, that harmonise well with the pale sky against which you see them. The beech in the shrubbery has begun to “gather brown”; the tall dark elms that shut it in remind you vividly of the poet’s description of “Autumn laying here and there A fiery finger on the leaves.” Against the thick box-trees underneath you love to see “The sunflower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disc of seed,”