I like to walk on the Green Park side; in summer because of the fresh, green, rustling trees, an unhurried pleasaunce in London's chaotic noises, and in winter because I like nothing better than to look at leaf-stripped trees standing nakedly against a grey sky, finger-posts of Nature pointing to the real No-Man's Land, and illustrating the miraculous wonder of being just beautiful, as no man-made thing can be; for all things made by man, a picture, or, if you like, a woman's shoes with heels of stained majolica, have an aim and a purpose. They lack the futility, of which Nature alone has the secret, of being just carelessly beautiful. When I say Nature, I do not see the Dame Nature of Oscar Wilde's crooked vision, a crude, slatternly charwoman, but a spendthrift prodigal, spending for the sheer love of spending; he takes every man by the sleeve, and with delicious good manners he makes it seem that he values your opinion above all others, that he has created the beauty of the world to please in particular your eye, that you will sadly disappoint him if you hint that you hadn't much liked the tinge of vermilion in yestreen's sunset, for he had touched in that vermilion just to give you a pleasant surprise. Thus it is with Nature and myself; I see him as an old beau, given to leering in cities, but frank and natural in open places. And he knows me well, too; knows I am no minor poet, no poet at all, in fact, and, therefore, not to be gulled by insincere sunsets and valleys without shade or colour; that the idea of a fawn skipping about where I don't expect him, far from causing in me a metrical paroxysm after Mr. Robert Nichols, frankly bores me; he has shown me an odd nymph here and there, but I haven't encouraged him.... They are so intangible, I thought, and they faded away. So at last, in desperation, he stuck up a naked tree against a grey sky, and I thought it beautiful. It is a matter entirely between the old beau and myself. For all I care, you may think my stripped tree a stupid old tree, but to me it is beautiful. I see life that way. But the day I am thinking of, when I got off the bus at Hyde Park Corner, was towards the end of October, when oysters have already become a commonplace; and as I walked up the Green Park side, the path around me was strewn with brown and red and faded green leaves, the last sacrifice of autumn to winter. I wondered why all things did not die as beautifully and as naturally as autumn dies. If all things died like that, there would be no fear in the world, and a world without fear would be just a splendid adventure, and life would be like chasing a sunset to the Antipodes--it would disappear only to appear again, more wonderfully.