Change in the grey garden^closes * * * 

 A rain and ruin of roses*" 



SWINBURNE. 



OCTOBER 



TI7HEN the spent " night aches into day," in all the peace 

 of an October day, I walk out where Autumn is shed- 

 ding her leafy tears. How quiet is all around ; it seems as 

 though most of the world's inhabitants are still safe in the lap 

 of dreams, far away in the haven of restful hours. A blurred 

 landscape of blended opal and rose, above which is a faint 

 suggestion of sapphire, the prelude to, and promise of, a 

 delightful day. Gay with Autumn leafage the hedges wind 

 till lost in the fast-vanishing mist, like long strips of gaudy 

 ribbon, or, as they cross and recross empty wastes of square 

 fields, these hedge-limits appear as the gilt edges of great 

 books ! Oh, to lift the covers of these seeming mighty 

 tomes ; to know but a little of the many mysteries of flower 

 and insect ; the working of rain and mist ; dead leaf and new 

 leaf ! Under the acacia boughs a litter of olive-coloured leaf- 

 lets ; under the variegated maple a ruin of fallen foliage, white 

 and green. Here and there in gardens the laurustinus is 

 showing its corymbs of crimson-tipped blossom-buds, to open 

 anon a wonder of white starlets with a breath as sweet as 

 hawthorn ; side by side to them the yews stand freckled with 

 their red berries. Upon walls hang, lingeringly, yellow roses, 

 showing their red hearts, strangely bright, peeping down 

 upon their garden friends, tall, straggling nasturtiums, and 

 seedy marigolds dank with heavy dew. The rose-robed sun 

 at last shines through the mists, and the enambered hedges, 

 fringed with dew-threaded gossamers, glitter and glint in the 

 birth-light of the sun ! 



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