194 Walks in New England 



it is God which worketh in you both to will and 

 to do of his good pleasure.&quot; 



Traversing the ways of field and woodland this 

 troubled and worried spirit of man finds now as 

 fine a repose and as keen a delight as it can reach 

 to and sustain. For the wonderful days which 

 have passed over us and which have not yet ended, 

 the common spectacle of ripening earth has filled 

 us with a luxurious comfort that never satiates. 

 The atmosphere of the days of the fall of the leaf 

 and the farewell of the flowers is in itself a deli 

 cious gift of heaven, for heaven is about us not 

 only in our infancy, as Wordsworth wrote, but 

 always, if we resign ourselves to the infant s heart 

 that lives beneath the experiences of the world. 

 Indeed, it is not until we slip into the further side 

 of our human term, until we pass &quot; life s height of 

 water-shedding,&quot; that we get the whole value of 

 the heaven which God has given to the soul 

 through which he expresses himself, as through 

 the myriad forms of life besides. 



The region manifests the extraordinary vitality 

 of Nature when the frosts hold off. There has 

 been but one frost that even touched the trees, 

 and then only in limited areas where moisture ad 

 vances the assault of lowering temperature. The 

 ferns seldom survive as in this fall, where even 

 the sensitive fern (onoclea sensibilis) may yet oc- 



