September Sunshine 197 



but the song of the birds is unceasing. Now, though 

 the garden is stately with the tallest and richest 

 blossoms of the year, the silence is profound and 

 rarely broken. At both times there is a void back- 

 ground in nature, compared with her activity in 

 May or July, against which the wealth of pure sun- 

 shine stands out with the same kind of concrete 

 vigour and splendour as on the empty fringes of 

 the desert. 



At the time when the mellow sunshine of 

 September fills the garden spaces with the richest 

 haze of gold, the lengthening and deepening of the 

 shadows brings a contrasted effect of solemn and 

 stately beauty to the same bright beds and lawns. 

 Very much of the peculiar beauty and fascination 

 of the September garden is due to the increased 

 prominence, at a still early hour of the afternoon, 

 of the large and slowly stealing patterns of velvety 

 darkness which the sun casts on the sward. The 

 lawns are richest and greenest at the summer's 

 end in a moist and lukewarm year ; and never are 

 the shadows of trees more beautiful than at that 

 hour of middle afternoon on a still, sunny September 

 day, when the earth seems to settle to a deeper hush, 

 and the sunshine takes a tinge of riper gold. There 

 is no such perfect medium for shadow-tracery as 

 smooth and well-kept turf; and this particular 

 feature of beauty is therefore only to be seen at 

 its best in England, for there is nothing to be called 

 turf in foreign gardens, where the grass grows mis- 

 trustfully and in separate blades, like corn. Neither 

 is there any time of year when the shadow- 



