272 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



apples gleam. It is the gleam of melting frost. Under all 

 the dulcet warmth of the face of things lurks the bitter 

 spirit of the cold. Stand still for more than a few 

 moments and the cold creeps with a warning and then a 

 menace into the breast. That is the bitterness that makes 

 this morning of all others in the year so mournful in its 

 beauty. The colour and the grace invite to still con- 

 templation and long draughts of dream; the frost compels 

 to motion. The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and 

 of some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the 

 pageant of autumn, of that gradual pompous dying which 

 has no parallel in human life yet draws us to it with sure 

 bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we see it pass 

 through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual, 

 of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight 

 of such perfection as is many times achieved before the 

 end awakens the never more than lightly sleeping human 

 desire of permanence. Now, now is the hour; let things 

 be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be 

 thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a pre- 

 monition that remain they must not for more than a little 

 w^hile. The motion of the autumn is a fall, a surrender, 

 requiring no effort, and therefore the mind cannot long be 

 blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can when 

 the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the 

 decline beyond. A few frosts now, a storm of wind and 

 rain, a few brooding mists, and the woods that lately 

 hung dark and massive and strong upon the steep hills are 

 transfigured and have become cloudily light and full of 

 change and ghostly fair; the crowing of a cock in the still 

 misty morning echoes up in the many-coloured trees like 

 a challenge to the spirits of them to come out and be 



