October 30, 1915. 
L A X D AND \\i A T E E 
WOODLANDS IN AUTUMN. 
By J. D. Symon. 
NATURE, indifferent to the strife of man, has 
given us In these October clays a season of 
strange peace. Over the landscape there 
has brooded .4tschylus's " spirit of windless 
calm," bringing autumn to her fullest per- 
fection. Some years cheat the autumnal promise by 
rude gales, tearing the trees untimely, and leaving only 
rags of foliage to take the afterglow of crimson and 
russet. Then the gaunt hand of winter stretches all too 
soon among stripped branches, the trees are beggared 
and inhospitable, the flame of the woods fitful and half- 
Sshamed. But if ilie year closes softly, and the lea\es, 
as the dying Cyrano de Bergerac says, " make a 
glorious end," that is autumn as her worshippers would 
have her, and that in this year of stress is the autumn 
that has been vouchsafed to us, here and now. It need 
not be in any spirit of levity or indifference to the perils 
and sorrows of the time that one may snatch, for a 
moment, the consolations of the season. The liglitness 
of the opening year may have been hard to reconcile 
with our prevailing mood, but the mellow serenity of 
autumn strikes no incongruous note. It is the pageantry 
of death, but death so cunningly disguised and 
alleviated that it seems a new birth, a less jocund, but 
more gorgeous spring. 
Energy of Colour. 
The trees, softly ripening to their deciduous liour, 
have taken, as it were, a new and intense life. Tlie 
energy of heightened colour vibrates along the wo<xl- 
side, lately somewhat monotonous, but now infinite in 
Its variety. It is the' hour of revelation — every tree pro- 
claims itself with an insistent individuality, manifest 
othenvise in spring, but lost in the more uniform 
greenery of later summer. It is as though it would 
write and sign its testament in letters of gold or lire : 
Amid her russet sisterhood 
In fire the cherry writes her name. 
But autumn has other and more subtle accents than 
the more obvious accents of her flamboyant mood. 
-JiliSrS i^ lb? rsvelatii^n of distancesj lost in the drj', 
sliarp light of summer, but befraj'cd by the season gf 
veiling mists. Keats seized, if he did not elaborate, this 
truth, when he chose " season of mists," for the opening 
phrase of his " Ode to Autumn." In the morning hours 
the belts of woodland which seemed so lately a compact 
mass, now fall into their true aerial persjjective. 
Ranged, rank on rank, from near to far, they yield to 
this analysis of floating vapour. A month ago you 
would have sworn that the wood was uniform, almost 
characterless ; to-day it is an ordered host, with van- 
guard, main body, and rearguard rightly disposed and 
recognisable. The other day we could not tell which 
group was rear or van, now the wood is resolved, as it 
were, into vertical strata. 
Symbolism of the Hour. 
In its main motif this full-rounded symphonic close 
of the year is, as we say, indifferent to the angry mood 
of man, but the symbolism of the hour is not wholly 
unwritten in the diverse note of the autumn woods. This 
year goes out, like the last, in blood and fire, and as the 
clierry at the covert edge flings her crimson flag against 
beeches only lightly browned, and elms yellowed as yet 
only in great fantastic bouquets on the upjjer boughs, 
forest and coppice become a parable of war. Red death 
is in the hour, and the wild cherry tree, whitest in her 
springtime promise, now prefigures young lives whose 
red autumn has come upon them untimely. Nor is hope 
of renewal denied, though not to mortal eyes in any 
after spring. But the pageant of the passing year has 
other suggestions wherein the mood of IlPenseroso may 
recapture something of the spirit of L'Allegro. In the 
colour of the autumn woods we may rejoice as in a 
gorgeous sunset, which beguiles us to forget the dark- 
ness close at hand. The silences, the fragrance of the 
forest, the cedarn scent of the beeches give this season 
an oriental opulence and charm and mystery; a spiritual 
completeness denied to the other three. It is the repose 
■ — almost the Xir\"ana — of the year : 
Calm is the morn without a sound 
Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 
And only through the faded leaf 
The chestnut pattering to the ground. 
I had made a vow, on beginning this desultory fragment, 
that I would not drag in quotations — a most dismal vice. 
But it has gone the way of many other vows, and is 
likely to be broken again, impenitently. The whim- 
sical (and perliaps questionable) phrase, " oriental 
opulence," as applied to autumn and the autumn woods, 
brought with it the remembrance that it is to an Oriental 
that we owe — in its English dress at least — one of the 
happiest descriptions of the time. The original, to be 
sure, is Theophile Gautier's, but his line was made 
memorable for English readers by an Asiatic, that 
wonderful Hindu girl poet whose English writings have 
given her a secure place in our anthologies. It is to 
Toru Dutt that we owe, next to Gautier, that pretty 
autumn fancy, " When the rust is on the wood," simple 
and adequate as a translation, and of proved worth, for 
once heard, it is forever haunting. It might, indeed, be 
native English. 
Autumn's Exhilaration. 
In the Xorth the autumn air carries a snell exhilara» 
tion that England can hardly match, even on the crispest 
days. Here the touch of summer warmth lingers in the 
subdued sunshine as if it sought to hold winter at arm's 
length; yonder it goes half-way to meet him. In the 
South St. Luke and St. Martin contrive sometimes to 
make their little counterfeit summers most colourable 
imitations, save always for the colour of the woods and 
their songless silence. Were but these times of peace 
one would now hark forwards to the charm of the longer 
e\eningS) that luxury which Stevenson liked so well 
when, after the day of haf pv fatigue in the clear, bracing 
weather, he would come hOirie to {hQ fi,reside and UlP 
open volume of his choice among the novels oi Diima.<?, 
Le Vicomte de Bragelonnc. R. L. S., when he made that 
pleasing note, owed something to De Quincev. The 
curious may follow up the parallel for themselves. It 
will lead them out of autumn, wuh its blazing foliage, 
its glinting field-iires at twilight, its trailing wreaths of 
smoke, straight to boisterous winter and its ingle-nook 
compensations. But these comfortable reflections 
seem out of place to-day. And yet, and yet, is there not 
a soldier's song, dearer now to our campaigners than 
" Tipperary," which keeps alive, even in the trenches, 
this very sentiment and human longing? And so sing- 
ing, by eternal fitness tliey fight better pro arts et focis, 
or, as our idiom turns the ancient phrase, " for homes 
and hearths."- 
"LAND AND WATER" PLANO FUND. 
To the Editor of Land and Watee. 
Sm, — On belialf of my ship's company, I should like to 
say how very much the men like the piano that was sent to 
them through Land and Water, and how very much they 
appreciate the generosity of those kind persons who provided 
it. Will you pleai^.e couvey to them my sincere thauks for 
giviug the men this handsome present, which will always ba 
a soiure of unfailing pleasure to them, and more especially 
during the forthcoming winter ? 
W. J. WniTWORTU, Lieut.-Commander. 
H.M.S. Cockatrice. October 24. 
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