TIIE
PETERITE. Vol . . \II .
NOVEMBER, 1S92 .
No . rot.
AUTUMN. 110 could not write an essay on Autumn? Who does not know that it is the ",season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, " and all that sort of thing ? Who could not tell with half an eye, by looking out of my window at this moment, that the bounteous Sun is straying from Libra into Scorpio, which being interpreted means that it is neither Spring, Summer, nor Winter, but the jocund Autumn . For what would he see? To him, looking eagerly forth upon the bosom of the fruirfui earth, would appear imprimis at this early hour of 4 .30 p .m. a grey-blue air with a sky like cold gravy, shortly to disappear before Tartarean darkness . No voice of bird, not even the dulcet peacock breaks the silence, except at intervals when . . Beelzebub doth prompt an ass to pour his sorrows on the evening air . " There falls a tine drizzle, the atmosphere is such as to tip your nose with cold, and the general effect produced is that, no matter what Keats said in his ode, or Keble in his on the Redbreast's song amid the calm decay, " we, the scribe, love better the days when the snoring fire chortles on the hearth, and the godlike footballer sports upon the green . And because man is made to mourn, there comes to us a memory of days wherein the form divine of the cricketer added poetry to the prosaic Yorkshire landscape, when the bireme flashed past Marygate, and of days of more or less ethereal mildness called by mortals—Spring. And to us it seems that we like the downright seasons better than your one horse undecided ones .
W