Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/483

 . 17, 1863.] The moral of which seems to be that just as we admire the unclouded calmness and honour which attends that man’s old age who has lived well, so our feelings are insensibly tinged with some such tender regard for dying Nature, and the certainty that we shall lose in a short time the green foliage makes us cast more lingering glances at it while it yet stays. Most people, however, are contented to admire the colours of leaves when massed together, and rendered more effective by distant haze. Yet, without being microscopic, much beauty may be discerned in the fading hues of each tree. Thus the lime once so green invariably changes in autumn to a deep uniform yellow. The leaves of the mountain ash and elder are curiously bronzed and reddened before they fall. The walnut turns black and yellow where the early frosts have nipped its delicate green. The sycamore also turns black, and the leaves curl up and wince at autumn’s approach long before they drop off. Yellow and brown are the prevailing hues amongst ashes. Such are the most striking colours that fleck the general duskiness of our autumnal woodlands, harmonising well with the yellow stubbles hanging, as it were, in patches over the hills purpled with evening, to which, if a fine sunset be added with its brilliant bars of colour paling into the track of an October moon, few lands can show a more delightful scene. The horse-chesnut, with its deep yellow foliage shading off to red and brown, especially if it be growing near the water’s edge, must by no means be omitted from our enumeration, as those will readily allow who have seen a fine clump of them in October near Croxby Lake, Lincolnshire, or who remember the banks of the Isis.

Another customary study in our autumn walks is to observe the order in which the trees lose their leaves. The willow is often seen looking ragged and forlorn even at Midsummer. This, however, is due to the fact that it has then ripened its buds, and the leaves which have hitherto sheltered them, having performed their main functions, then drop off.

So in such trees as the beech, which produce two sets of buds during the season, those leaves which were formed during spring fall some time before those of the summer growth. In young beeches these wither, but remain on the tree during the winter, adding much to the picturesqueness of a coppice, till displaced by the buds of the following spring.

White of Selborne remarks that all lopped trees, while their heads are young, carry their leaves a long time. In the garden, currant-bushes and laburnums decay first, even while the foliage round them is still green. Indeed, most fruit-bearing trees and bushes begin to lose their leaves as soon as the fruit is mature. Apple trees, however, are an exception, the young summer shoots fluttering their bravery of verdure through all the early frosts until quite the end of November. When these leaves fall the pruner knows he may use his knife. The first appearance of autumn in the orchard is invariably among the walnut-trees. The mulberry, which puts on its summer foliage latest of our familiar trees, and is generally supposed to lose it at the first frost, is even stronger than the walnut, and waves a beautiful head of the deepest green leaves long after that tree has become ragged and unsightly. The ash, if it bears many keys, is perhaps the next in succession to lose its leaves. Many ashes bear no seeds, and then they abound in foliage, while their more fertile brethren look the picture of misery. The high winds, which generally set in with the end of September, soon cause the acacia to be in distress; while even at the end of August the white poplars have lost all their beauty, and many of their leaves. As an ornithologist can, within a very small margin, tell the exact day of the year by noting the arrival and departure of the migratory birds, and the botanist construct a floral time-piece by remarking at what hours of the day the different flowers close or expand, so a lover of the country might almost exactly hit upon the precise period of spring’s approach or autumn’s decay, by observing what hues were predominant in the foliage around him.

Very sad in October are the retired woodland glades. The plumed ferns, but lately so light and green, are now clumps of blackened lonely fronds, hanging over the stones whose nakedness they covered so tenderly during summer, dripping with morn and evening’s mists, and looking like the Dryads of Greek fancy, weeping with dishevelled hair for their ravaged habitations. Still moss and ivy are putting on their greenest tints on the banks, while the holly-berries overhead are reddening; and, if some solitary mullein, with its tall spire of yellow flowers, keeps its melancholy watch over the dell, reminding us of the lost wealth of summer, we have a contrast in the clumps of butcher’s broom, gladdening our eyes with their deep green. These skirt the moor to where brown sheets of decayed heather-blossom are flecked by the white wiry lichen, that so often shelters under its tufts. Such uplands as these are far more cheerful, and when enlivened by a hawk skimming over them, or a long line of hunters sweeping to a distant cover, are very pleasantly associated in most person’s minds with the presence of autumn.

Autumnal scenes are not great favourites with our painters. Their beauties change every day, and are so fleeting, that the utmost industry of the artist can hardly stay their tints and reproduce them on canvas. We have many studies of trees, or clumps of trees, in their fading dress, but it is not every one who will set himself to cope with the deeper shadows and softer lights of the shortening days, and paint the versatile foliage of large woodland pieces, when

Barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.

In America, because there is a longer interval between the end of summer and the violent setting in of winter, there is also more opportunity to gather up the effects of the fading leaf into a large composition, as Mr. Cropsey has done in his “Autumn on the Hudson River,” which was in last year’s International Exhibition. It has always been a favourite season though with poets, who can affect the imagination by a few vigorous touches of word-painting, and brings in a fertile