Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/202

188 be thrown upon it, to bring out all its best features to vivid, breathing life. The mellowest sun of an English autumn was descending the western horizon, and no other autumn sun the wide world round equals it, even at noon. In the first place, it seems to come down twice as near the earth as in America, as if it had closer social relation to it; or, for a few weeks in the year, delighted to spread its golden wings nearer to the glad and beautiful sceneries which it had created before they took the white veil of winter's frosts and snow. Then, at this season, it fills the whole heavens with a humid but not damp mist of light, unlike the dry, crimson suffusion of our American Indian summer's sky—a mist not golden of decided nuance, but like the weak dilution of the atmosphere of some vast orb of molten gold more distant than the sun. In such a light we looked off into the great valley, north, south, and west. It was a vast basin filled with autumnal glory that ran over the brim on all sides. From the height on which we stood, a hundred smaller hills sank almost to the levels of the common fields that floored the great amphitheatre with their living mosaic. The tall-timbered woods and groves interspersed looked like trunkless shrubs that spread their tinted foliage on the ground like rich carpets of leaves stemmed living in the earth. Truly, beyond other distance, height lends enchantment