Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/210

196 absorbs and governs all. But in an English autumn you have all the colours on an equal footing, and no one has an absorbing place or power in the landscape, although its own is retained to all its life. You see a green in the middle of November which the grass or grain-fields never show in spring. For nothing in May or June can equal the green of a field of Swede turnips, or the vivid hue of mangel-wurzel. These crops come out rich in the autumn landscape here; and when alternated with the bright stubble of recently-harvested wheat and barley-fields, and fields of lake-coloured soil harrowed and smoothed to a garden's surface for the harvests of another year, you have the ground-work of a picture which the English May does not present, and which our American autumn cannot equal, because these root-crops do not make a feature of our landscape. Then the English hedges that, like gilded frames, enclose these various fields, give to the whole vista an aspect which no other season or country can equal. Indeed, in green itself the October of England outdoes its June in distinctness, diversity, and grouping of the shades of that maidenhood colour of vegetable life. For, besides these luxuriant crops then in full verdure, there are pasture lands and twice-mown meadows showing, between long files of hedge-row trees, as vividly green as any our landscape presents