It is not true that the close of a life which ends in a natural
fashion--life which is permitted to put on the pomp of death and to go
out in glory--inclines the mind to repose. It is not true of a day
ending nor the passing of the year, nor of the fall of leaves. Whatever
permanent, uneasy question is native to men, comes forward most
insistent and most loud at such times.
There is a house in my own county which is built of stone, whose gardens
are fitted to the autumn. It has level alleys standing high and banked
with stone. Their ornaments were carved under the influence of that
restraint which marked the Stuarts. They stand above old ponds, and are
strewn at this moment with the leaves of elms. These walks are like the
Mailles of the Flemish cities, the walls of the French towns or the
terraces of the Loire. They are enjoyed to-day by whoever has seen all
our time go racing by; they are the proper resting-places of the aged,
and their spirit is felt especially in the fall of leaves.
At this season a sky which is of so delicate and faint a blue as to
contain something of gentle mockery, and certainly more of tenderness,
presides at the fall of leaves. There is no air, no breath at all. The
leaves are so light that they sidle on their going downward, hesitating
in that which is not void to them, and touching at last so imperceptibly
the earth with which they are to mingle, that the gesture is much
gentler than a salutation, and even more discreet than a discreet
caress.
They make a little sound, less than the least of sounds. No bird at
night in the marshes rustles so slightly; no man, though men are the
subtlest of living beings, put so evanescent a stress upon their sacred
whispers or their prayers. The leaves are hardly heard, but they are
heard just so much that men also, who are destined at the end to grow
glorious and to die, look up and hear them falling.
* * * * *
With what a pageantry of every sort is not that troubling symbol
surrounded! The scent of life is never fuller in the woods than now, for
the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will
not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the
earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare
and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling
and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods
throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and
the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all
around. It is upon such a mood of parentage and of fruition that the
dead leaves fall.
The colour is not a mere splendour: it is intricate. The same unbounded
power, never at fault and never in calculation, which comprehends all
the landscape, and which has made the woods, has worked in each one
separate leaf as well; they are inconceivably varied. Take up one leaf
and see. How many kinds of boundary are there here between the stain
which ends in a sharp edge against the gold, and the sweep in which the
purple and red mingle more evenly than they do in shot-silk or in
flames? Nor are the boundaries to be measured only by degrees of
definition. They have also their characters of line. Here in this leaf
are boundaries intermittent, boundaries rugged, boundaries curved, and
boundaries broken. Nor do shape and definition ever begin to exhaust the
list. For there are softness and hardness too: the agreement and
disagreement with the scheme of veins; the grotesque and the simple in
line; the sharp and the broad, the smooth, and raised in boundaries. So
in this one matter of boundaries might you discover for ever new things;
there is no end to them. Their qualities are infinite. And beside
boundaries you have hues and tints, shades also, varying thicknesses of
stuff, and endless choice of surface; that list also is infinite, and
the divisions of each item in it are infinite; nor is it of any use to
analyse the thing, for everywhere the depth and the meaning of so much
creation are beyond our powers. And all this is true of but one dead
leaf; and yet every dead leaf will differ from its fellow.
That which has delighted to excel in boundlessness within the bounds of
this one leaf, has also transformed the whole forest. There is no number
to the particular colour of the one leaf. The forest is like a thing so
changeful of its nature that change clings to it as a quality, apparent
even during the glance of a moment. This forest makes a picture which is
designed, but not seizable. It is a scheme, but a scheme you cannot set
down. It is of those things which can best be retained by mere copying
with a pencil or a brush. It is of those things which a man cannot fully
receive, and which he cannot fully re-express to other men.
It is no wonder, then, that at this peculiar time, this week (or moment)
of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least
demand--perhaps remember--our destiny, come strongest. They are proper
to the time of autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and
old; the morning (if one rises early enough to welcome its leisurely
advance) contains something in it of profound reminiscence. The evenings
hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, and the
fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light
fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare
me for the isolation of the soul.
It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of autumn,
for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and at its close
the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the dead return.