en, for my living.

OCTOBER.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. . . ."

I have been planting a perennial border in the garden and consulting,
with serious damage to the temper, a number of the garden-books now in
fashion. When a man drives at practice--when he desires to know precisely
at what season, in what soil, and at what depth to plant his martagon
lilies, to decide between _Ayrshire Ruga_ and _Fellenberg_ for the pillar
that requires a red rose, to fix the right proportion of sand and
leaf-mould to suit his carnations--when 'his only plot' is to plant the
bergamot--he resents being fobbed off with prattle:--

"My squills make a brave show this morning, and the little petticoated
Narcissus Cyclamineus in the lower rock-garden (surely Narcissus
ought to have been a girl!) begins to 'take the winds of March with
beauty.' I am expecting visitors, and hope that mulching will
benefit the Yellow Pottebakkers, which I don't want to flower before
Billy comes home from school," etc.

But the other day, in 'The Garden's Story,' by Mr. George H. Ellwanger,
I came upon a piece of literary criticism which gave me a pleasurable
pause in my search for quite other information. Mr. Ellwanger, a great
American gardener, has observed that our poets usually sing of autumn in a
minor key, which startles an American who, while accustomed to our
language, cannot suit this mournfulness with the still air and sunshine
and glowing colour of his own autumn. With us, as he notes, autumn is a
dank, sodden season, bleak or shivering. 'The sugar and scarlet maple,
the dogwood and sumac, are wanting to impart their warmth of colour; and
St. Martin's summer somehow fails to shed a cheerful influence' comparable
with that of the Indian summer over there. The Virginia creeper which
reddens our Oxford walls so magnificently in October is an importation of
no very long standing--old enough to be accepted as a feature of the
place, not yet old enough to be inseparably connected with it in song.
Yet--

"Of all odes to autumn, Keats's, I believe, is most universally
admired. This might almost answer to our own fall of the leaf,
and is far less sombre than many apostrophes to the season that occur
throughout English verse."

From this Mr. Ellwanger proceeds to compare Keats's with the wonderful
'Ode to Autumn' which Hood wrote in 1823 (each ode, by the way, belongs to
its au