their spring reunions and rivalries; some of them sing a little after
a silence of months. The robins, blue-birds, meadow-larks, sparrows,
crows, all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of
spring. The cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May.
The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel
blooms. The trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is
humid, and the moisture rises in the ground. Nature is breaking camp,
as in spring she was going into camp. The spring yearning and
restlessness is represented in one by the increased desire to travel.

Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have
their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints,
their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have
the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after
all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the
morning, the other the evening; one is youth, the other is age.

The difference is not merely in us; there is a subtle difference in
the air, and in the influences that emanate upon us from the dumb
forms of nature. All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to
have burned out. One recalls the notion of Herodotus that he is grown
feeble, and retreats to the south because he can no longer face the
cold and the storms from the north. There is a growing potency about
his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them in fall. One is the
kindling fire, the other the subsiding flame.

It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting unmistakably the
difference between sunrise and sunset; and it is equally a trial of
his skill to put upon canvas the difference between early spring and
late fall, say between April and November. It was long ago observed
that the shadows are more opaque in the morning than in the evening;
the struggle between the light and the darkness more marked, the gloom
more solid, the contrasts more sharp, etc. The rays of the morning sun
chisel out and cut down the shadows in a way those of the setting sun
do not. Then the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning,--not so
yellow and diffused. A difference akin to this is true of the two
seasons I am speaking of. The spring is the morning sunlight, clear
and determined; the autumn, the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening,
golden.

[Illustration: ON THE EDGE OF A CATSKILL "SUGAR BUSH"]

Does not the human