arity, saw cause one year to make a partial
recantation. Autumn, until then, had seemed to be a practitioner of all
the easy arts at once, or rather, she had taken the easy way with the
arts of colour, sentiment, suggestion, and regret.

She had often encouraged and rewarded, also, the ingratitude of a whole
nation for a splendid summer, somewhat officiously cooling, refreshing,
allaying, and comforting the discontent of the victims of an English sun.
She had soothed the fuming citizen, and brought back the fogs of custom,
effaced the skies, to which he had upturned no very attentive eye,
muffled up his chin, and in many other ways curried favour. Not only did
she fall in with his landscape mood, but she made herself his housemate
by his fireplaces, drew his curtains, shut out her own wet winds in the
streets, and became privy to the commoner comforts of man, like a wild
creature tamed and conniving at human sport and schemes. "Domesticated"
Gothic itself, or the governesses who daily by advertisement describe
themselves by that same strange modern adjective, could not be more bent
upon the flattery of man in his less heroic moments.

Autumn, for all her show of stormy woods, is apt to be the accomplice of
daily human things that lack dignity, and are, in the now accepted sense
of a once noble word, comfortable. Besides, her show of stormy forests
is done with an abandonment to the pathos of the moment, with dashings
and underlinings--we all know the sort of letter, for instance, which
answers to the message and proclamation of Autumn, as she usually is in
the outer world. A complete sentimentalist is she, whether in the open
country or when she looks in at the lighted windows, and goodnaturedly
makes her voice like a very goblin's outside, for the increasing of the
bourgeois' _bien-etre_.

But that year all had been otherwise. Autumn had borne herself with a
heroism of sunny weather. Where we had been wont to see signals of
distress, and to hear the voluble outpouring of an excitable temperament,
with the extremity of scattered leaves and desperate damp, we beheld an
aspect of golden drought. Nothing mouldered--everything was consumed by
vital fires. The gardens were strewn with smouldering soft ashes of late
roses, late honeysuckle, honey-sweet clematis. The silver seeds of rows
of riverside flowers took sail on their random journey with a light wind.
Leaves set forth, a few at a time, with a little volley