AUTUMN

I.

This has been a year of long sunshine.  Month has followed upon month with little unkindness of the sky; I scarcely marked when July passed into August, August into September.  I should think it summer still, but that I see the lanes yellow-purfled with flowers of autumn.

I am busy with the hawkweeds; that is to say, I am learning to distinguish and to name as many as I can.  For scientific classification I have little mind; it does not happen to fall in with my habits of thought; but I like to be able to give its name (the “trivial” by choice) to every flower I meet in my walks.  Why should I be content to say, “Oh, it’s a hawkweed”?  That is but one degree less ungracious than if I dismissed all the yellow-rayed as “dandelions.”  I feel as if the flower were pleased by my recognition of its personality.  Seeing how much I owe them, one and all, the least I can do is to greet them severally.  For the same reason I had rather say “hawkweed” than “hieracium”; the homelier word has more of kindly friendship.

II.

How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows not why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling suggestion.  Yesterday I was walking at dusk.  I came to an old farmhouse; at the garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it was our doctor’s gig.  Having passed, I turned to look back.  There was a faint afterglow in the sky beyond the chimneys; a light twinkled at one of the upper windows.  I said to myself, “Tristram Shandy,” and hurried home to plunge into a book which I have not opened for I dare say twenty years.

Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I become to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual.  A book worth rising for; much better worth than old Burton, who pulled Johnson out of bed.  A book which helps one to forget the idle or venomous chatter going on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish hope for a world “which has such people in’t.”

These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves at the moment when I hungered for them.  But it often happens that the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought.  Ah! the books that one will never read again.  They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by for ever.  I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me.  Books gentle and quieting; books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but many a time.  Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few.  Perhaps when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a kindness—­friends passed upon the way.  What regret in that last farewell!