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.