pathos gave delight. The autumn _with_ pathos has a way there of
overwhelming her many fragrances in the general odour of dead leaves
generalized. That year you could breathe all the several sweet scents,
as discriminated and distinct as those of flowers on the tops of
mountains--warm pine and beech as different as thyme and broom,
unconfused. Even the Spring, with her little divided breezes of
hawthorn, rose, and lilac, was not more various.

Moreover, while some of the woods were green, none of the fields were so.
In their sunburnt colours were to be seen "autumn tints" of a far
different beauty from that of a gaudy decay. Dry autumn is a general
lover of simplicity, and she sweeps a landscape with long plain colours
that take their variations from the light. When the country looks "burnt
up," as they say who are ungrateful for the sun, then are these colours
most tender. Grass, that had lost its delicacy in the day when the last
hay was carried, gets it again. For a little time it was--new-reaped--of
something too hard a green; then came dry autumn along, and softened it
into a hundred exquisite browns. Dry autumn does beautiful things in
sepia, as the water-colour artist did in the early days, and draws divine
brown Turners of the first manner.

The fields and hedgerows must needs fade, and the sun made the fading
quick with the bloom of brown. For one great meadow so softly gilded, I
would give all the scarlet and yellow trees that ever made a steaming
autumn gorgeous--all the crimson of the Rhine valleys, all the patched
and spotted walnut-leaves of the _muhl-thal_ by Boppard, and the little
trees that change so suddenly to their yellow of decay in groups at the
foot of the ruins of Sternberg and Liebenstein, every one of their
branches disguised in the same bright, insignificant, unhopeful colour.