for all the trees have darkened to their final tone, and stand in their
differences of character and not of mere date. Almost all the green is
grave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, in
majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to
inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks after
the dawn.

Gravity is the word--not solemnity as towards evening, nor menace as at
night. The daylight trees of July are signs of common beauty, common
freshness, and a mystery familiar and abiding as night and day. In
childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise
than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher
sensibility for April and April evenings--a heartache for them, which in
riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

But, on the other hand, childhood has so quickly learned to find daily
things tedious, and familiar things importunate, that it has no great
delight in the mere middle of the day, and feels weariness of the summer
that has ceased to change visibly. The poetry of mere day and of late
summer becomes perceptible to mature eyes that have long ceased to be
sated, have taken leave of weariness, and cannot now find anything in
nature too familiar; eyes which have, indeed, lost sight of the further
awe of midsummer daybreak, and no longer see so much of the past in April
twilight as they saw when they had no past; but which look freshly at the
dailiness of green summer, of early afternoon, of every sky of any form
that comes to pass, and of the darkened elms.

Not unbeloved is this serious tree, the elm, with its leaf sitting close,
unthrilled. Its stature gives it a dark gold head when it looks alone to
a late sun. But if one could go by all the woods, across all the old