so gently enjoyable by all men and women who have not used up life;
and with all your lessons, so unobtrusive, so touching, that have
come home to the heart of human generations for many thousands
of years. Yesterday was Sunday; and I was preaching to my simple
rustics an autumn sermon from the text We all do fade as a leaf.
As I read out the text, through a half-opened window near me, two
large withered oak-leaves silently floated into the little church
in the view of all the congregation. I could not but pause for a
minute till they should preach their sermon before I began mine.
How simply, how unaffectedly, with what natural pathos they seemed
to tell their story! It seemed as if they said, Ah you human beings,
something besides us is fading; here we are, the things like which
you fade!

And now, upon this evening, a little sobered by the thought that
this is the fourth October which has seen this hand writing that
which shall attain the authority of print, I sit down to begin an
essay which is to be written leisurely as recreation and not as
work. I need not finish this essay, unless I choose, for six weeks
to come: so I have plenty of time, and I shall never have to write
under pressure. That is pleasant. And I write under another feeling,
more pleasing and encouraging still. I think that in these lines
I am addressing many unknown friends, who, though knowing nothing
more of me than they can learn from pages which I have written,
have come gradually not to think of me as a stranger. I wish here
to offer my thanks to many whose letters, though they were writing
only to a shadow, have spoken in so kindly a fashion of the writer's
slight productions, that they have given me much enjoyment in the
reading, and much encouragement to go on. To all my correspondents,
whether named or nameless, I now, in a moral sense, extend a friendly