XXXI.

AUTUMN A PAINTER-MANNER OF WORKING.

"Leaves have their time to fall,

And flowers to wither at the North wind's breath."

DEAR H

No country can compare with ours in the richness, at least of its autumn scenery. The mountains of the eastern world are not wooded like ours, and hence cannot exhibit such a mass of foliage as they present. But if you wish to behold autumn in its glory, you must stand on some height that overlooks this vast wilderness. What seemed to you in summer an interminable sea of green, becomes a limitless expanse of the richest colors-a vast collection of fragmentary rainbows. And the different effects of light on different portions is most astonishing. Here a mountain blazes in splendor, and there a valley looks like a kaleidescope just so variegated and confused.

Autumn has been written and rhymed about from

the days of Thomson down, but always in the same

general tone of sadness. The text of every one has

been

"The melancholy days have come

The saddest of the year."

There must be something natural in this, or it would not be so universal; and my own experience has heretofore corresponded with this prevailing sentiment. Indeed the effect of the dying year is palpable on those least affected by such changes and least conscious of them. You notice it in the very sports of children. In spring time the most vigorous games and boisterous merriment are seen on every village green. But in autumn these are thrown aside for forest strolls or walks by the river side. The scene subdues and chastens the very spirit of childhood; and there is something sad in seeing the glorious summer, that has been so full of life and health and beauty, lie down and die on the bosom of Nature. Hope, which comes with spring, yields in autumn to reflection, and man looks forward to decay rather than to maturity and strength. But this feeling

becomes deeper and sadder as one enters the forest and hears the leaves rustling to his tread, and the sound of the squirrel cracking the nuts amid the dying tree-tops.

The trees have a melancholy aspect about them— they appear to be conscious that their glory is departing; and every leaf, as it loosens itself from the stem where it has nodded and swayed the livelong summer in joy, and flutters to the earth, seems to lie down as a sad memorial of the departing year.

But for once in autumn I have had none of these feelings. Roaming through this glorious region, and along the foot of these mountains, I have seen summer die as I never saw it die before. There has been a beauty and brightness and glory about the changing foliage this year, I never before witnessed. No drenching rains faded the colors before their time, and amid the clear weather and slight frosts, the summer has died like the dolphin, changing from beauty to beauty; and Autumn, the usually sober, serious, sober Autumn, has seemed the most frolicsome fellow of all the year. Stand in one of these deep valleys, and look around you on the shores and hill-slopes and mountain ridges! Autumn, with his brush and

THE FOREST IN AUTUMN.

283

colors, has been painting with the most reckless prodigality and in endless variety of beauty and brightness. There is no end to his whims and conceits-the changed landscape seems the work of one in his most joyous, frolicsome mood. There stands a single maple tree; Autumn approached it last night, and apparently from a mere whim, threw his brush over the top, making it a scarlet red one third of the way down, while the other portion he left green as in its spring-time. He simply put a red cap on it and passed on. On another, he has run his brush along a single limb, which flashes out from the deep bosom of green in singular contrast. Yonder is an open grove which he has hurried through, touching here and there a tree with his reckless brush, till it is spotted up with all the colors of the rainbow. He has painted one all yellow, another all red, a third left untouched, and a fourth sprinkled over with a shower of colors, as if he had simply shaken his brush over it in mirth.

He has brought out colors where you never discovered anything but barrenness before. A yellow wreath is running along a rock and festooning a tree, where yesterday was only an humble unseen vine.

He has painted it in a single night. He has trod the gloomy swamp also, and lit up its solemn arcades with brightness and beauty. The bushes that lifted themselves modestly beside the dark fir trees, unnoticed before, he has touched with his pencil, while the evergreens, which he always avoids, stand in their native greenness and lo, a yellow lake is spread under their sombre tops, as if a flood of molten gold had suddenly been poured through them. He has tipped the bush that dips the water with his pencil, and lo, the liquid mirror blushes with the reflection at morning. Like a giant he has stood at the base of the sky-seeking mountain, and swept his brush with a bold stroke all over its forest-covered sides, till it fairly dazzles the eye as the evening sunbeams flood it. There, where the ridges stoop into a long steady slope, he has wrought on a grander scale. The different nature of the soil has given birth to several varieties of timber, which lie like so many separate strata for miles along the mountain side; and here he has swept his brush in long stripes of yellow and red and green and gold, till acres on acres of carpeting spread away on the vision, while here and there separate clumps of trees have been touched with varie