Autumn

IMPROVEMENT ERA

Autumn Paragraphs from "Our Inland Sea"

Alfred Lambourne

A mighty drowsiness is on the land. The Harvest Moon —the Indians' Moon of Falling Leaves—has sup- planted the Moons of Fire. Dream-like has become my island. Ruddy, like a weary and belated sun, comes up the Autumn moon, and like a vast Koh-i-noor, the sun itself is blurred and yellow. Haze-enwrapped are the dis- tant Wasatch Mountains; through deepening shades of saddened violet, the Onaqui Range lapses into melancholia. The western headlands, the jutting promontories, ap- pear as if cut from dim, orange crepe, or maroon-colored velvet. Wistful and vague stand the peaked islands, and shell-like is the gleam of the outstretched brine.

One more turn and the present richness of the time will be gone. In the heavens there is a transfiguration, and the transfiguration extends to earth! Always there

are the same great stretches of water around this solitary island, always the same dreary and monotonous hills; ever

the same strange walls of rock and ever the same wild peaks in clustered multitudes. But how the seasons and the great sun play with them! They are ever the same, yet never the same; eternal yet evanescent, playthings with time and the elements.

Autumn is to the seasons as twilight to the day. Both work a similar effect upon the mind. In autumn all the splendor of the sunset skies lies on the woods. But, ah! it must be confessed, it wants in spirituality. It no longer makes us think of the Cherubim, the wings of archangels, but rather of the earthly garments of prelates and kings.

Now comes the end of Autumn. The last cold rain has frozen as it fell. In sheets and ice-embossings it

gleams on the island rocks. There is a tone of menace, a moan-like sound in the wind. Long since the old, and the gray-winged gulls have flown. From out the sky, and softened by distance, there falls the dissonant clang of migratory geese. Once more I hear, a sound to stir the blood as one listens, the trumpet call of the southward- flying swan.