She rose and anxiously drew aside a curtain
of her window. The day was one of God's odes written for men.
Would that the days of our human autumn were as calmly grand, as
gorgeously hopeful as the days that lead the aging year down to the
grave of winter! If our white hairs were sunlit from behind like
those radiance bordered clouds; if our air were as pure as this
when it must be as cold; if the falling at last of longest cherished
hopes did but, like that of the forest leaves, let in more of the
sky, more of the infinite possibilities of the region of truth
which is the matrix of fact; we should go marching down the hill
of life like a battered but still bannered army on its way home.
But alas! how often we rot, instead of march, towards the grave!
"If he be not rotten before he die," said Hamlet's absolute grave
digger.--If the year was dying around Lady Florimel, as she looked,
like a deathless sun from a window of the skies, it was dying at
least with dignity.
The sun was still revelling in the gift of himself. A thin blue mist
went up to greet him, like the first of the smoke from the altars
of the morning. The fields lay yellow below; the rich colours of
decay hung heavy on the woods, and seemed to clothe them as with
the trappings of a majestic sorrow; but the spider webs sparkled
with dew, and the gossamer films floated thick in the level sunbeams.
It was a great time for the spiders, those visible Deaths of the
insect race.
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