The ash-trees grow crimson in color, and lose their summer life in great
gouts of blood. The birches touch their frail spray with yellow; the
chestnuts drop down their leaves in brown, twirling showers. The
beeches, crimped with the frost, guard their foliage until each leaf
whistles white in the November gales. The bittersweet hangs its bare and
leafless tendrils from rock to tree, and sways with the weight of its
brazen berries. The sturdy oaks, unyielding to the winds and to the
frosts, struggle long against the approaches of the winter, and in their
struggles wear faces of orange, of scarlet, of crimson, and of brown;
and finally, yielding to swift winds, as youth's pride yields to manly
duty, strew the ground with the scattered glories of their summer
strength, and warm and feed the earth with the _debris_ of their leafy
honors.
The maple in the lowlands turns suddenly its silvery greenness into
orange scarlet, and in the coming chilliness of the autumn eventide
seems to catch the glories of the sunset, and to wear them--as a sign of
God's old promise in Egypt--like a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire
by night.
And when all these are done,--and in the paved and noisy aisles of the
city the ailantus, with all its greenness gone, lifts up its skeleton
fingers to the God of Autumn and of storms,--the dogwood still guards
its crown; and the branches, which stretched their white canvas in
April, now bear up a spire of bloody tongues, that lie against the
leafless woods like a tree on fire!
Autumn brings to the home the cheerful glow of "first fires.
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