1817: Jane Austen observes in her last novel Persuasion:
“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness—that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
1841: The novelist George Eliot writes to her friend Maria Lewis:
“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
1907: Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris writes to his wife, Clara:
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
1934: The 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor in Bulgaria sees a vast cloud of storks heading south:
“I don’t know the exact date of the passing I had just witnessed, but it must have been well into September. Nothing had indicated a change of season: no hint that the autumn equinox was not far off. Everything in that charred landscape still spoke of summer, everything, that is, except a slight truce from the wringing heat of solstice and a scarcely perceptible advance of sunset. Everyone had been remarking on the phenomenally long sojourn of the storks this year. The birds too must have been deluded by the amazing summer into thinking that warm days would never cease. What subconscious intimations of the shift of the Earth’s axis had told them that it was time to go? A drop in temperature, moisture in the air, an assembly of vapours, a warning formation of a distant cumulous, or a faint breeze from an ominous quarter?”
“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love—that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
1907: Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris writes to his wife, Clara:
“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
1934: The 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor in Bulgaria sees a vast cloud of storks heading south:
“I don’t know the exact date of the passing I had just witnessed, but it must have been well into September. Nothing had indicated a change of season: no hint that the autumn equinox was not far off. Everything in that charred landscape still spoke of summer, everything, that is, except a slight truce from the wringing heat of solstice and a scarcely perceptible advance of sunset. Everyone had been remarking on the phenomenally long sojourn of the storks this year. The birds too must have been deluded by the amazing summer into thinking that warm days would never cease. What subconscious intimations of the shift of the Earth’s axis had told them that it was time to go? A drop in temperature, moisture in the air, an assembly of vapours, a warning formation of a distant cumulous, or a faint breeze from an ominous quarter?”
