comes sobbing through the trees?

Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat off the fading
leaves and flatten them into shapeless patterns on the soaking floor.
Fall and slant and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, through
the creaking branches, blow about the whispering corners; parley there
outside my window; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hiding, and if
I am sad, sigh with me and sob.

May one not indulge in gentle melancholy these closing days of autumn,
and invite the weather in, without being taken to task for it? One
should no more wish to escape from the sobering influence of the
October days than from the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the
wide wonder of the stars.

"If winds have wailed and skies wept tears,
To poet's vision dim,
'T was that his own sobs filled his ears,
His weeping blinded him"--

of course! And blessed is the man who finds winds that will wail with
him, and skies that love him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves his
friends and next of kin a great deal of perfunctory weeping.

There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October. A
single, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacity
for joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still ache
for more. So it happens that June is only a memory of individual days,
while October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a spirit, a soul,
beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So much is already gone, so many things
seem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the wooded
hillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the very
sunshine of October.

In June the day itself was the great event. It is not so in October.
Then its coming and going were attended with ceremony and splendor, the
dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all the pageantry and pomp
of a regal fete. Now the day has lessened, and breaks tardily and
without a dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades into the
night. The warp of dusk runs through even its sunlit fabric from
daybreak to dark.

It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, this
screen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of
the fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October mood of things.

For it is the inner mood of things that has changed as well as the
outward face of things. The very heart of the hills feels it. The
hush that f