Ir is always hard to have to sit in an office in fine weather. But hardest of all, perhaps, when the first real autumn day comes; when the sun is brilliant but tempered, the air crisp and still, and the mellow light invests even the most matter-of-fact scenes with a soft beauty, not devoid of melancholy, yet full of unutterable suggestion. There is no time of the year when the venerable landscape of China appears so full of romance. The autumnal haze softens the rugged and too often treeless outlines of the hills and paints warm tints down their sides; and the brown creeks take suen colour from the sky as makes us forget their muddiness. Even the flat monotony of Shanghai's surroundings, which it is not easy to admire, is endued with a certain charm. But it is for English scenery that one most yearns in autumn, for the sight of the cock pheasant strutting among his admiring ladies under the shelter of a little brown spinney; for the stubble fields and the thin smoke rising from a village -in the valley. below; for the grayling, most sporting of fish, and the clear streams of Itchen and influence.
Browning longed to be in England ''now that April's here', but was none the less inspired in the line '"'Oh good gigantic smile of the old brown earth this autumn morning'', and the verses that begin "'where the yellow end of evening smiles" are certainly of the autumn. The ''Iylls of a King'' to a very large extent undoubtedly were set in autumn scenery. Nightingales, of course, belong to June; and yet curiously enough, two of the most beautiful lines that Keats, or anyone else, ever wrote—Charmed' magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn —are redolent of autumn.
Among the many exquisite stories told in the Bible, there is none more beautiful than that of Ruth, which is wholly laid in autumn scenery; for, though we are not told so in so" many words, Naomi's interview with her two daughters-in-law must have occured in autumn, and the rest of the book is all harvest time. Shakespeare, as a Warwickshire man, would know well how perfect an English autumn can be. and many of his plays must have been written unconsciously under its influence. In "Hamlet" and 'Lear' black winter predominates. But the "'Tempest'', one of the ripest and loveliest of the products of his genius, is full of autumn feeling, as, we think, ''is ''The Merchant of Venice."
Test. It needs a good banking account to enjoy these things properly; and the creature comforts of life are more plentiful and more easily realized in China than they are just now in England. But man never is but always to be blessed'' and the dream is all the _more alluring for being unattainable.
Poets, supposed traditionally to worship the spring, to reserve their highest enthusiasm for "Pan with flocks with fruits Fxmona crowned'', are really 10. Tésy. sub tio the autumnal In China, apart from its natural beauty, autumn is wel come on many counts. It i. our renascence after the fierce heat of summer. Carpets are put down again; for all outdoor sports the temperature is ideal; and in the evening the pleasure of having a fire is all the greater because it seems just a wee bit extravagant. And politically, a region of thought from which we can-never get very far away, the atmosphere is as much quieter as it is climatically, with the high pressures spreading all along the coast to of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.