The beautiful English autumn has therefore drawn to a close! There is nothing to match the gentle soothing charms of mid-October in these southern counties. An afternoon walk along the picturesque banks of the Severn, or beside the Avon, a river which Shakespeare's memory has made almost sacred, or over the lovely Surrey hills, is the most beautiful, most useful sort of relaxation that the spirit can enjoy, exhausted by books and by the wearing bustle of life.

There is something here of that ethereal peace of which the pagan poets dreamed in their ineffable glimpses of Elysium: only the particular nature of the North, the Saxon lines of its architecture, the layout of the fields, afford the romantic and elegiac note which is missing in the Latin landscape.

One walks in a soft light, in a melancholy golden haze, in an almost painfully tender air: the green of the endless lawns one treads, the restful sleepy lawns under the spreading branches of the ancient aristocratic trees that stand solemn and isolated and immobile in religious withdrawal, leads the soul insensibly towards something very pure. There is a silence of extreme limpidity, like that which must reign beyond the clouds, a silence that does not exist in hot climates, where the incessant rising of sap seems to make a vague murmur, a silence which rests upon the spirit like a caress.