September 2008

Summer into Autumn

It had been a glorious summer with
bright, hot sunny weather;
and now the year was fading away as
seasonably into mellow days,
with mornings of silver mists and clear frosty nights.
The blooming look of the time of flowers
was past and gone;
but instead there were even richer tints
abroad in the sun-coloured leaves,
the lichens, the golden-blossomed furze;
if it was the time of fading,
there was glory in the decay.

by Elizabeth Gaskell, 19th Century British Unitarian novelist. This excerpt is from her story “The Doom of the Griffiths” as it appears in A Green Sound: Nature Writing from the Living Tradition of Unitarian Universalism, edited by William Lach and published in 1992 by Skinner House Books. Available from the CLF Library.