By H.B Marriot Watson

THERE comes a day in the autumn season, and somewhere, I think, near the middle of September, when, at a sweep, the year unfolds its future. Till then it has lived at full strength, ominous of no failure through all its changes, with no menacing memento mori: with no doubt, no question, of its own absolute sufficiency. Virile even in its excesses, it has laid with an easy air the eternal forces of dissolution; so that we in its bosom have grown to forget them. So much of seeming power has there been in its lavish performance that we have never considered defeat. Yet upon this day of humiliation it is come, and the strong year bows to its mortality with silent resignation. What an abject to-day, and how proud but yesterday! It is strange the discovery should be so swift and so sudden; it comes in a flash to the year and those that trust in it. There is no quiet ebbing of the full life. The tide stands still, turns in the moment, and behold it racing seaward! This day is surely known to all of us. You remember that hour in the sudden gloaming when the miasma of the autumn crept through your nostrils. Last night it was a full moon, and looking from my window I saw the stars flicker out, and felt the cool air enwrap me. It was summer then, and I had the dreams of a summer night; there was a warmth in the blood of the earth, and its smile was sweet and gracious. One could lean over and listen to the year’s fresh confidences; one saw its young thoughts upon its face. Nature was unsecretive, buoyant, overbearing. To-night she is grown older, and her age is on her sober visage. A little ago, as I passed into my garden to the roses, the dusk fell and I stumbled among the flower beds. A mist rose quickly from the quiet earth, and there was the savour of decay in my throat. There were roses here last night: I watched them from my window dipping in the breeze. But now I cannot find them; perhaps it is the dusk. Surely last night there were birds in the elms and the sweetbriar. I vow it was a thrush I heard calling to the moon for the lack of a nightingale. Now there is silence; the dreary mist is creeping higher, and I see the newly lighted street-lamps dimming in the haze. A chill is mounting in my bones. The tide is running seaward; the year is persuaded of death.

At this unexpected hour of her defeat is all evil triumphant. In one moment, as it were, the year sickens, and conscious of her destiny, falls to thinking on the grave. Through the breach in her fine vitality rise abysmal vapours of the underworld—out of the patient earth the fog and the deadly chill; nor shall anything prevail against them longer. Unto Nature is revealed now her own impotence, and she must henceforth go with her hand to her heart; stricken with eld she must limp forward to her tomb. It is long months since we knew her young and debonair, when each of her movements was tremulous with vigour, vivid with significance. How vain she was, how riotous, how merry! She did not spare her thews in the whirl, but drained all the pleasures. And yet she has worn the same gay front into her fuller maturity; she has been at one pitch till this collapse. And we have excused this extravagance, holding her justified by the grace of her very joyousness. Where are they now, those vivacious measures and that noble vanity? See this pitiful creature choking in the damp shadows, and take heed unto yourself. For our lives have been enclosed in hers; and her abasement, is it not also ours? We have laughed with her and have danced with her; with her too shall we not weep and become the poor ghosts of our younger selves? Nay, though we would not, we are so constrained; our blood has lost the quality of youth. The splendour has faded from the fabric of our dream, from the world is gone the charm that once held us intent upon the nearest pleasure. It is not only that your body carries the marks of another year, but one might say a certain elasticity of the mind dies year by year with Nature. You will not resume your occupations comfortably to-night. Do you think there is not a tinge of sadness in your laughter over your favourite humourist? Has not your study an air of melancholy? Your pictures speak of the vanity of this passing life. From your shelves a thousand still voices of your books summon you to the thought of final rest. To what end is this infinite trouble? Of a truth you are a weary soul fighting for you know not whether good or evil. In your accustomed chair your thoughts flow inwards, and you see the tissue of desires and aims you call yourself. If you can find in this moment one worthy aspiration, one feeling other than of clay, then shall you find the night a little clearer, the year a little younger. But your poignant introspection will perceive the weariness and the folly and the vanity of being. Your soul is cold and clammy; you think it on the brink of death, and cry out upon the horror of your creation. How meanly selfward now do all your habits show! how tiresome your slender virtues! how misspent your indulgences! It is but a few weeks since you had the disposition to pride yourself on life as a very sweet benevolence of God. Then you were sure of your footway—saw in it a swift, short path to golden gates. You mounted on your brave ambitions and soared to pinnacles, doubting not the good of them. Have you no questionings now, when one by one your stars have sailed into the mist? Should you ride now so high as those month-old thoughts, would you tremble and despair at the mortality of your office? would you suffer of surfeit and weariness? It would seem so on this grey autumn evening.

But perhaps you will not have these untoward thoughts. Perhaps these changes are but the prelude of divers new delights, and your chair is no seat of melancholy, but a place to forecast the corporeal pleasures of the winter. You may dwell upon the rich charnel colours with a delicate thrill. You have the secret of survival, so, and are the proper denizen of this world, seeing your correspondence with Nature is so perfect. In truth it is an unwholesome spirit in which to take her decadence, which, since it has recurred through aeons, must be nobly wise. Is it so? Rots she towards perfection year by year? And is the whole universe mutable to a supreme glory?

It is a trifle changes us. A wind swaggering down the street has blown the drift into rags, and I see my stars again. They are still white and shining. NEÆRA’S HAIR

VIEWED with a quiet judgment, as it were in the placid observation of art, I cannot affect a genuine passion for her hair. Its intrinsic worth is of the highest, I acknowledge, and it would go upon the market at a notable price. But, to be honest, I have never taken fire save at the touch of something very human, and the absolute or the ideal, however consummate, I have always reckoned in the very coldest values. The sheer perfection of a form or colour, the exquisite achievement of some independent and impersonal beauty, has always seemed to me desolate and uninspiring. It is the easiest affair to execute marmoreal contours, and to follow them with the eye is to get only the integral interpretations of sense; but relate them to a human soul, and the very devil is in your emotions. Of themselves the tresses of a woman’s hair discover no particular charm, but may be simulated in a score of factories. There is, to be sure, a certain distinction in colours, as there are also degrees of fineness and variations of abundance; but properties of this sort away from the human subject are ineloquent and ineffectual. Were it not for her own rare beauty and the individual framework of her sex, I fear Neæra’s hair would be of little moment in my life; whereas it is now the supreme end and finish of her loveliness, for which I profess a taste something unwarrantable and very inordinate.

‘God,’ I have said, while riveted upon the confusion of her face, ‘contrived three wonders in this creature, woman: the one her eyes; her long and slender outline for the second; and—to crown all—her hair. The rest, maybe. He rendered by some deputy.’ The thought is a superfluous blasphemy, the merest ecstasy of contemplation, in no wise the issue of my calmer moments. As at a sober distance from her presence I resolve within myself the complex riddle of my feelings for her, I can see now how unessential, how immaterial, is that one grace of hers that takes me to the upper heights of passion. Her hair is the most idle accident of her composition, an after-thought in her design, a supererogant fancy, nothing warm nor intimate, imposed upon the full, rich body of her breathing humanity. All other parts of her have part in her; her hair alone is distressingly exterior. I can hardly imagine there is one freer than herself to the mercy of tempestuous and aëry humours. I suppose she is more supremely sensitive to her own thoughts than any of her sex since Eve: the slightest flutter of her heart flashes on the instant in her eyes, and thrills through her delicate flesh. More sensations flit over her changing features than you would credit to the feelings of an hour. Her expressions are her soul, and she herself is an oblation to the visual passions. But in all those outward offices her hair has no part; the passions in full cry sweep through her, leaving it unruffled. It is extrinsic and imparticular, the veriest appanage to an unerring mirror of her inner self, of a cold essential beauty, changeless, subservient, gestureless, and dead. There is no fancy nor mood in her soul but twinkles a moment in her eyes, which are a record surer than might be devised of science. Each mute thought, demure or wild, rebellious or serene, leaps in a dart to the surface of that blue, flashes and drowns in those deep and silent wells. Nor is there a strenuous emotion that spares her slender frame. I have seen Fear break from her eyes, pass, and run trembling down her body. Disdain has gleamed through those enchanted windows, and quivered on her fastidious shoulders. From those clear deeps Anger has sprung forth upon me, and her bosom has rocked to its frail foundations. And there too I have watched Love circling as the great lights dancing on a summer sea. There never lived on earth a creature of such rare poise.

And her long tresses sleep quietly upon her head. From all these fascinating exhibitions of herself they stand apart, dumb sentinels on her loveliness. I could admit no glory in them separate from her, and of God’s three gifts they are the least of note. And yet they stir me as though they were the prime factors in her beauty. To gaze upon her hair is to break the last bonds of my senses, and to set my heart crying in the night. The lustrous brown, with its swift passages of gold, sits demure upon a dainty brow, soft, wreathing, and all-fragrant. Ten thousand wavering threads go in and out together, burning and shining and flickering on her head. Her hair caresses her; it runs in a company of myriads, it curves in innumerable tiny arcs, it droops in a multitude of intertwined festoons; it rises in slow curls, it falls in minute and tremulous cascades; it is of infinite complexity, of manifold audacity. And on a day when the warm summer gusts are chasing through the woods I have seen it, free of its catches, stirring in the wind, a stream of fire in the sun’s eye. At such a time it wakes into life and blows to the air. It is as vital then as the gay features of her face; at each breath it swerves, and it tosses; it riots with the wind; it runs atremble down the breezes. It keeps high holiday against heaven, and leaps, a merry frolic, to the sky. Ah, then is it instinct with life and light. Then is she bound with a cowl of gold: a hood of motley gold—gold upon her head and gold upon her shoulders, dancing gold about her arms and bosom.

One confidence contents me in Neæra’s hair. So tranquilly it rests on her pretty head, that it will suffer no thought of change. It shall abide against the press of Time, when all else fails. Years shall not touch it, nor filch any fragrance from those coils. In the face of Death shall this fine grace be left her: change shall bereave her of her eloquent form; the eyes shall narrow and grow dim; but untarnished, unimpaired, surely that golden hair shall abide through all decay.