More and more, as the tranquil years went by, Percy found himself able
to draw a quiet satisfaction from the regularity, the even sureness,
with which, in every year, one season succeeded to another. In
boyhood he had felt always a little sad at the approach of autumn.
The yellowing leaves of the lime trees, the creeper that flushed to
so deep a crimson against the old grey walls, the chrysanthemums that
shed so prodigally their petals on the smooth green lawn--all these
things, beautiful and wonderful though they were, were somehow a
little melancholy also, as being signs of the year's decay. Once, when
he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he had overheard a friend of
the family say to his father "How the days are drawing in!"--a remark
which set him thinking deeply, with an almost morbid abandonment to
gloom, for quite a long time. He had not then grasped the truth that
in exactly the proportion in which the days draw in they will, in
the fullness of time, draw out. This was a lesson that he mastered in
later years. And, though the waning of summer never failed to touch
him with the sense of an almost personal loss, yet it seemed to him a
right thing, a wise ordination, that there should be these recurring
changes. Those men and women of whom the poet tells us that they lived
in "a land where it was always afternoon"--could they, Percy often
wondered, have felt quite that thankfulness which on a fine afternoon
is felt by us dwellers in ordinary climes? Ah, no! Surely it is
because we are made acquainted with the grey sadness of twilight, the
solemn majesty of the night-time, the faint chill of the dawn, that
we set so high a value on the more meridional hours. If there were no
autumn, no winter, then spring and summer would lose, not all indeed,
yet an appreciable part of their sweet savour for us. Thus, as his
mind matured, Percy came to be very glad of the gradual changes of the
year. He found in them a rhythm, as he once described it in his diary;