Dear golden year! I am sorry
to see its face so changed and withering: it has held so much for us
both. Yet I am feeling vigorous and quite like spring. All the seasons
have their marches, with buffetings and border-forays: this is an autumn
march-wind; before long I shall be out into it, and up the hill to look
over at your territory and you being swept and garnished for the seven
devils of winter.
"Roaring gray" suggests Tennyson, whom I do very much associate with
this sort of weather, not so much because of passages in "Maud" and "In
Memoriam" as because I once went over to Swainston, on a day such as
this when rooks and leaves alike hung helpless in the wind; and heard
there the story of how Tennyson, coming over for his friend's funeral,
would not go into the house, but asked for one of Sir John's old hats,
and with that on his head sat in the garden and wrote almost the best of
his small lyrics:
"Nightingales warbled without,
Within was weeping for thee."
The "old hat" was mentioned as something humorous: yet an old glove is
the most accepted symbol of faithful absence: and why should head rank
lower than hand? What creatures of convention we are!
There is an old notion, quite likely to be true, that a nightcap carries
in it the dreams of its first owner, or that anything laid over a
sleeper's head will bring away the dream.
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