How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days. ~John Burroughs

Fall blew into the Shenandoah Valley last night with a big temperature drop and some much-needed rain. For most of the summer the wind is silent, but it’s really talking now, whistling around the old red barn and rattling the house.  The swifts still swoop over our pond in vigorous pursuit of insects and we’ll have many summery days yet before autumn settles in for good, but the season is a changing which inspires me to post some lovely autumnal pics with some of my favorite quotes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
~John Donne
Elegy IX–The Autumnal.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
~William Cullen Bryant

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
~John Keats Ode to Autumn.

(***Pic of the Alleghenies taken by my mother)

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz

Autumn’s the mellow time.
~William Allingham

Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.~Albert Camus

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
~Faith Baldwin

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
~Emily Dickinson
Nature XXVII, Autumn.

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
~Emily Bronte

And from one of my favorite authors:

“It was one of those autumn days, crisp and clear, when the sky has a pellucid quality which is rarely seen in other seasons.  The hedge maple had turned a brilliant yellow and the beech trees above the hedges were a deeper gold. A few hardy summer wild flowers such as knapweed, yarrow, and cranesbill still starred the verges and banks, brave survivors of summer heat and the ferocity of the recent storms.”  ~Miss Read,Changes at Fairacre