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FRANCESCA CARRARA.
79

she passed along the fields and entered the dim glades of the forest, she felt what a new life had awakened within her. She no longer turned a cold and dispirited gaze on the objects around—she could enter into and rejoice in all natural loveliness. The magnificent autumn, the royal spendthrift of the year, was now wearing that proud regality so soon to depart into darkness and decay; and this it is, despite its purple and crimson, which laugh the glories of Tyre to scorn, that renders autumn the most melancholy of the seasons—the others have a further-looking hope. Winter softens into spring, spring blushes into summer, and summer ripens into autumn,—all going on into increased good. But autumn darkens into winter, and is the only quarter that ends as the destroyed and the desolate. There is in autumn no hope, that prophetic beautifier of the foregone year. But just now, the glorious conqueror of wood and field was in the first flush of its radiant hours; every object shone out transparent in the clear blue air of the bright brief noon. If the hedges had lost the may and the honeysuckle, the scarlet berries of the hip and the haw shone like carved coral—the rich orchard of the birds; the slender bindweed wound about with its pale and delicate flowers—so delicate, yet so deadly;