A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year.
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October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.
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How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last.
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A single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.
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Its leaves have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, “When shall we redden?”

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As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this bright afternoon, I see… the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted.
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Now, too, the first of October, or later, the Elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.
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Some morning … there is perhaps a harder frost … and now, when the … wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground … Some trees … appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously … and … reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of autumn’s wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall of leaves there has been in the night … The streets are thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen Elm-leaves make a … pavement under our feet.
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A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks…
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When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves … I find my boat all covered … with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. … When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface … a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water … and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river. … Often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them.
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Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day … I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove … I … find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers … And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted leaves…
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For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know…: the early blushing Maple, the Poison-Sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the Poplars, the brilliant red Huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are painted … The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day … see in what showers they come floating down!
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It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down … painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. …One wonders if the time will ever come when men … will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with such … serenity…