AS WINTER COMES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18084, 30 May 1923, Page 8

AS WINTER COMES.

[ _ If the frost, and the clear mornings and the ,nip in the air mean that Winter, the season of sere old age, is quickly marching on, then winter is joy indeed, despite the blue hands and the red noses and the cost of coal and the inability to hold a pen when work begins for the day. In all sunshine is' joy, for light is the joy of existence as darkness is the bane, and the sun of this time-, not to he named winter yet, is a calm sun, a serene sun, not a wonderfully warming sun, but the essence of brightness and the beginning of all laughter. i Clouds obscure the sky, and some deep concealed grievance appears and gnaws at mentality : it rains, and the man, the master, wallows over the golf course and I causes chaos on his return home; j but let it clear—and the birds ' sing again ; the brown verdure of autumn bravely awaits its further dissolution; the grass lifts a tired blade or so in defiance of the over-nearing frost.

All is glorious in the- country, from the blue hills, mist shrouded, to the rivers and the creeks which are more translucent, more beautiful, each peblile seeming more delicate than the other. The reverie of Autumn —late Autumn, can hut. lead the thinker into happy moods, for at the bottom of al! his thoughts is the one, compelling, ever present, one so full of hope. It i- s this: old _agc comes like a. winter, yet with old ago the beauty of: the autumn is prolonged, and the sunlit winter conies in so slowly as to be imperceptible. so that at the end, the tired body, after the last frost j

lias cleared and the last leaf fallen, sees the gentle Springapproach. so sweetly and quietly that the quickening Summer means nothing but happiness and peace.

Surely the “winter of man’s discontent” could not be the winter of sunshine? The cool evening of Autumn brings not a thought but that is hopeful of a winter with bright days; and life’s cool evening- is as that of the season, ldeath does not come with the Winter, for it is itself the Spring, the Spring whicn will herald in the glorious Summer, and as wee buds and shoots show through the winter’s lack lustre, dour branches, so some beauty peeps through the lattice of seared age. The bright winter may mean for the materialist nothing but his golf and his walks and his football. He may never pause to think of himself as the plant that blooms, withers with Autumn, to be re-born with Spring-; he may not realise that old Time with his scythe watches his drives, follows close behind him, counts the goals he scores.