Flowers are becoming rare--a few daisies in the fields, some blue
or yellow chicories and colchicums, some wild geraniums growing among
fragments of old walls, and the brown berries of the privet--this is all
we were able to find. In the fields they are digging potatoes, beating
down the nuts, and beginning the apple harvest. The leaves are thinning
and changing color; I watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on
the plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the thickly-strewn
turf with shades of reddish-brown. We are nearing the end of the fine
weather; the coloring is the coloring of late autumn; there is no need
now to keep out of the sun. Everything is soberer, more measured, more
fugitive, less emphatic. Energy is gone, youth is past, prodigality at
an end, the summer over. The year is on the wane and tends toward
winter; it is once more in harmony with my own age and position, and
next Sunday it will keep my birthday. All these different consonances
form a melancholy harmony.
* * * * *
The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience,
and its value is measured by the sacrifices which it can extract from
the individual.
* * * * *
A young girl's love is a kind of piety.
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