The wistaria is faded

The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but this is the season of the heather in flower, and on this calm and gentle evening the caressing wind brings you the perfumes of poor Campine.
Love them and breathe them in while brooding over its fate; its soil is bare and harsh and the wind wars on it; pools make their holes in it; the sand preys on it, and the little left to it, it yet gives.
Once in autumn, we lived with it, with its plain and its woods, with its rain and its sky, even to December when the Christmas angels crossed its legend with mighty strokes of their wings.
Your heart became more steadfast there, simpler and more human; we loved the people of its old villages, and the women who spoke to us of their great age and of spinning-wheels fallen from use, worn out by their hands.
Our calm house on the misty heath was bright to look upon and ready in its welcome; and dear to us were its roof and its door and its threshold and its hearth blackened by the smoky peat.
When night spread out its total splendour over the vast and pale and innumerable somnolence, the silence taught us lessons, the glow of which our soul has never forgotten.
Because we felt more lonely in the vast plain, the dawns and the evenings sank more deeply into us; our eyes were franker, our hearts were gentler and filled to the brim with the fervour of the world.
We found happiness by not asking for it; even the sadness of the days was good for us, and the few sun-rays of that end of autumn gladdened us all the more because they seemed weak and tired.
The wistaria is faded and the hawthorn dead; but this is the season of the heather in flower. This evening, remember, and let the caressing wind bring you the perfumes of poor Campine.

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