The Upton Letters by A.C. Benson — Read

DEAR HERBERT, -- It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels. But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing.

We left the high-road and soon were in the wood -- the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house -- Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you -- came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of mass.