The colors of autumn

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I
love - that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting
about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the
pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very
footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give
us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious
autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly
about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”   - George Eliot (from a letter to Miss Lewis, 1841)

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the
day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves
and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the
thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar
and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that
season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt
at description, or some lines of feeling.”    - Jane Austen (from Persuasion, 1817)

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (The American Notebooks, 1842)

Tilly agrees.