Lovecraft on Autumn

What you say of the fascination of autumn is very true - and I have always felt it despite the menace of physical discomfort it brings. I love an abnormally hot October, when I can wander around through the prismatic landscape and imbibe the spell of the ancient harvest season without shivering. There is malancholy in it, but the accompanying beauty and sense of adventurous expectancy are so great as to make that quality forgivable. It is a season of almost weird retrospective, when one seizes on the unchanged objects and processes of nature - or of anciently ordered life - and half-imagines that the past which they typify is still present. The woods, the fields, the hillside orchards laden with fruit, the fields of sheaved corn, the old stone walls overgrown with flaming vine, the farmyards heaped with brilliant pumpkins and other garnerings of the year, the acrid odour of smoke, the distant notes of horn and hound across the stubbled fields and dying meadows - all these things have a potent magic for one who has known the old days and the simple folkways of an immemorial culture not yet urbanised.


H.P. Lovecraft, Sept. 2, 1931, letter to August Derleth