Of Taste and Tenderness

After all that fire, I need the coolness and the calm of autumn woods (though the color is a kind of conflagration too).  I would walk all afternoon, lingeringly, away from the aggravations of the workplace and the polling booth, like Jane Austen’s happy walker here:

The pleasure of her walk arose from viewing 
the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered edges, and from repeating to herself 
some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness.

 —Jane Austen (Persuasion) 

And yes, preferably with a dog to keep me silent company.

images:  Drum Castle Woods in Autumn, Richard Slessor

     Wendover Woods in Autumn, Robert Firth