On Halloween 2023, taking it to harvest time, Autumn, and the churn of seasons.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (d 1825)

On Autumn, Barbauld being the female equivalent of a polymath of sorts, has a few words:

"Farewell the softer hours, Spring's opening blush
And Summer's deeper glow, the shepherd's pipe
Tuned to the murmurs of a weeping spring,
And song of birds, and gay enameled fields--
Farewll!  'Tis now the sickness of the year,
Not to be medicined by the skillful hand."

The impetus towards a change of temperature, or even a warm temperature as a "blush" brings us into a outward appearance context, and yet we can feel too the blood in our faces, making an inward context in terms of our internal feelings.

Indeed, in her time agriculture and commerce: things to be done by the people that made the world pump along.  A lot of manual labor.

Barbauld's own imput was along the lines of her role as a teacher and her side function as an activist, speaking and doing on things that niggled at her in the real world.  If only so many of us were demarcated so in our time, to recognize productive things, day-to-day things, the "core business" and then to give the extra time to the far future, as Bob Dylan says, "testing eternity", and how this feels like salvation he says--

--something of the long game and an inner peace with one's own precepts and doings, like the providential nod from the Lord from On High, but something too of inner peace.

Of "summer's deeper glow", we have not too much of that here in the Southeastern USA, to see the weather turn for two months TOO HOT and make everything wither and sag before the weather turns and the leaves re-color in a welcome respite.  Indeed, we become accustomed to sleeping with our socks off for so many weeks, and then the real world ticks us on the shoulder and reminds us that the state of nature, as Marcus Aurelius and the old philosopher's say, is constant states of change in matter.

And as Barbauld notes below, this endless churn of nature between states of change is a "tempest".

"...The naked trees
Admit the tempest; rent is Nature's robe;
Fast, fast, the blush of Summer fades away
From her wan cheek, and scarce a flower remains
To deck her bosom; Winter follows close,
pressing impatient on, and with rude breath
Fans her discolored tresses.  Yet not all
Of grace and beauty from the falling year
Is torn ungenial....."