The third season of the year, when, in Europe and North America, leaves turn to yellow and red and begin to drop from the trees; apples and pears ripen and a smell of rottenness and wood-fires comes into the air with a warning of winter as a sudden deep chill. This is the season so sweetly rendered by Keats in his "Ode to Autumn".
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
