Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” was a literary breakthrough for the era, published posthumously in October, 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly. The essay highlighted a natural phenomenon familiar to his potential lecture attendees and readers, having already been presented as a lecture addressed to seversl local audiences that may have reflected more on aesthetics and not extrapolated deeper meaning. Thoreau began early in 1862 to polish the essay for intended publication, perhaps conscious of his increasing frail health. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in May, 1862.
Thoreau’s essay places autumn in a unique literary setting: geographical, natural, cultural, aesthetic, and ultimately philosophical.
As Thoreau notes in the essay: “The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry. A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.”
Thoreau intends to describe a larger and more meaningful richness to the autumnal phenomenon. He notes the subtle changes in nature begin in late summer, as early as August, which he describes in an essay section he calls “The Purple Grasses.” The section following formally announces autumn: “The Red Maple.” Thoreau makes the point that the leaf itself ripens, not just the fruit overtly changing color. But the season has a deeper truth to convey. We must embrace the aesthetics but embrace, too, the entirety of meaning in the dying leaves. Can we appreciate the lesson of impermanence, a lesson derived from direct observation, not from book reading. Can we come directly to reflect upon the leaves.
“How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”
Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints” appears in many book anthologies and in the original Atlantic Magazine: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1862/10/10-60/131953888.pdf