18th century parody on autumn

Now that pale-eyed autumn is once more a sojourner to our shores, treading the joyful grapes of summer into bitter wine, weaving the tapestry of regret with the distaff of memory, and, like a mourning bride, lighting the first tender lamp of melancholy in the hearth of the soul, it behooves we mortals to return to the contemplation of that serene tableau of autumnal ennui which is like the obverse of vernal splendour, and, like it,  precedes and acts as herald of a sterner season, which is even like that season in the life of man unto which all due obeisance must in time be paid. 

What matters, therefore, if in due time we are made poorer and our share somewhat diminished? To what god may we justly attribute such reversals if not to that deity which rules every pantheon with an irreversible will, namely, that first primal god, Chronos, he that wielded the pitiless sickle that with all due circumspection and in full measure, reaped? 

Such too is our measure and our fate, we that are subject to the mild or harsh weathers of the passing moment, and those whims and caprices that, finding their genesis in caterpillar-like sloth, give birth, betimes, to passing beautiful butterflies of fancy bedecked in much splendour, and that, like those short-lived insects, find themselves wind-borne and storm-tossed, given ultimately, but not as seems inappropriate to their origin and destiny, to futility. What but their pithy dance among the flowers is fair, yet but it is short, and in like manner, we mortals enjoy a temporary season, finding only, in such dance and delight, the bitter pollen of experience, culled from so many living flowers of circumstance, whose paraphernalia and appurtenances, giving the appearance of solidity, are like the petals of those selfsame blooms, shaken loose at a moment's notice, and descending once more to a lowly soil.

Even now, brethren, is the leaf descended, and the flitting flies of proud blazoned august given way, to that first chill which bequeaths the equinox with a breath of waiting decline, promising, but still deftly and subtly, the riotous, the dionysian, and the gay, among the sere and withered, the due traits and character of the harvest season, the diabolic Samhain, the ripe apple, the treaded grapes, and the arbor flaming with gold and scarlet, flourishing and blooming with the fire and fullness of the year, a ruddy festival before a long sleep, a banquet accompanied by majestic music, always with a note of melancholy in the finer and nobler chords, played relentlessly, and in that relentlessness, a quickening of the pulse leading only to a faster-coming weariness. 

Autumnus venit; Aestate fugit.