" Mr. Brander Matthews writes: "An American with a sense of
the poetic cannot but prefer to the imported word 'autumn' the native
and more logical word 'fall,' which the British have strangely suffered
to drop into disuse." Well, "autumn" was a sufficiently early
importation. "Our ancestors," wrote Lowell (quoted by Mr. Matthews in
the same article), "unhappily could bring over no English better than
Shakespeare's;" and in Shakespeare's (and Chaucer's) English they
brought over "autumn." The word has inherent beauty as well as splendid
poetical associations. I doubt whether even Shakespeare could have made
out of "fall" so beautiful a line as
"The teeming autumn, big with rich increase."
I doubt whether Keats, had he written an _Ode to the Fall_, would have
produced quite such a miraculous poem as that which begins
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."
Still, Mr. Matthews is quite right in saying that "fall" has a poetic
value, a suggestion, an atmosphere of its own. I wonder, with him, why
we dropped it, and I see no smallest reason why we should not recover
it. The British literary patriotism which makes a point of never saying
"fall" seems to me just as mistaken as the American literary patriotism
(if such there be) that makes a merit of never saying "autumn.
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