Ou-yang Hsiu

“ For autumn is Nature’s chief executioner; and its symbol is darkness. It has the temper of steel; and its symbol is a sharp sword. It is the avenging angel, riding upon an atmosphere of death. As spring is the epoch of growth, so autumn is the epoch of maturity:―
Its strains decay,
And melt away.
In a dying, dying fall. [3]
And sad is the hour when maturity is passed; for that which passes its prime must die.
“Still what is this to plants and trees, which fade away in their due season?...But stay: there is man, man the divinest of all things. ”

“ Has man an adamantine frame, that he should outlast the trees of the field? Yet after all who is it, save himself, that steals his strength away? Tell me, O boy, what right has man to accuse his autumn blast? ”

“ A hundred cares wreck his heart: countless anxieties trace their wrinkles on his brow: until his inmost self is bowed beneath the burden of life. And swifter still he hurries to decay when vainly striving to attain the unattainable, or grieving over his ignorance of that which can never be known. ”