But though the least pleasant sight connected with the coming on of Winter in this month is, to see the leaves, that have so gladdened the groves all the Summer long, falling everywhere around us, withered and dead,--that sight is accompanied by another which is too often overlooked. Though most of the leaves fall in Winter, and the stems and branches which they beautified stand bare, many of them remain all the year round, and look brighter and fresher now than they did in Spring, in virtue of the contrasts that are everywhere about them. Indeed the cultivation of Evergreens has become so general with us of late years, that the home enclosures about our country dwellings, from the proudest down to even the poorest, are seldom to be seen without a plentiful supply, which we now, in this month, first begin to observe, and acknowledge the value of. It must be a poor plot of garden-ground indeed that does not now boast its clumps of Winter-blowing Laurestinus; its trim Holly-bushes, bright with their scarlet berries; or its tall Spruce Firs, shooting up their pyramid of feathery branches beside the low, ivy-grown porch.
Of this last-named profuse ornamenter of whatever is permitted to afford it support (the Ivy), we now too everywhere perceive the beautifully picturesque effects: though there is one effect of it, also perceived about this time, which I cannot persuade myself to be reconciled to: I mean where the trunk of a tall tree is bound about with Ivy almost to its top, which during the Summer has scarcely been distinguished as a separate growth, but which now, when the other leaves are fallen, and the outspread branches stand bare, offers to the eye, not a contrast, but a contradiction.
But let us not dwell on any thing in disfavour of Ivy,--which is one of the prime boasts of the village scenery of our island, and which, even at this season of the year, offers pictures to the eye that cannot be paralleled elsewhere. Perhaps as a single object of sight, there is nothing which gives so much innocent pleasure to so many persons, as an English Village Church, when the Ivy has held undisputed possession of it for many years, and has hung its fantastic banners all about it. There is a charm about an object of this kind, which it is as difficult to resist as to explain the secret of. _We_ will attempt neither; but instead, continue our desultory observations.