The night of the year approaches.

August 18

Many leaves of the cultivated cherry are turned yellow, and a very few leaves of the elm have fallen, — the dead or prematurely ripe. 

The abundant and repeated rains since this month came in have made the last fortnight and more seem like a rainy season in the tropics, — warm, still copious rains falling straight down, contrasting with the cold, driving spring rains. Now again I am caught in a heavy shower in Moore's pitch pines on edge of Great Fields, and am obliged to stand crouching under my umbrella till the drops turn to streams, which find their way through my umbrella, and the path up the hillside is all afloat, a succession of puddles at different levels, each bounded by a ridge of dead pine-needles. 

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now? The season of flowers or of promise may be said to be over, and now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The night of the year is approaching. What have we done with our talent? All nature prompts and reproves us. How early in the year it begins to be late! The sound of the crickets, even in the spring, makes our hearts beat with its awful reproof, while it encourages with its seasonable warning. It matters not by how little we have fallen behind; it seems irretrievably late. The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life. The sound of so many insects and the sight of so many flowers affect us so, — the creak of the cricket and the sight of the prunella and autumnal dandelion. They say, "For the night cometh in which no man may work."

H. D. Thoreau, August 18, 1853

What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill . . . See  August 18, 1856 ("It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, . . . so little brought to pass! "). See also . July 30 1852 (After midsummer we have a belated feeling as if we had all been idlers, and are forward to see in each sight and hear in each sound some presage of the fall, just as in middle age man anticipates the end of life.);

The night of the year is approaching. See August, 19, 1853 (" The day is an epitome of the year.")