Autumn: the year's last, loveliest smile.

Bryant’s line personifies autumn as a final, gracious expression of beauty before the year’s decline into winter. Calling it the “last” smile acknowledges transience and the approach of loss, while “loveliest” suggests a mature, heightened beauty—color, clarity, and harvest—made more poignant by its brevity. The phrasing compresses a Romantic-era sensibility: nature is not merely scenery but a moral and emotional register, capable of mirroring human experience. The quote often functions as a meditation on endings that are not purely bleak—an argument that culmination can be radiant, and that farewell may carry its own distinct sweetness.