At the summer night has a loveliness to which the 

 ^ S *tvF °^ l eas t sensitive must in some degree yield, 

 creates a spell which must trouble even a 

 dulled imagination, as moonlight and the 

 faintest rippling breath will trouble un- 

 quickened pools into a sudden beauty. It 

 is a matter of temperament, of mood and 

 circumstance rather, where one would find 

 oneself, at the rising of the moon, in the 

 prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a 

 pinewood shelving to a calm sea breaking in 

 continuous foam : or among mountain soli- 

 tudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening 

 to a green darkness, till the sudden moon rests 

 athwart one hill-shoulder like a bronze shield, 

 and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an 

 amber glow along all the heights : or on great 

 moors, where one can see for leagues upon 

 leagues, and hear nothing but the restless 

 crying of the curlew, the screech of a heron, 

 the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive sounds 

 and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal 

 solitudes. Or, again, on a white roadway 

 passing through beech-woods : or on a gorse- 

 set common, with the ch lining of a nightjar 

 filling the dusk with the unknown surge and 

 beat in one's own heart : or on the skirts of 

 thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, 

 with perhaps the loud breathing and trampling 



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