114 Timeless Night 



lighter blossoms of the cow-parsley have vanished 

 in early June. Its blossoms loom with a duller 

 and colder light than the heads of elder-bloom ; 

 where it mingles with their lowest branches by the 

 hedge-side, the lights seem fading in the cool haunts 

 nearest earth. By the stream-sides, and all across 

 the meadows, where the reeling of the grasshopper 

 warbler sounds through the dusk, the plumes of 

 meadowsweet gleam soft and luminous like the 

 elder-bloom. All these clustered heads of small 

 blossoms have the same kind of luminous radiance 

 in the night ; they are more conspicuous from afar 

 than single corollas, and are softer when seen close 

 at hand. The tall white campion, growing in the 

 corn and on the banks among the grasses, shines 

 hard and firm, like a blossom cut from alabaster ; 

 and when we move away, it quickly vanishes into 

 the night. 



These July flowers are the motionless lights of 

 the night ; their massed constellations swing in no 

 orbit, except when an uneasy wind of midnight 

 draws a pendulous blossom of elder to and fro 

 across the face of the dark wood. But the dusk is 

 also peopled by the white moths. They droop to 

 the white clover blossoms out of the enveloping 

 obscurity like the meeting of earth and air made 

 luminous. In the last hayfields and among the 

 bents of the pastures the ghost swift moths keep up, 

 between nine and ten at night towards midsummer, 

 their strange, vibrating dance. The males are long- 

 winged moths of silvery whiteness ; they choose 

 a station a little above the grass-tops, and swing 



