EVENING LIGHT 171 



And earth sighed in sleep beneath that glittering 

 world, because the moon is a glass wherein the 

 living planet may see her own story as the future 

 shall write it and end it. The moon is her ever- 

 present sermon, glorious in the reflected sunlight, yet 

 compact of dust and ashes, a ghost that steals along 

 the confines of night, a skeleton at the world's full 

 feast of abundant vitality. For us indeed — being 

 but the midges of an hour — this tremendous vision 

 carries no personal message ; its mockery of life is 

 too enormous and too remote to move mankind ; but 

 I conceive of the Mother as gazing upward in sorrow 

 from her green hills and fertile valleys, from her 

 teeming seas and many waters, from the multitudinous 

 living things that she loves. Her hour of rest is 

 haunted, her heart something chilled by the cold 

 and lovely face of her dead sister. Therefore, when 

 day has vanished altogether, and moisture limns its 

 trailing curtains on the meadows ; when star and glow- 

 worm twinkle ; when nocturnal voices float along the 

 air and beneath the woods ; when fall a final silence 

 and universal sleep, the wakeful Earth shall lift her 

 dark, dewy eyes to the firmament and marvel dumbly, 

 because the lesser light proclaims how that for her and 

 all who dwell upon her bosom, Death, in his eternal 

 patience, also waits. 



