vale--one of those days in which the world seems too good to be true, a
day of which we feel, "This day can never come again." It was like
walking through the Twenty-third Psalm. And, as it closed about us, as we
came to our village at nightfall, and the sunshine, like a sinking lake
of gold, grew softer and softer behind the uplands, the solid world of
rock and tree, and stubble-field and clustered barns, seemed to be
growing pure thought--nothing seemed left of it but spirit; and the hills
had become as the luminous veil of some ineffable temple of the
mysterious dream of the world.

"Puvis de Chavannes!" said Colin to me in a whisper.

And later I tried to say better what I meant in this song:

_Strange, at this still enchanted hour,
How things in daylight hard and rough,
Iron and stone and cruel power,
Turn to such airy, starlit stuff!

Yon mountain, vast as Behemoth,
Seems but a veil of silver breath;
And soundless as a flittering moth,
And gentle as the face of death,

Stands this stern world of rock and tree
Lost in some hushed sidereal dream--
The only living thing a bird,
The only moving thing a stream.

And, strange to think, yon silent star,