column of thick smoke came volleying from the heap, that went
softly and silently up into the orange-tinted sky; some forty feet
higher the smoke was caught by a moving current of air; much of it
ascended higher still, but the thin streak of moving wind caught
and drew out upon itself a long weft of aerial vapour, that showed
a delicate blue against the rose-flushed west. The long lines of
leafless trees, the faint outlines of the low distant hills, seemed
wrapped in meditative silence, dreaming wistfully, as the earth
turned her broad shoulder to the night, and as the forlorn and
chilly sunset faded by soft degrees on the horizon. As the day thus
died, the frost made itself felt, touching the hedgerows with rime,
and crisping the damp road beneath my feet. The end drew on with a
mournful solemnity; but the death of the light seemed a perfectly
natural and beautiful thing, not an event to be grieved over or
regretted, but all part of a sweet and grave progress, in which
silence and darkness seemed, not an interruption to the eager life
of the world, but a happy suspension of activity and life. I was
haunted, as I often am at sunset, by a sense that the dying light
was trying to show me some august secret, some gracious mystery,
which would silence and sustain the soul could it but capture it.
Some great and wonderful presence seemed to hold up a hand, with a
gesture half of invitation, half of compassion for my blindness.
Down there, beyond the lines of motionless trees, where the water
gleamed golden in the reaches of the stream, the secret brooded,
withdrawing itself resistlessly into the glowing west. A wistful
yearning filled my soul to enter into that incommunicable peace.
Yet if one could take the wings of the morning, and follow that
flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the
same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun
ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas,