redder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because one
associates daylight with people, and voices, and bustle, and hurryings
to and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, and
feeding our bodies that we may be able to work to feed them again; but
here was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure
air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living
soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up
to warm only me, and nowhere a single hard word being spoken, or a
single selfish act being done, nowhere anything that could tarnish the
blessed purity of the world as God has given it us. If one believed in
angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and
cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every
twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The
doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent,
and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave,
judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless,
and forgiven. And see the blessedness of sleep, that sends us back for a
space to our early innocence. Are not our first impulses on waking
always good? Do we not all know how in times of wretchedness our first
thoughts after the night's sleep are happy? We have been dreaming we are
happy, and we wake with a smile, and stare still smiling for a moment at
our stony griefs before with a stab we recognise them.

There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up
quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the
field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet
flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and
intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and
suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the
beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs