So we went up into an attic, and drew the curtains, and lit the fire, and took draughts of long oblivion, and made our sorrows pompous by reading Villon and Catullus and Du Bellay, and the close of _Paradise Lost_, and the thirteenth book of the _Morte Darthur_, and Goethe's "Now comes first love and friendship's company," and other things that reminded us of decay and beauty; and not one of them but drew a long echo from the hoary walls of "Quebec" (now safe within our brains). Yet not one of these things, however splendid or tumultuous or tender, was then too splendid or tumultuous or tender for our mood. Nor could one of them stir us so potently as the picture that came often that evening to our minds. Here was the gaudy, dismal, roaring street, its roar sometimes settling into a kind of silence through which the heart longs for voice of woman or bird to penetrate; and there, seen over the high wall, was the old man who owned "Quebec," playing bowls with several happy children in the twilight, and half-hidden by the dense border of hollyhock, red-hot poker, blush roses, nasturtium, and sunflower; and the house itself, looking more distant than it was, in that sweet light, seemed to possess those calm, impregnable high places of the wise, than which, says Lucretius, there is no possession more desirable.
Just before dawn, I came to a cleft high in the hills, so that I could only see a little copse of oak and hazel, and in the dying moonlight a thousand white islands of cloud and mountain
Totus conlucens veste atque insignibus albis.
The night had gone, and the day had not come; and the little copse had the serious, brooding air which all things have at that hour, and especially when the land is tender with the first hope of spring and in that reverie—
For what I saw seemed but the fragments of something which night had built for its own delight, and as they became clearer and clearer they had more and more the appearance of being unbuilt and dissolved. But, gradually, the birds were let out and they sang. Their songs, on the wintry hill, which I had last visited in summer, broke upon the silence as in summer they never do, like the opening of the door of a room that is empty but has once been gay with fire and books and men; and sweet though the blackbird was, and shrill the missel-thrush, their songs were awful, and said that "a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us." The grass, which had truly been of no colour, though my urgent memory persuaded me that it was green, began to awake to colour, and, while in the shadow of the copse the dusk was impenetrable, the light reached a knoll where there was dead bracken still. "Colour," said Novalis, "is an effort of matter to become light," and for one moment the grass upon that knoll ceased to strive and was light. A plover that wheeled close by disappeared and was but a glow.