It was the one clearly visible piece of man’s work among all those potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion. It was more intelligible than some men are when they say “I worship” or “I love.” Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles, and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the farmyard. Slowly the light came, and the world was filled with it as imperceptibly as the brain with a great thought. It fell upon the spokes of the waggon wheel, and they seemed to move. Then all was over.
The clear face of things which it is so hard to enjoy was back again. The determined starlings flew swift and straight overhead. The clouds about the risen sun went stately upon their errands through the sky.
In front, a tall beechen hill closes up the gulf that runs out of the valley into the heart of the chalk down. The hill fills nearly half the sky, and just above it stands the white full moon, as one who looks over his lands. It warms the low, pale, curdled sky, but does not disturb the darkness of the beeches. All its light seems to fall and settle, as if it would dwell there for ever in the cherry trees on either hand. All are blossoming, and in their branches the nightingales sing out of the blossom, dispersing what ruins remain of the world of yesterday, and building rapidly those tall watch towers that last until dawn, which men may climb and from their summits see what may make them out of love with the earth.
The past day is long past, the day of fighting, digging, buying, selling, writing; and if there are still men on the earth they are all equal in the trances of passion or sleep; the day to come is not to be thought of. The moon reigns; you rule. The centuries are gathered up in your hand. You and the moonlight and the nightingale and the cherry blossom have your own way with them all night long. It is true then that Virgil, Catullus, Crashaw, Burton, Shelley ... live still, and Horace, Racine, Bishop Beveridge ... never lived. You exult because you are alive and your spirit possesses this broad, domed earth. Poor thing as you are, you have somehow gained a power of expression like the nightingale’s, a pure translucency like the petals of the flowers; and as never before to man or woman you open your eyes widely and frankly, even the limbs move with the carelessness of the animals, the features lose the rigidity that comes of compromise and suppression.