We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature is steeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleeting moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist schön.”
It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end of the _Merchant of Venice_, when Lorenzo and Jessica let the sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Doña Sol fancy in the moonlight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”
I have known many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchman’s rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in Florence, when you couldn’t see the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when large trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be part of a fairy revel; and nights in South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as Prospero’s island.