e four seas benediction is everywhere; blue-bells and the rosy
fingers of heath deck the mountain-tops, where the grouse are crooning
to each other among the whins; down the hillsides into every valley pour
gladness and greenness and song; there are flowers everywhere, even to
the very verge of the whispering sea. There, among the gray bent-spikes
and brackens on the sandhills, primroses weave their yellow wreaths; and
little pansies, golden and blue and purple, marshal their weird eyes
against the spears of dark blue hyacinths, till the rich tribute of
wild thyme makes peace between them.

The blue sky overhead, with its flocks of sunlit clouds, softly bends
over the gentle bosom of the earth. A living spirit throbs everywhere,
palpable, audible, full of sweetness and sadness immeasurable--sadness
that is only a more secret joy.

Then the day grows weary, making way for the magic of evening and the
oncoming dark with its mystery. The tree-stems redden with the sunset;
there is a chill sigh in the wind; the leaves turn before it, burnished
against the purple sky. As the gloom rises up out of the earth, bands of
dark red gather on the horizon, seaming the clear bronze of the sky,
that passes upward into olive-color, merging in dark blue overhead. The
sun swings down behind the hills, and purple darkness comes down out of
the sky; the red fades from the tree-stems, the cloud-colors die away;
the whole world glimmers with the fading whiteness of twilight. Silence
gathers itself together out of the dark, deepened, not broken, by the
hushing of the wind among the beech-leaves, or the startled cluck of a
blackbird, or a wood-pigeon's soft murmur, as it dreams in the
silver fir.

Under the brown wings of the dark, the night throbs with mystic
presences; the hills glimmer with an inward life; whispering voices
hurry through the air. Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full
of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere
through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt
their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of
loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand,
palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives,
calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to
enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth,
great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes.

Summer w