Moonflower

“ A potent mystic virtue dwells in a waning moon according to his garden lore, which is old as his pagan ancestors. If you prune rose-trees in a waxing moon the new growths will be long, weak shoots, and the crop of roses in the summer poor, puny things. Prune in the waning moon and the new growths will be short, sturdy rods bearing large flowers, and an abundance of them. Garden seed must be sown under the auspices of the waning moon if you want your flower-beds in the summer-time to be renowned for beauty, to make your friends envious of your success and yourself just swaggeringly happy. ”

“ The moon indeed was palest gold behind the pines, so that its radiance was a mere shower of pollen, just a brushing of white moth-down over the reeds of their little dark pond, and the black blur of the flowering currant bushes. And the young lime-trees, not yet in full leaf, quivered ecstatically in that moon-witchery, still letting fall raindrops of the past spring torrent, with soft hissing sounds. A real sense in the garden, of God holding his breath in the presence of his own youth swelling, growing, trembling toward perfection! ”

“ Moon-flowers are species of the morning-glory family that open their flowers at night. A well-grown plant trained over a porch trellis, or allowed to grow at random over a low tree or shrub, is a striking object when in full flower at dusk or through a moonlit evening. In the Southern states (where it is much grown) the moon-flower is a perennial, but even when well protected does not survive the winters in the North.
Cuttings usually give best results in the Northern states, as the seasons are not long enough for seed plants to give good bloom. ”

“ It is very pleasant, I assure you, to frolic in the light of the moon; only I cannot understand why you are always so cold and so solemn and so still, you pale, pretty little moonbeam."
"Indeed, I do not know that I am so," said the moonbeam. "But I am very old, and I have travelled many, many leagues, and I have seen wondrous things. Sometimes I toss upon the ocean, sometimes I fall upon a slumbering flower, sometimes I rest upon a dead child's face. I see the fairies at their play, and I hear mothers singing lullabies. Last night I swept across the frozen bosom of a river. ”

“ The moonbeams trail their shrouds;
Their tattered cerements
Cling to the gauzy clouds,
In ribbons frayed and thin—
And startled by the light
Silence shrinks deeper in
The depths of night.
Useless lie spades and rakes;
Rust's on the garden-tools.
Yet, where the moonlight makes
Nebulous silver pools
A ghostly shape is cast—
Something unseen has stirred.... ”

“ Fully as bright and radiating, though softer in its hue, than the broad sunshine, the moon poured down in living streams its gifts of ether-light. The monster palms, the slender arekas, the feathery bamboos and tamarinds, reveled in the harmony and glow of radiant moonlight, which leaping down in phosphorescent waves, sprang on from leaf to flower, from bud to herb, and streaming through the waving seas of giant, emerald grass, died sparkling at its feet. ”

“ How lovely a garden can be by moonlight, even a poor little garden. The moon is merciful, she touches all things, even the weeds, with a soft mystery; hallows the lily and every white bloom; in her light the red and blue flowers are not faded or extinguished, but softened; distances, shadows are intenser, more suggestive than in the garish glory of the sun; soft voices, soft footsteps are needed for the moonlit garden, and one may not think of work or gardeners. ”

“ This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. ”

“ One more we have, and that must not be forgotten for the rarity, because it opens, when all else close, when the Sun goes down; and for that reason we call it, the flower of the Moon: It growes in great tuffs, the leaves almost in the form of a Heart, the point turning back, the flower somewhat bigger then a Primrose, but of the purest purple that ever I beheld. When this flower falls off, the seed appears, which is black, with an eye of purple; shap’d, and of the sise of a small button, so finely wrought, and tough withall, as it might serve very well to trim a suit of apparell. ”

“ He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire. But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has unmistakably called up to him. ”

“ It begins to open as the sun declines, and is in full expanse throughout the night, shedding a delicious fragrance, and offering its brimming goblet, filled with nectareous juice, to thousands of moths, and other crepuscular and nocturnal insects. When the moon is at the full in those cloudless nights whose loveliness is known only in the tropics, the broad blossom is seen as a circular disk nearly a foot in diameter, very full of petals, of which the outer series are of a yellowish hue, gradually paling to the centre, where they shine in the purest white. ”

“ Dancers and wreaths of roses,
The moonlight's trick, no doubt.
A naked nymph upon the stair,
A sculptured vine that clasps the air,—
And then one Bacchic bird somewhere
Will pour his passion out.
All night above that garden the rose-flushed moon will sail,
Making the darkness deeper where hides the nightingale. ”

“ And when the warm tropic night drops down, and one goes wandering in the moonlight, to see for the first time the palm-tree plumes all glassy-silver under the radiant sky, flashing magically as they tremble in the faint night wind, it is more than ever the land of dream that is thus lit up in the soft clear dusk. So vivid is the moonlight, that one can even see the scarlet colour of the flamboyant flowers fallen in the dust, and distinguish the deep violet and hyacinthine hues of the far-off mountain peaks across the bay.... ”

“ It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. "Now! Now!" it said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously. Sometimes she tried to account for her uneasiness by saying that she was growing old, and that the year's death reminded her of her own. She compared herself to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and nights the increasing pull of the earth below. ”

“ And how useful in this respect is the moon! Volumes might be filled with the poetry of the moon; and yet the theme is ever fresh. The poet and the painter find the subject to be inexhaustible. The aspect of nature in moonlight is so different, that we have, by the gift of the lesser light, virtually two worlds for our abode. The gorgeous sunlit scene gives way, like a dissolving view, to the milder radiance of the moon, and, as by a magic spell, a new scene, with its own characteristic beauty, starts out from nature's canvas. The picturesque effects of moonlight are infinitely varied ”

“ I walked up from the hospital late to-night, half-past eight, and hungry ... in the cold, brilliant moonlight; a fine moon, very low, throwing long, pointed shadows across the road from the trees and hedges.
As one climbs up there is a wood on the right, the remains of the old wooded hill; [Pg 12] sparse trees, very tall; and to-night a star between every branch, and a fierce moon beating down on the mud and grass.
I had on my white cap and long blue coat, very visible. The moon swept the road from side to side: lovers, acting as though it were night, were lit as though it was day. ”

“ Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare
Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,
And so be added to the moon up there.
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon. ”

“ Then would come the moonlight to make the world a fairyland of the softest of blue; a mystical land, covered by a velvet sky, studded with sky-diamonds, which seemed very close to the earth, and a moon, like a great ball, stereopticon in its contour and fairly transparent in its soft brilliancy. ”

“ Half an hour before, indeed, the radiant face of night's sweet queen had been veiled by a blacker curtain, which had gathered thick over the sky at the sun's decline; but, as the moon rose high, those dark vapours became mottled with wavy lines of white, and gradually her beams seemed to drink them up.
It may be asked if those two sloping meadows, with their clumps of trees, and broken hedgerows, and the little stream flowing on between them, was all that the moonlight showed? That would depend upon where the eye of the observer was placed. ”

“ Ridiculously enough, though I have not journeyed only in the moonlight, yet I have from my earliest youth forever taken note of the influence of its light, have never in any region missed the light of the full moon and I dream of being, not quite an Endymion, but yet a favorite of the moon. When it returns, its orb little by little growing full, I cannot suppress a feeling of longing while I gaze upon it, whether in meadow and woodland, on the mountains or in the city itself and in my own room. ”

“ AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. ”

“ These moon plants grew like that.
In a few minutes, as it seemed, the buds of the more forward of these plants had lengthened into a stem and were even putting forth a second whorl of leaves, and all the slope that had seemed so recently a lifeless stretch of litter was now dark with the stunted olive-green herbage of bristling spikes that swayed with the vigour of their growing.
I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. ”

“ It was a royal gift the Moon Queen gave. She said that henceforth the beach should be enchanted. The hideous stones the gnomes had thrown should not ruin it after all, but should make it more precious to the world, for they should all turn to shining jewels. She chose to make the white pebbles the loveliest of them all, and so change them that the sea people could never forget her. These stones shone as clear as crystal, and in the pure depths of each one there trembled a moon-ray, a memento of her crystal kingdom. ”

“ Only in this land of sunshine and magnolias will you find this wonderful bird. It never wanders far from the Gulf. It flourishes best amid the magnolias, and it fills the southern woods with music. It sings at all hours; at night, when the Moon is looking kindly down upon the Earth, and the Earth is serenely smiling to the Moon, its clear notes ring out joyously, until even the stars from their glittering palaces lean down to listen. ”

“ Calm she looked, yet pale with wonder,
Sweet in unwonted thoughtfulness,
Watching the earth that dwindled under
Faintly, faintlier afar.
It was the lovely moon that lovelike
Hovered over the wandering, tired
Earth, her bosom grey and dovelike,
Hovering beautiful as a dove....
The lovely moon: — her soft light falling
Lightly on roof and poplar and pine —
Tree to tree whispering and calling,
Wonderful in the silvery shine
Of the round, lovely, thoughtful moon.
Contents / Contents, p. 3
Stone Trees
Last night a sword-light in the sky
Flashed a swift terror on the dark. ”

“ The moonlight was beautiful; the old trees stand mournful and black against the luminous sky; there is for him a fascination in the solitude, as his noiseless steps lead him alternately into the black shadow cast on the sward by the towering foliage, and into the clear moonlight, on dewy grass that shows grey in that cold brightness. ”

“ Bewitched with the lunar mystery, the wood stands expectant, nebulous, silent. Incomprehensible and inaccessible to men is its slow, sure experience, and the secret of its forged desires.
Into its lunar silence men have brought the revolt, the speech and laughter of youth; but, overcome by the lunar mystery, they are suddenly grown silent and meditative.
The open glade in the woods, enchanted by the green, cold light of the moon, seems very white. Along the edge of the glade lie the shadows of the trees; they seem unreal and nebulous and mysteriously still. ”

“ The moonlight is drawing him—dizzy the height—
Life’s burden has passed from him into the night
“Stop lover! One step and death stands in your way!”
Where he stood, falls undimmed the moonlight’s ray. ”