Nightshade

“ BIRD RAPTURES. The sunrise wakes the lark to sing, The moonrise wakes the nightingale. Come darkness, moonrise, every thing That is so silent, sweet, and pale: Come, so ye wake the nightingale. Make haste to mount, thou wistful moon, Make haste to wake the nightingale: Let silence set the world in tune [264] To hearken to that wordless tale Which warbles from the nightingale O herald skylark, stay thy flight One moment, for a nightingale Floods us with sorrow and delight. To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail; Leave us to-night the nightingale. ”

“ Gradually, as he sat there on horseback, the beautiful orb of night rose up from behind the trees, and with her peculiar power of dispersing the clouds and shadows that obstruct her way, she was seen struggling with and overcoming the vapours of the night; sometimes, like a veiled but still lovely countenance, beaming through a thin film of white mist which grew radiant with her radiance; sometimes hidden for a single instant behind a dark mass which swept over her with gilded edges; sometimes bursting forth from a dark cloud, with pure effulgence, like sudden joy succeeding despair. ”

“ Fitful and uncertain as the shadows which the night-clouds cast, were their concealments from him, and imperfect revelations to him; and, like the night-clouds still, if the clear light broke forth for a moment, it was only that they might sweep over it, and make the darkness deeper than before.
Without, there was a profound and solemn hush upon the ancient pile of building, and its buttresses and angles made dark shapes of mystery upon the ground, which now seemed to retire into the smooth white snow and now seemed to come out of it, as the moon’s path was more or less beset. ”

“ In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. ”

“ Night is the city's disease.
The streets and the people one sees
Glow with a light that is strangely inhuman;
A fever that never grows cold.
Heaven completes the disgrace;
For now, with her star-pitted face,
Night has the leer of a dissolute woman,
Cynical, moon-scarred and old.
And I think of the country roads;
Of the quiet, sleeping abodes,
Where every tree is a silent brother
And the hearth is a thing to cling to.
And I sicken and long for it now—
To feel clean winds on my brow,
Where Night bends low, like an all-wise mother
Looking for children to sing to. ”

“ Only this dumb, woful face seems to belong to and end with the night. I turn to look at it. Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away? While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn. ”

“ In the long watches of the winter night, when one has awoke from some evil dream, and lies sleepless and terrified with the solemn pall of darkness around one—on one of those deadly, still dark nights, when the window only shows a murky patch of positive gloom in contrast with the nothingness of the walls, when the howling of a tempest round chimney and roof would be welcomed as a boisterous companion—in such still dead times only, lying as in the silence of the tomb, one realises that some day we shall lie in that bed and not think at all: that the time will come soon when we must die. ”

“ On a midsummer night, on a night that was eerie with stars,
In a wood too deep for a single star to look through,
You led down a path whose turnings you knew in the darkness,
But the scent of the dew-dripping cedars was all that I knew. ”

“ And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; but to a full knowledge of those things which lit the Night Land; even as a man wakes from sleep each morning, and knows immediately he wakes, the names and knowledge of the Time which has bred him, and in which he lives. ”

“ When the night came again and shadows moved
As the moon through the ice-flower stared and roved,
And that unyielding Shadow came again.
That Shadow came again unseen and caught
The children as they sat listening in vain,
Their starved hearts failing ere the Shadow removed.
And when the new morn stepped from the same cold East
They lay unawakening in the barren light,
Their song and their imaginations bright,
Their pains and fears and all bewilderment ceased.... ”

“ The night is dying. Her rich darks and whites grow pallid. Each moment a layer of darkness peels off. The sky turns blue before one knows it: the rocks grow brown: there is blue in the crevasses, and green upon the swards—all low-toned yet distinct. Faint puffs of warm air come, we know not whence, touch our faces, and are gone. The lantern has been extinguished; we stride out more freely; the day awakens within us also. ”

“ Horizon in mourning black – !... the Angel of darkness flies in silence over surface of calm waters and drowsing forests – !... Oh black night! oh terrible night, my spirit loves you – !.... Nor ornamented by star!.. Nor one ray!.. some restless lightning, running from distant storm – lightning sways and disappears in dead abyss . . .
But sky lightens!. . already swallow twitter touched voice of beak – – and lark wonders in his prophetic psalm. . . . Dawn with silvery wings comes and throws garland of diamonds from his burning forehead on the earth, which being chatting. ”

“ Night long since had settled on us, yet not profound darkness. Night in midsummer seems to partake of a forgotten cousinship with the day. It is a luminous darkness that prevails, and encumbers the night as with a lucid mist. I could stand by the babbling shore and pierce the brooding veil upon the sea with the shafts my eyes, and feel none of the oppression of that blankness that falls with night in winter. And I could descry also the remote and twinkling lights of Southington over waters that were not black but rather ghostly. Distress had settled upon us also with the darkness. ”

“ It is a moonless night, and what light the stars might furnish is withheld by a blanket-screen of thick clouds. No night could be darker; for, lest an occasional star find a cloud-rift and peer through, a fog drifts up from the river. This is good for the English, since it hides their watch fires, which one by one are lost in the mists. The darkness deepens until even the hawk-eyed hunting-shirt men, trained by much night fighting to a nocturnal keenness of vision, are unable to make out their nearest comrades.
The pitch blackness, and the fog chill creeping over him, tell on Papa Plauche. ”

“ While I read in that dolorous book about souls, the night crept forward into the profound darkness of early morning. With evening had come a swift warmth, breeding, out of its meeting with the chill of the day, a thick fog, which laid its blank gray face against the lamp-light of my open window—a face un-featured except by the ghost of a scantily leaved branch, whose supporting tree trunk was hidden as if beneath deep water. ”

“ I wakened from the nightmare with a start. A strong light dazzled my eyes and, blazing into my face, lit up another face as well. Just for an instant I saw it; then the electric ray that revealed it died into dead darkness. But on my retina was photographed the face, in a pale, illumined circle.
A second sufficed to bring back to my brain this old dream and the waking reality which followed that night at the Abbey, the night Shelagh and I called “the spook night.” For here, in my cabin on the yacht Naiad, and on the crushed pillow of my bed, was that face. ”

“ Often and often, when allowed to sleep in the Open air at night-time, instead of experiencing all the horrors of a night in the common cell, the cool night-air would send me off into a sound sleep, from which I would start up from some confused dream of old days, and, looking up to the sky, would wonder to myself, half awake and half asleep, which was the dream and which the reality, the old loved scenes, or the prison of es-Saier at Omdurman. ”

“ The innocent, sweet Day is dead.
Dark Night hath slain her in her bed.
O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!
—Put out the light, said he.
A sweeter light than ever rayed
From star of heaven or eye of maid
Has vanished in the unknown Shade. ”

“ And in this wise passed three days and nights; yet both in the sleep-time and the time of waking did great multitudes cease not to watch; so that many went hungry for sleep, as in truth did I. And sometimes we saw those Youths with plainness; but other times they were lost to our sight in the utter shadows of the Night Land. Yet, by the telling of our instruments, and the sense of my hearing, there was no awaredness among the Monsters, and the Forces of Evil, that any were abroad from the Pyramid; so that a little hope came into our hearts that yet there might be no tragedy. ”

“ Dark have been my forebodings, standing first on one foot and then on the other, through the night hours, preyed upon by visions, holding my eyelids open by my will, while strange thoughts like vultures over their carrion, wheeling about above me, assail me, tear me with their beaks and talons. Dark looms the cloud bank through the black portals of the river. The fog holds the bleared eyes of the morning. And I, stiff with watching, suspect some evil. Some foul play is in the mountains, stalking in the shadows of the dawn. ”

“ It was my foolish imagination, the effect of the poison.
The night was full of torture. My bed seemed to lift itself under me, then to fall again, then up again! I used autosuggestion: “At night all the Numbers must sleep; sleeping at night is a duty just like working during the day. To sleep at night is necessary for the next day’s work. Not to sleep at night is criminal.” ”

“ Such a clear, moonlight night, when the air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in long layers—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all—Such a night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense; the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise in all that clearness. ”

“ And surely I to go forward again now with my telling. And you to know that on the eighth day upon the Slope, about the end of the ninth hour, there to be an upward seeming of light, afar before us in the Darkness, and did show as a dull and vague sheen above us in the night. And truly, I to know that we did be come at last a-near unto the Night Land.
And we went upward then very eager through the dark; and the dim shine did grow, ever; so that we soon to see it very plain, as a looming of light afar upward. And we ever to climb and to go onward. ”

“ Death in daylight is bad enough, but in the dark how much worse! And the fate that threatened them appeared wherever they might turn their eyes—above, in the shape of that broken beam which yet in the twilight appeared defined in a shadowy form against the dim sky; around, in this treacherous casing, which, being undermined, might at any moment fall, like the lower portion, and crush them; beneath, most awfully, and most surely, are those dark, stealthy, secret waters which had come in from the “drain” upon them as though to punish their rashness, and make them pay for it with their lives. ”

“ And I turned and looked down the slope; and surely all before me was utter wildness of a dark desolation; for it did seem to go nowhither but into an everlasting night. And there was no fire down there, neither light of any kind; but only Darkness and, as I did feel, Eternity. And downward into that Blackness did the great slope seem to go for ever.
Now, as I did stand there, looking downward into the Dark, and often backward unto the shining of the Final Light, and put to a horrid desolateness, behold! there came the low beating of the Master-Word in the Night. ”

“ I called again, my tongue stiff with fright; but I called as one awaking from a dream—a horrid dream, for my nostrils quivered with the damp acrid odour, and I felt the crab-reptile clinging to my knee. Why had the night fallen so swiftly—and where was I—where?—stiff, chilled, torn, and bleeding, lying flung like a corpse over my own threshold, with Voyou licking my face and Barris stooping above me in the light of a lamp that flared and smoked in the night breeze like a torch. Faugh! ”

“ Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow,—malignant, serpent eyes. And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. ”

“ Better the black night than the intangible horror within. I flung up the sash and looked out across the moor. There was no light, nothing but an inky darkness and the uncanny rustle of elder-bushes. The sound chilled me, and I closed the window. ”

“ Then a nightingale began to sing; I could not see the bird, but only heard the lovely music gushing from amid the dim gloom of the leaves, filling the whole forest with exquisite strains. I understood the nightingale’s song just as well as I did that of the cricket, but what it sang was much more beautiful.
THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG.
The Day has furled
Her banners red,
And all the world
Lies cold and dead ”