The Mystery of Night
Every day two worlds lie at my door and invite me into mysteries as far
apart as darkness and light. These two realms have nothing in common
save a certain identity of form; colour, relation, distance, are lost
or utterly changed. In the vast fields of heaven a still more complete
and sublime transformation is wrought. It is a new hemisphere which
hangs above me, with countless fires lighting the awful highways of the
universe, and guiding the daring and reverent thought as it falters in
the highest empyrean. The mind that has come into fellowship with
Nature is subtly moved and penetrated by the decline of light and the
oncoming of darkness. As the sun is replaced by the stars, so is the
hot, restless, eager spirit of the day replaced by the infinite calm
and peace of the night. The change does not come abruptly or with the
suddenness of violent movement; no dial is delicate enough to register
the moment when day gives place to night. With that amplitude of power
which accompanies every movement, with that sublime quietude of energy
which pervades every action, Nature calls the day across the hills and
summons the night that has been waiting at the eastern gates. No stir,
no strife, no noise of great activities, put forth on a vast scale,
break the spell of an hour which is the daily witness of a miracle, and
waits, hushed and silent, in a world-wide worship, while the altar
fires blaze on the western hills.
In that unspeakable splendour, earth and air and sea are for the moment
one, and through them all there flashes a divine radiance; time is not
left without the witness of its sanctity as it fades off the dials of
earth and slips like a shining rivulet into the shoreless sea of light
beyond. The day that was born with seas and suns at its cradle is
followed to its grave by the long procession of the stars. And now
that it has gone, with its numberless activities, and the heat and
stress of their contentions, how gently and irresistibly Nature summons
her children back to herself, and touches the brow, hot with the fever
of work, with the hand of peace! An infinite silence broods over the
fields and upon the restless bosom of the sea. Insensibly there steals
into thought, spent and weary with many problems, a deep and sweet
repose; the soul does not sleep; it returns to the ancient mother, and
at her breast feels the old hopes revived, the old aspirations
quickened, the old faiths relight their dying fires. The fever of
agonising struggle yields to the calm of infinite trust; the clouds
fall apart and reveal the vision, that seemed lost, inviolate forever;
the brief, fierce, fruitless strife for self is succeeded by an
unquestioning trust in that universal good, above and beyond all
thought, for which the universe stands. Who shall despair while the
fields of earth are sown with flowers and the fields of heaven blossom
with stars? The open heart knows, in a revelation which comes to it
with every dawn and sunset, that life does not mock its children when
it holds this cup of peace to their anguished lips, and that into this
tideless sea of rest and beauty every breathless and turbulent
streamlet flows at last.
In the silence of night how real and divine the universe becomes!
Doubt and unbelief retreat before the awful voices that were silenced
by the din of the day, but now that the little world of man is hushed,
seem to have blended all sounds into themselves. Beyond the circle of
trees, through which a broken vision of stars comes and goes with the
evening wind, the broad earth lies hushed and hidden. Along the
familiar road a new and mysterious charm is spread like a net that
entangles the feet of every traveller and keeps him loitering on where
he would have passed in unobservant haste by day. The great elms
murmur in low, inarticulate tones, and the shadows at their feet hide
themselves from the moon, moving noiselessly through all the summer
night. The woods in the distance stand motionless in the wealth of
their massed foliage, keeping guard over the unbroken silence that
reigns in all their branching aisles. Beyond the far-spreading waters
lie white and dreamlike, and tempt the thought to the fairylands that
sleep just beyond the line of the horizon. A sweet and restful
mystery, like a bridal veil, hides the face of Nature, and he only can
venture to lift it who has won the privilege by long and faithful
devotion.
If the night be starlit the shadows are denser, the outlook narrower,
the mystery deeper; but what a vision overhangs the world and makes the
night sublime with the poetry of God's thought visible to all eyes!
Who does not feel the passage of divine dreams over his troubled life
when the infinite meadows of heaven are suddenly abloom with light? On
such a night immortality is written on earth and sky; in the silence
and darkness there is no hint of death; a sweet and fragrant life seems
to breathe its subtle, inaudible music through all things. In the
depths of the woods one feels no loneliness; no liquid note of hermit
thrush is needed to make that silence music. The harmony of universal
movement, rounded by one thought, carried forward by one power, guided
to one end, is there for those who will listen; the mighty activities
which feed the century-girded oak from the invisible chambers of air
and the secret places of the earth are so divinely adjusted to their
work that one shall never detect their toil by any sound of struggle or
by any sight of effort. Noiselessly, invisibly, the great world
breathes new life into every part of its being, while the darkness
curtains it from the fierce ardour of the day.
In the night the fountains are open and flowing; a marvellous freshness
touches leaf and flower and grass, and rebuilds their shattered
loveliness. The stars look down from their inaccessible heights on a
new creation, and as the procession of the hours passes noiselessly on,
it leaves behind a dewy fragrance which shall exhale before the rising
sun, like a universal incense, making the portals of the morning sweet
with prophecies of the flowers which are yet to bloom, and the birds
whose song still sleeps with the hours it shall set to music. The
unbroken repose of Nature, born not of idleness but of the perfect
adjustment of immeasurable forces to their task, becomes more real and
comprehensible when the darkness hides the infinitude of details, and
leaves only the great massive effects for the eye to rest upon. While
men sleep, the world sweeps silently onward under the watchful stars,
in a flight which makes no sound and leaves no trace. Through the deep
shadows the mountains loom in solitary and awful grandeur; the wide
seas send forth and recall their mighty tides; the continents lie
veiled in rolling mists; the immeasurable universe glitters and burns
to the farthest outskirts of space; and yet, nestled amid this sublime
activity, the little flower dreams of the day, and in its sleep is
ministered to as perfectly as if it were the only created thing.
When one stands on the shores of night and looks off on that mighty sea
of darkness in which a world lies engulfed, there is no thought but
worship and no speech but silence. Face to face with immensity and
infinity, one travels in thought among the shining islands that rise up
out of the fathomless shadows, and feels everywhere the stir of a life
which knows no weariness and makes no sound, which pervades the
darkness no less than the light, and makes the night glorious as the
day with its garniture of constellations; and even as one waits,
speechless and awestruck, the morning star touches the edges of the
hills, and a new day breaks resplendent in the eastern sky.