MIDSUMMER MOONLIGHT
All through the afternoon of the fervent July day I could see the
sun sifting and winnowing his gold for the sunset. All the morning
his alchemic forces had been quietly transmuting gray mists of
midnight, vapors from damp humus, moisture from lush leaves and I
know not what other pure though common elements into the precious
glow that began to haze the west soon after noon. The old belief
that the alchemist at his utmost cunning could recreate rose
blooms from their own ashes had sure foundation. I have seen the
sun do it every June in countless gardens where, out of this same
humus and soft rains, his potency works the transmutation as if in
a night. So on July days this father of transmuters melts in his
crucible, of which the earth under our feet seems always the very
bottom of the bowl, many ingredients, and distils from them this
pure gold. Soon after he passes the meridian you may see it
sprinkled lavishly from zenith to horizon, and as the day wanes it
gilds all sordid things with the glow of romance. By it we get the
clearer vision and have thoughts of the unseen things which are
eternal. The trouble with sordid souls, if such there be, is that
they have never seen enough sunsets. People who live in places or
palaces where these are never seen have need to be born of noble
fathers and sweet mothers, to be carefully nurtured in hope and
aspiration and belief, or the world is the worse for them.
Long after the sun had gone and the evening was cool with
unclotted dew, the fires of the melting burned high in the upper
air and the gold that had been thin vapor seemed to condense into
clouds that glowed copper-red with the molten metal and cooled and
dropped into the distant hills. No wonder the miners go ever
westward for the precious gold, to Colorado and Nevada and
California, to Sitka and the Copper River, to Anvil City and the
Nome beach and across the straits to Siberia. Never a clear night
falls but they see the alchemy at work and the precious element
going down in dust and nuggets and wide lodes behind the peaks and
into the canons just beyond.
Usually it is not until the gold begins to pass that I notice the
nighthawk, though he may have been circling and crying "peent,
peent" all the afternoon. If you can catch sight of him before the
light fades too much you will see the white bar which crosses each
wing beneath and looks exactly like a hole, as if the bird had
transparencies in his pinions as has the polyphemus moth. Many a
summer afternoon I have seen nighthawks circling erratically above
Boston Common, and there their cry has sounded like a plaint. No
doubt these birds fly there by choice and bring up their young on
the tops of Back Bay buildings because they prefer the place, but
this has not prevented a tinge of melancholy in their voices. Like
many another city dweller they may take habit for preference, but
the longing for the freedom of the woods, though unconscious, will
voice itself some way. The nighthawk's cry, falling from the high
gold of the waning sunset to dusky pasture glades, has no note of
melancholy but a soothing sleepiness about it that makes it a
lullaby of contentment. I rarely hear him after dark. I fancy he
goes higher and higher to keep in the soft radiance of the fading
glow. Only once have I ever seen one sky-coasting, falling like a
dark star from a height where he seemed but a mote in the gold, a
smaller, point that the green glint of a real star that had just
come through. It was as if his wings had lost their hold on the
thinner air of this remote height. He half shut them to his body
and dived head foremost on a perilous slant. Then, just as he must
be dashed to pieces on the gray rock of the ledge on which I sat,
he spread them wide, caught the air that sang through the wide-spread
primaries with a clear, deep-toned note, and rose again;
and in his "peent, peent" was a quaint note of self-satisfaction
and self-praise.
[Illustration: The Sun sifting and winnowing his Gold for Sunset]
It is customary to ascribe actions of this sort on the part of a
bird to a desire to please and astound the mate who is supposed to
look on with fervent admiration. Sometimes this may be the case,
but I think more often the bird, like my nighthawk, does it to
please himself. There was no mate in sight when this nighthawk did
his sky coasting, nor did any appear afterward. It was after the
mating season and I think the bird did it in just pure joy in his
own dare-deviltry. He liked to see how near he could come to
breaking his neck without actually doing it. In the same way a
male woodcock will keep up his shadow-dancing antics long after
the nesting season is over, and the partridge drums more or less
the year around. The other bird may have much admiration for these
actions if she sees them, but never half so much as the bird who
performs. Nothing could equal that.
The most beautiful moonlight nights we have are those on which the
moon is an hour or two late. Then we see the day merge into real
darkness as velvety shadows slip quietly up out of the earth and
dance together. These congregated under the pines at first, last
night, and waited a bit before they dared the shelter of deciduous
trees. Long after that they huddled on the margins of the open
pasture as bathers do on the pond shore when the water is cold,
seeming to put dark toes into the clear light and then withdraw
with a shudder. When they all went in I do not know, for I was
watching the sky. By and by I looked back at the pasture and the
open places in the wood, and all alike were filled with a wavering
crowd that seemed to trip lightly and noiselessly as if in a
minuet. Little by little they blotted out familiar outlines till
only the tallest of pines looming dark against the lighter horizon
had form. All else was a void, not that of chaos but a soft cosmos
of completion.
[Illustration: Sunrise over the Pond]
It is singular how long one may look at this complete darkness and
not note the dancing lights in it. After you see them, the glint
of the fireflies flitting hither and thither, starring the meadows
as thickly as distant suns star the sky, making a milky way of the
brookside and flashing comet-like along the dry upland, is
singularly vivid. They sparkle, these northern fireflies of ours,
with a dainty glint that merely emphasizes the darkness. Now and
then you may see the larva of one of these, which is the glow-worm
beside the path. You may get a very faint real illumination from
him, lighting perhaps the space of your fingernail as he crawls
along. He, too, merely serves to make the darkness visible. The
firefly of the tropics is more spectacular. He blazes forth like a
meteor, setting all the thicket aglow for a moment. The lights of
our fireflies are more like a frosting of the darkness, as when
the moon shines in winter and the light glints from ice crystals
hung on the frozen grass. I like ours best.
The herald of the moon is the whippoor-will. I do not recall
hearing him sing on pitch black nights. Starshine is enough for
him, but I am convinced that he is only half nocturnal and that he
watches for signs of moonlight as eagerly as I do. Last night I
saw the glint of it in the upper sky an hour before the moon rose,
a silvery shine which did not touch the lower atmosphere, but shot
athwart the higher stars like a ghost of aurora. The whippoor-will
saw it, too, and began his call, which I do not find a melancholy
plaint, but rather an eager asking. It was a voice of shrill
longing, sounding out of luminous loneliness after the moon began
to silver all things. Slowly, like a benediction, this silvery
luminosity descended till it touched the tops of eastward hills
with the softest imaginable glow and filled all the sky above them
with light. The glow of the sun drives the darkness before it and
then appears. The glow of the moon is so much the more gentle in
that it fills the world with radiance and leaves the darkness,
which it permeates, but does not destroy. It is a newer evangel,
which does not seek to rebuild the world, but simply takes it as
it is and fills it with clear fire, adding to its rough vigor
purity of motive. I do not see how anyone who loves moonlight can
be bad, or even morose and melancholy. Its light drowns all these
in a deep sea of peace.
As the moon came up, gibbous and glowing, its beams seemed to skim
into the darkness under the pines as a swallow flies, scaling
along beneath the blackness of close-set plumes above, to light
long aisles between the naked boles below. These that had been so
invisible before that I had to find my way among them by the
friendly leading of the path beneath my feet, now took on a
radiance of their own. Green and brown no longer, they glowed with
the witchery of the level light, their real colors only shining
faintly through this transparent frosting, this veneer of cool
fire, till the place was like those European salt caverns of which
one reads where the dark roof is upheld by crystalline pillars
that give ghostly reflections of the lights that the miners carry.
Here, groping in the grotesque glow of their own lanterns might
well come the gnomes of German tales although, so sweetly gentle
is the light, I can think of them only as kindly goblins bent on
quaint deeds of goodness.
Beyond the pines the path led me moonward through glades among
deciduous trees, no doubt the abodes of elves. That may have been
but a sphinx moth that flew down the path before me, his fat gray
body silvered by the moonlight, his short, narrow wings beating so
fast that they became but a gauzy nimbus about him, or it may have
been Puck, training to put that girdle round about the earth in
forty minutes. Here invisible creatures scurried away from a fairy
ring whose flagging is of round pyrola leaves, lighted by ghostly
white candelabras of the waxy blooms, field mice, very likely, or
black beetles, or elves dancing in the moonlight about their
queen. How am I to know which? Surely if elves dance anywhere it
is on midsummer nights like this when the dew has clotted on all
the leaves till they are pearled with a soft green fire as if from
caverns under sea and I walk down the path through such caves and
among such kelp and corals as a merman might. All about me I hear
the stirring of the little people and now and then soft airs
fanned from invisible wings touch my cheek. It may be moth, or
bat, or tricksy Ariel for all I know or care, such glamour does
the haunted air throw about him who will leave the brown earth
behind and plunge in its silvery depths.
Pushing aside tapestries woven of such figures as these on a cloth
of white silver, I stepped out of the wood on to the shore of the
unruffled pond. Here a man might well pause and take no further
step lest he fall into the blue depths of space. The moon hangs
like a great shield in a sky of soft sapphire, piled with luminous
figures. Within the wood are fairy and elf, goblin and gnome, half
seen in the filmy light. Here giant genie stand revealed, passing
in the dim perspective of mighty distances or leaning portentously
from the radiant sky. In the mirror-like pond I see all these
things repeated in an underworld that is as distinct and clear,
yet strangely distorted. The miles of soft blue distance that
stretch invitingly upward to the withdrawn stars of the zenith,
stretch as soft and blue, but fearsomely deep beneath my feet to
the nadir. Standing at the water's rim I am on the verge of a
vast, deep gulf that no plummet might fathom, into which at
another step I shall begin to fall, and once falling fall forever,
for there is no bottom. It is all very well to say to one's self
that an inch below the mirroring surface lies the good gray sand
which was there by daylight. The midsummer moon is past the full
and things are as they seem.
[Illustration: Rounding the Breakwater at Nantucket within the Call
of the Old Lisbon Bell]
By midnight the white genie of the sky had stalked off beyond the
horizon out of sight. The moon that had been so great among them
with its rim touching the eastern hills that it was like a great
map of itself hung on the margining sky, had concentrated to a
ball of white light near the zenith. Back in the wood I found the
invisible little people out in full force, rustling, flitting and
calling. But the white light had gone and under thick foliage of
deciduous trees the real night had come again, dappled, indeed, by
flecks of filtered moonlight which dazzled and made the shadows
more obscure. In the depths of the pines the veritable darkness of
Egypt smothered all sight. Here the path must be found by the feet
alone, and it is singular what potency of understanding thrills up
from the good brown earth through the boot-soles when it is
needed. Every footpath is a shallow canal through which you flow
as does water if you will but let it lead you. If the foot fall
but a little to the right or left of the wonted spot some slight
inequality of the earth that in the full daylight would never
reach your senses, now sends definite messages to you. By it you
swing with certainty to the right or the left and find the next
footfall near enough within the narrow way to continue the
guidance. No matter how winding the path, it will keep you within
its borders if you will but give up your will to it.
Stepping from this Egyptian shadow of the pines to the full glare
of midnight on the brow of the hill was like having a searchlight
thrown on you. All things gleamed in a white radiance which had
rainbow margins where the dew hung heaviest on nearby objects.
By day in this spot the eye is photographic and records every
detail, by night you have the same story told again by the brush
of an impressionist. It is the reverse with sounds. In the full
glare of the sun the myriad voices of the world mingle in a clear
roar that is a steady musical note, and soon you forget to hear
it. By night each noise is individual, and leaves its impress on
the mind. Whoever remembers the quality of noises he hears by day
in the city, however great the uproar? Who can forget the soothing
chirp of crickets in the grass at his feet by night?
Standing on a hilltop on such a midnight a man may map the
watercourses, large and small, for miles around, though by day he
can see from the same place no glint of water. Here is a deep lake
of white fog which marks a marsh, and into it flow winding streams
that are level with the treetops on the margin. Here the moon by
night is distilling and vatting mountain dew from which all wild
creatures may drink deep without fear of deleterious effects.
It is the cup that cheers and does not inebriate. The waking
robins tipple on it and sing the more joyously, nor is there
in their midday any of the moroseness of reaction.
Three hours later the moon had slipped down from the zenith into
cushions of velvety, violet black, low in the western sky. Its
bright white glow was lost in part and it was haloed with a yellow
nimbus of its own fog distillation. Over on the margin of the
pines the little screech owl, now full of field mice and having
time to worry, voiced his trouble about it in little sorrowful
whinnies. Down in the pasture a fox barked distinctly and a coon
answered the plaint of the screech owl in a voice not unlike his.
It always seems to me that the night hunters of pasture and
woodland bewail the passing of such a night as much as I do. The
whippoor-will began to voice his petulant wistfulness again. He
had been silent for hours, feasting I dare say on myriad moths and
unable to call with his mouth full. The whippoor-will chants
matins as querulously as he does vespers. Far in the east the
stars that had been gleaming brighter as the moon descended paled
again. The night in all its perfect beauty was over, for into the
shrill eagerness of the whippoor-will's call cut the joyous carol
of a dawn-worshipping robin.