Page:Francesca Carrara 3.pdf/316

Rh long waving grass below was tremulous with the dew. The ivy, clinging round that side of the old church, shone with its broad green leaves, which caught a double radiance from the moon and from the small diamond panes of the Gothic windows which the long drooping branches enwreathed. There was an uncertain and sad loveliness on the atmosphere, which harmonised with humanity.

There is something in the shadowless sky and the unbroken moonshine which mocks us with repose. We have no part in it; our own unrest has no sympathy with the blue and spiritual horizon, whose hope is not with this life. The calm and quiet light is not of our busy and careful world; it belongs to sleep, to silence, and to dreams; and, alas! we gaze on it with the beating heart and the fevered pulse, while the thousand vain delusions of past and future cast their various shadows before our eyes. Who stands watching in the sleepless midnight, but one from whose pillow repose is banished by one all-present thought? Ambition, hate, love, alike have their vigils; and what have they in common with the cloudless sky, where the moon wanders, placid as the spirit of the good when resigned to die, and confident and filled with another and holier sphere? But the troubled element, the fitful flash, the murky