TWILIGHT.

(From "Essays on the Picturesque.")

HERE are some days when the whole sky is so full of jarring lights, that the shadiest groves and avenues hardly preserve their solemnity; and there are others, when the atmosphere, like the last glazing of a picture, softens into mellowness whatever is crude throughout the landscape.

Milton, whose eyes seem to have been most sensibly affected by every accident and gradation of light (and that possibly in a great degree from the weakness and consequently the irritability of these organs), speaks always of twilight with peculiar pleasure. He has even reversed what Socrates did by philosophy; he has called up twilight from earth and placed it in heaven.

From that high mount of God whence light and shade
Spring forth, the face of brightest heaven had changed
To grateful twilight.-Paradise Lost, v. 643.

What is also singular, he has in this passage made shade an essence equally with light, not merely a privation of it; a compliment never, I believe, paid to shadow before, but which might be expected from his aversion to glare, so frequently and so strongly expressed:

Hide me from day's garish eye.

When the sun begins to fling
His flaring beams.

The peculiarity of the effect of twilight is to soften and mellow. At that delightful time. even artificial water, however naked, edgy and tame its banks, will often receive a momentary charm; for then all that is scattered and cutting, all that disgusts a painter's eye, is blended together in one broad and soothing harmony of light and shadow. I have more than once, at such a moment, happened to arrive at a place entirely new to me, and have been struck in the highest degree with the appearance of wood, water and buildings, that seemed to accompany and set off each other in the happiest manner; and I felt quite impatient to examine all these beauties by daylight.

At length the morn, and cold indifference came.

The charm which held them together, and made them act so powerfully as a whole, had vanished.

It may, perhaps, be said that the imagination, from a few imperfect hints, often forms beauties which have no existence, and that indifference may naturally arise from those phantoms not being realized. I am far from denying the power of partial concealment and obscurity on the imagination; but in these cases, the set of objects when seen by twilight is beautiful as a picture, and would appear highly so if exactly represented on the canvas; but in full daylight, the sun, as it were, decompounds what had been so happily mixed together, and separates a striking whole into detached unimpressive parts.

SIR UVEDALE PRICE

HE sun was now resting his huge disk upon the edge of the level ocean, and gilded the accumulation of towering clouds through which he had traveled the live-long day, and, which now assembled on all sides, like misfortunes and disasters around a sinking empire and falling monarch. Still, however, his dying splendour gave a sombre magnificence to the massive congregation of vapours, forming out of the unsubstantial gloom the show of pyramids and towers, some touched with gold, some with purple, some with a hue of deep and dark red. The distant sea, stretched beneath this varied and gorgeous canopy, lay almost portentously still, reflecting back the dazzling and level beams of the descending luminary, and the splendid colouring of the clouds amidst which he was setting. Nearer to the beach, the tide rippled onward in waves of sparkling silver, that inperceptibly, yet rapidly, gained upon the sand.

Following the windings of the beach, they passed one projecting point of headland or rock after another, and now found themselves under a huge and continued extent of the precipices by which that iron-bound coast is in most places defended. Long projecting reefs of rock, extending under water, and only evincing their existence by here and there a peak entirely bare, or by the breakers which foamed over those that were partially covered, rendered Knockwinnock bay dreaded by pilots and ship-masters. The crags which rose between the

beach and the mainland, to the height of two or three hundred feet, afforded in their crevices shelter to unnumbered seafowl, in situations seemingly secured by their dizzy height from the rapacity of man. Many of these wild tribes, with the instinct which sends them to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise; but its wild and moaning sound was heard some time, and its effect became visible on the bosom of the sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The mass of waters, now dark and threatening, began to lift itself in larger ridges and sink in deeper furrows, forming waves that rose high in foam upon the breakers, or burst upon the beach with a sound resembling distant thunder. SIR WALTER SCOTT.

WITH

OUR INLAND SUMMER NIGHTFALL.

(Extract.)

ITHIN the twilight came forth tender snatches

Of birds' songs, from beneath their darkened eaves;

But now a noise of poor ground-dwellers matches

This dimness; neither loves, nor joys, nor

grieves.

A piping, slight and shrill,

And coarse, dull chirpings, fill

From out some lower dark
Comes up a dog's short bark;
There food and welcome rest, there cool
soft meadows lie.

The children, watching by the roadside wicket,

Now houseward troop, for blind-man'sbuff, or tag;

The ear, that all day's stronger, finer music Here chasing, sidelong, fireflies to the thicket,

There shouting, with a grass-tuft reared for

SUNSET.

UNSET is burning like the seal of God Upon the close of day. This very hour Night mounts her chariot in the eastern glooms,

ROBERT LOWELL.

To chase the flying sun, whose flight has left
Foot-prints of glory in the clouded west:
Swift is she hailed by winged swimming
steeds,