r branches and their leaves, their soft
encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you
see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also
precisely to the right, and precisely to the left.

By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were,
disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly
in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can
take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at
night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey.

Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington
Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight
has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin
until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the
influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the
June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so
fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as
though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender
leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering
glimpses of sky go through.

If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and
take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in
orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look
more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon
the separate leaves.

Or if there is an early moon, she is as sovereign a restorative as the
dark itself. She touches the high places of avenues within sound of the
London wheels, and they become as simple as tree-tops at Verona. But,
indeed, the moon is plainly seen to bring this dignity and liberty from
the simple skies. All the world knows her to be like that lady of the
poets who spoke to none that was not worthy, because before she talked
with men she 'knighted them with her smile.' It is one of the tyrannies
wreaked by the electric light and the gas-lamps upon the street-side tree
that they keep away from it the glimpses of the moon. Not only is secret
darkness forbidden, but the secret light is quenched. The tree waves
softly all night in the unaltering lamplight, and the moonlight is killed
upon its leaves.

As to these lights of London lamps, their beauty, which is so great, seems
to d