he 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 brida