haze the very air seems to lie curled and to have
gone to sleep. And yet how portentous! The haze seems to brood. It seems
somehow to suggest that there is all of life asleep on earth. You
seem to feel rather than to hear the whole creation breathing in
its sleep--as if it was soundlessly stirring in dreams--presently to
stretch, to awake. There is also the delicacy, the tenderness of all
young things about it. Even in winter it reminds me of the very first
unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are
still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so
worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie
all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the
earth--under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the
contrast of the universe and of creation.

We drove along--and slowly, slowly came the dawn. You could not define
how it came. The whole world seemed to pale and to whiten, and that was
all. There was no sunrise. It merely seemed as if all of Nature--very
gradually--was soaking itself full of some light; it was dim at first,
but never grey; and then it became the whitest, the clearest, the most
undefinable light. There were no shadows. Under the brush of the wild
land which I was skirting by now there seemed to be quite as much of
luminosity as overhead. The mist was the thinnest haze, and it seemed to
derive its whiteness as much from the virgin snow on the ground as from
above. I could not cease to marvel at this light which seemed to be
without a source--like the halo around the Saviour's face. The eye as
yet did not reach very far, and wherever I looked, I found but one word
to describe it: impalpable--and that is saying what it was not rather
than what it was. As I said, there was no sunshine, but the light was
there, omnipresent, diffused, coming mildly, softly, but from all sides,
and out of all things as well as into them.

Shakespeare has this word in Macbeth, and I had often pondered on it:

So fair and foul a day I have not seen.

This was it, I thought. We have such days about four or five times
a year--and none but the northern countries have them. There are
clouds--or rather, there is a uniform layer of cloud, very high, and
just the slightest suggestion of curdiness in it; and the light is very
white. These days seem to waken in me every wander instinct that
lay asleep. There is nothing definite, nothing