The first night we made our bed where the plover has her nest, in a grassy hollow on the shelf of a mountain.

“The day is done,” said my companion.  “A little space of time has died.  Now see the vision of the Eternal, which comes after death;” and he pointed to the night sky, in which one by one little lamps were lighting.

The bright world passed away, faded away in my eyes and became at last a dark night sky in which shone countless stars.  During the day, my soul expressed itself to itself in the beauty which is for an hour, but at night it re-expressed itself in terms of the Infinite.  I looked to my companion, and his eyes and lips shone in the darkness so that he seemed dressed in cloth cut from the night sky itself, and interwoven with stars.  We lay together and looked up into the far high sky, we breathed lightly:  it seemed we exhaled the scent of flowers that we had inbreathed in the morning—­we slept.

And then the morning!  The quiet, quiet hours, the flitting of moths in the dawn twilight, the mysterious business of mice among the stones about us, the cold fleeting air just before sunrise, full of ghosts, our own awakening and the majestic sunrise, the exaggeration of all shapes, the birth of shadows, the beaming heralds, glorious rose-red summits and effulgent silvered crags, ten thousand trumpets raised to the zenith, and ten thousand promises outspoken!

We arose, my companion and I—­he only seemed to come to life when the first beam touched me.  I greeted the sun with my voice, and turning round, there at my feet was my friend, familiar, dear, so ready for living that one would have said the sun himself was his father.

“I was dead,” said he, “and behold I am alive again.  The world passed away, and behold, at the voice of a trumpet, it hath come back.  Beauty faded yestreen from colour into darkness, from life to death, and to-day it hath out-blossomed once again; the Sun was its father, dear gentle Night its mother....”

And running with me, he clambered upon a rock and outstretched his arms to the sun as if he were a woman looking to a strong man.

“Greater is the glory of sunrise than the glory of sunset, for the sunrise promises what shall be, whereas the sunset only tells the glory of the past.  The sunrise promises beautiful days, the sunset looks back upon beauty as if there were nothing in the future to compare with what has just departed.”

Thus sang my friend, and we scampered along to the newly wakened river.  Cold and fresh was the water, as if it also had slept in the night.  It was full of the night, but the morning which was in us strove with it, and at a stroke conquered it.  The sun laughed to see us playing in the water, and we greeted him with handfuls of sparkles.  The river was lusty and strong; it wrestled with us, grasped, pushed, pulled, buffeted, threw stones, charged forward in waves, laboriously rolled boulders against us....