As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an end.  This year’s robins are in full voice; and the only song that is not for love or nesting—­the childish song of boy-birds, the freshest and youngest note—­is, by a happy paradox, that of an autumnal voice.

Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist’s wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding note.  Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent, stealthy soles of the barefooted in the south.

THE TETHERED CONSTELLATIONS

It is no small thing—­no light discovery—­to find a river Andromeda and Arcturus and their bright neighbours wheeling for half a summer night around a pole-star in the waters.  One star or two—­delicate visitants of streams—­we are used to see, somewhat by a sleight of the eyes, so fine and so fleeting is that apparition.  Or the southern waves may show the light—­not the image—­of the evening or the morning planet.  But this, in a pool of the country Thames at night, is no ripple-lengthened light; it is the startling image of a whole large constellation burning in the flood.

These reflected heavens are different heavens.  On a darker and more vacant field than that of the real skies, the shape of the Lyre or the Bear has an altogether new and noble solitude; and the waters play a painter’s part in setting their splendid subject free.  Two movements shake but do not scatter the still night:  the bright flashing of constellations in the deep Weir-pool, and the dark flashes of the vague bats flying.  The stars in the stream fluctuate with an alien motion.  Reversed, estranged, isolated, every shape of large stars escapes and returns, escapes and returns.  Fitful in the steady night, those constellations, so few, so whole, and so remote, have a suddenness of gleaming life.  You imagine that some unexampled gale might make them seem to shine with such a movement in the veritable sky; yet nothing but deep water, seeming still in its incessant flight and rebound, could really show such altered stars.  The flood lets a constellation fly, as Juliet’s “wanton” with a tethered bird, only to pluck it home again.  At moments some rhythmic flux of the water seems about to leave the darkly-set, widely-spaced Bear absolutely at large, to dismiss the great stars, and refuse to imitate the skies, and all the water is obscure; then one broken star returns, then fragments of another, and a third and a fourth flit back to their noble places, brilliantly vague, wonderfully visible, mobile, and unalterable.  There is nothing else at once so keen and so elusive.

The aspen poplar had been in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these.  The dimmer constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies.  Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and vague eyes of the stream.  They are blind to the Pleiades.