He turned upon his side, and looked along the grassy summit to the woods upon the opposite slope and to the distant mountains.  Dull silver, immutable, perpetual, they reared themselves to meet the moonbeams.  Between him and those stern and changeless fronts, pallid as with snows, stretched the gray woods.  The moon shone very brightly, and there was no wind.  So unearthly was the quiet of the night, so solemn the light, so high and still and calm the universe around him, that awe fell upon his soul.  It was well to lie upon the hilltop and guess at the riddle of the world; now dimly to see the meaning, now to lose it quite, to wonder, to think of death.  The easy consciousness that for him death was scores of years away, that he should not meet the spectre until the wine was all drunken, the garlands withered, and he, the guest, ready to depart, made these speculations not at all unpleasing.  He looked at his hand, blanched by the moonlight, lying beside him upon the grass, and thought how like a dead hand it seemed, and what if he could not move it, nor his body, nor could ever rise from the grass, but must lie there upon the lonely hilltop in the untrodden wilderness, until that which had ridden and hunted and passed so buoyantly through life should become but a few dry bones, a handful of dust.  He was of his time, and its laxness of principle and conduct; if he held within himself the potential scholar, statesman, and philosopher, there were also the skeptic, the egotist, and the libertine.  He followed the fashion and disbelieved much, but he knew that if he died to-night his soul would not stay with his body upon the hilltop.  He wondered, somewhat grimly, what it would do when so much that had clothed it round—­pride of life, love of pleasure, desire, ambition—­should be plucked away.  Poor soul!  Surely it would feel itself something shrunken, stripped of warmth, shiveringly bare to all the winds of heaven.  The radiance of the moon usurped the sky, but behind that veil of light the invisible and multitudinous stars were shining.  Beyond those stars were other stars, beyond those yet others; on and on went the stars, wise men said.  Beyond them all, what then?  And where was the place of the soul?  What would it do?  What heaven or hell would it find or make for itself?  Guesswork all!

The silver pomp of the night began to be oppressive to him.  There was beauty, but it was a beauty cold and distant, infinitely withdrawn from man and his concerns.  Woods and mountains held aloof, communing with the stars.  They were kindred and of one house; it was man who was alien, a stranger and alone.  The hilltop cared not that he lay thereon; the grass would grow as greenly when he was in his grave; all his tragedies since time began he might reenact there below, and the mountains would not bend to look.

He flung his arm across his eyes to shut out the moonlight, and tried to sleep.  Finding the attempt a vain one, and that the night pressed more and more heavily upon him, he sat up with the intention of shaking the negro awake, and so providing himself with other company than his own thoughts.