Look but at the avenue of the Broad Walk at night, as it is seen from its northern gate. Some midsummer daylight hovers up the sky, but the coolness and purity of subtle light are subtly mixed with the thin brown that is the colour of London. A narrow space of this sombre and delicate sky lies straight between the two masses of the trees, and they are unmarked, unbroken, by any single branch or twig astray. The symmetry is absolute; the wide pathway is one faint grey from foreground to distance. Close to you, two sentinel trees, one on either hand, hold the gateway of the majestic avenue, and these only are green, on these only shines the gaslight of the road. These two are among those London trees that never bathe in darkness. You can see their branches and their leaves, their soft encounters with the night-winds, and their articulate composure; but you see none of such things in the high and dark mass beyond, standing also precisely to the right, and precisely to the left. By day it is a London avenue, and the grass and gravel are, as it were, disowned by Nature; but now this rigid pattern of a landscape is visibly in the heart and centre of Nature and Night. No pilgrimage of days can take a traveller further than the places he is rapt to by a pause, at night, where distance and dreams themselves have made the journey. Or seek the trees earlier in the night; for the trees of Kensington Gardens are not deprived of the delicate dusk, though the first twilight has too much of day in it, and the touching restoration does not begin until the paths are vague and colour is absorbed and effaced by the influence of the local sky. London passes away from the trees while the June north-west is still luminous, but barely luminous, and going out so fast that to watching eyes it seems to flash softly while it darkens, as though summer lightning were at play under the horizon; then the tender leaves of penetrable trees, lightly apart in the tree-tops, let showering glimpses of sky go through. If, on the other hand, you turn your own face from the bright regions and take the leaves with the north-west upon them, on no apple-trees in orchards, and on no olives in the south, does the subsiding evening look more sweetly. All is forgotten except the cool ablution of evening upon the separate leaves.