Therefore I shall sit here awhile on this garden seat, and muse in and upon the twilight. The scene and place are favourable for quiet thought. The lawn is smooth and shaven; at my feet lie beds of profuse geranium, verbena, calceolaria, petunia, in their rich Autumn prime, before any hint of frost has visited them. The air is quite heavy with the scent of the massed heliotrope. The colours, if sobered, are not yet lost in the fading light; the scarlets and purples are hushing and blending; the cherry colour, yellow, and white, have grown more distinct, and stand out more apparent upon the grass. Overhead, the sky is deepening to that dusk steel blue which soon discloses the very faint yet eye-catching glimmer of one white star. Across the quiet dome, and between the still, outstretched, motionless branches, the silent bats flit to and fro; there is a rustle of chafers in the lime. One sweet melancholy monotonous sound gives a background to the silence, an undertone that enhances, not in the least disturbs, the quiet. For the great charm of this garden, which lies on the slope of a hill, is, that near the foot of that hill swells and fails the ever-moving Sea. And looking from my garden seat through the near rose-bushes and above the taller growth lower down the slope, I see the broad silver shield, rising, as it seems to me on my hill-seat, up the circle of its horizon. An hour ago I was admiring the brilliancy and intensity of its colour, green shoaling into blue, and sparkling in the sun; now the faint light of the broad moon shares the sway of the decaying sunlight; and I see above and through the branches a space of pale bright grey. The jewel blue of afternoon has died out from it, but the more neutral tint accords better, I feel, with the sober hour and hushed sounds of twilight. How complete is the harmony and the balance of colour in all God’s pictures! And I love these twilight studies, that are much like the paintings, so Robert Browning tells us, of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. Pictures in which-- “A common greyness silvers everything, All in a twilight.” This is essentially a twilight poem I always think; silver-grey; a quiet calmed heart that has settled down into a deep still sadness and disappointment. He longs for those higher aspirations which can here be but imperfectly expressed, knowing that it is not well unless we hold an ideal far above our fulfilment here; and that, if we have attained all we sought in our pursuit of the beautiful and the good, we have not intended nobly enough:-- “There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease And Autumn grows, Autumn in everything. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self, And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight piece.”