The flowers are closed in the moonlight of the April garden, but their perfumes fill the night—hyacinths, tulips, and ghostly white and yellow lilies scent the air with a dim, delicious fragrance. They sleep in the fullness of Spring, and the April moon, round and white, displays the masses of their colours in her dazzling beam. Faint scents of earth come from the field, of the earth harrowed and her hidden secrets revealed. The scent of moss and soil mingles with the scent of the flowers in the garden. The moon rides high, then dips towards the west—she founders in the west like a great ship; the moon founders, and as she sinks, the sun arises on the opposite shore of the sky, and a long golden beam slants into the garden. The flowers wake and open their petals to the sun—the scents of the harrowed earth are lost in the sweetness of the opening flowers. “The night is come—O night verily blessed!” The blessed night is an April night, the night of a full moon. Already the scents of Spring are stirring in the fields—fair scents, fugitive scents, scents of budding and growth. Yet to the watcher of the Passion, Spring has not yet fully come. The earth is like a stage set, but with the curtains down. All is in readiness, but the drama has not yet begun. The watcher of the Passion feels that Spring will not have begun till he sings among the perfumes of incense and lilies:— “Lo, the fair beauty of earth, from the death of winter arising, Every good gift of the year now with its Master returns.” But already at those lines he will be looking back—back on a beginning he did not see. The breaking of Easter day was hidden from all but the moon, as none but the moon saw the Son of Man rise from the dead. So on this most blessed night there is no watching but the watching of the moon. The faithful have kept a sorrowful watch in Gethsemane, as a few months ago they kept a joyful watch at Bethlehem, but this night is too blessed, too solemn for human vigil. All we can do is to salute it as it drops over the earth, to greet it as we should greet a joyful daybreak— “The night is come—O night verily blessed!” Then we disperse and leave that night to its own mysteries. The moon is high in the sky, her flooding whiteness of light has wiped out nearly all the stars. On the earth she calls colours into being, strange, ghostly colours. She sails across the heavens like a ship, and to-night she seems to bear with her the wonder of all past lore: she is the ship of the dead to which the Egyptians looked up, she is the goddess who wooed Endymion, she is the Mystery of Mysteries in some far-off Hindu temple. Ship, queen and goddess, mystery of mysteries, she is by virtue of that night when she rode the Paschal heavens and saw what was hidden from all human eyes.