These things mingle their power with that of the silence and the wooded distance under the blue and rosy west. The slow dying of a train’s roar beats upon the shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed up in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to the glory of the twilight. Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over the dew from the folds in low clouds of infinitely modulated grey. Autumn is clearly hiding somewhere in the long warm alleys under the green and gold of the hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait for certain harmonies with oaks in the meadows and beeches in the steep woods. The songs, too, are those of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin moodily brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the unseen wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a broken voice of a matter now forgotten, of the melancholy twit of the single bullfinch as he flies. The sudden lyric of the wren can stir no corresponding energy in the land which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered cow fastened to the milking-stall and munching grains. Soon will the milk and honey flow. The reaping-machine whirrs; the wheelwrights have mended the waggons’ wheels and patched their sides; they stand outside their lodges. There is a quarter of a sloping wheat-field reaped; the shocks stand out above the silvery stubble in the evening like rocks out of a moonlight sea. The unreaped corn is like a tawny coast; and all is calm, with the quiet of evening heavens fallen over the earth. This beauty of the ripe Demeter standing in the August land is incomparable. It reminds one of the poet who said that he had seen a maid who looked like a fountain on a green lawn when the south wind blows in June; and one whose smile was as memorable as the new moon in the first still mild evening of the year, when it is seen for a moment only over the dark hills; and one whose walking was more kindling to the blood than good ale by a winter fire on an endless evening among friends; but that now he has met another, and when he is with her or thinks of her he becomes as one that is blind and deaf to all other things.