_Still waters_; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ... amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase; or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music ... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. _Foam_--and the hour is gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn”: _Wind_--and the noises of the town are like the humming of wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and incommunicable things: _Ruth_--and sorrow and exile are become loveliness: _Helen_--and that immemorial desire is become _our_ desire, and that phantom beauty is become _our_ dream and _our_ passion. _Still Waters_--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of travelling wings. THE PLEIAD-MONTH From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.