beyond, white shoulders lapsing on white shoulders, white peaks rising beyond white peaks, white crests fading into further snowy crests, and, nearer, it may be, glens sinking into glens, no longer a sombre green, but as though stilled avalanches awaiting a magician’s unloosening spell. Once, just there, in just such a place, I saw a wonderful sight. The January frosts had gone, and February had come in with the soft sighing of a wind out of the south. The snows faded like morning-mists. But after three days the north wind came again in the night. At dawn it veered, and a light snow fell once more, then thick and moist and flaky, and by noon had changed to rain. But an hour or so later the polar breath once more came over the brows of the hills, and with midwinter intensity. The rain was frozen on every bough, on every branch, on every spray, on every twig, on every leaf, on every frond of bracken, on every spire of reed, on every blade of grass. The world had become cased in shining ice, crystalline, exquisite in radiant beauty, ineffable, as in a trance, the ecstasy of the Unknown Dreamer. At sundown the vast orb of blood-red flame sank over the glens and burned among the aisles of the forest. Looking at the ice-mailed wilderness of bole and bough and branch between me and the sun I saw a forest of living fire, wherein, as a wind stirred and threw sudden shadows, phantoms of flame moved to and fro, or stood, terrible children of light, as though entranced, as though listening, as though looking on Life or on Death. When at last the flame was all gathered up out of the west, and an aura of faint rose hung under the first glittering stars, an extraordinary ocean of yellow spread from the horizons serrated with immense mauve peninsulas and long narrow grass-green lagoons. But the mass of the western firmament was yellow, from the orange-yellow of lichen and the orange-red of the dandelion to the faint vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose. How lovely then were the trees which had been set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the sunset: what a fairyland, now, of delicate amber and translucent topaz. What mysterious colonnades, what avenues of lovely light! And then, later, to turn, and see the chill grey-blue ice-bound trees behind one filling slowly with moonshine, as the immensity of ocean fills, wave after wave, at moonrise, when a cloud is slowly uplifted by mysterious withdrawing airs! Then, truly, was Dreamland no longer a phantasy of sleep, but a loveliness so great that, like deep music, there could be no words wherewith to measure it, but only the breathless unspoken speech of the soul upon whom has fallen the secret dews. ST. BRIDGET OF THE SHORES