a reflected light upon her face; seven minutes, and whose eyes but hers should open, bright and pure as two blue stars? We had studied those stars; and read at a glance that our little one had again entered the House of Life.
Our baby's dying and her new birth is an exact type of the death and birth of the day. One description serves for both. As she sank away, fainting and cold, so night expires. This takes place at various times, according to the season; but generally about two o'clock in the morning in these latitudes. If you happen to be watching or working within doors, you may note the time by a coldness and shuddering in your limbs, and by the sudden waning of the fire, in spite of your best efforts to keep it bright and cheerful. Then a wind—generally not a very gentle one—sweeps through the streets—once: it does not return, but hurries straight on, leaving all calm behind it: that is the breath that passed over the child. Now a blush suffuses the East, and then open the violet eyes of the day, bright and pure as if there were no death in the world, nor sin. All which the blackbird seems to announce to the natural world below. The wind we spoke of warns him; whereupon he takes his head from under his wing, and keeps a steady look-out toward the East. As soon as the glory of the morning appears, he sings his soldierly song; as soon as he sings, smaller fowl wake and listen, and peep about quietly; when—there comes the day overhead, sailing in the topmost air, in the golden boat with the purple sails. And the little winds that blow in the sails—here come they, swooping over the meadows, scudding along hedgerows, bounding into the big trees, and away to fill those purple sails again, not only with a wind, but with a hundred perfumes, and airs heavy with the echoes of a hundred songs.[1]
I wish I were a poet; you should have a description of all this in verses, and welcome. But if I were a musician! Let us see what we should do as musicians. First, you should hear the distant sound of a bugle, which sound should float away: that is one of the heralds of the morning, flying southward. Then another should issue from the eastern gates; and now the grand reveillé should grow, sweep past your ears (like the wind aforesaid), and go on, dying as it goes. When as it dies, my stringed instruments come in. These to the left of the orchestra break into a soft slow movement, the music swaying drowsily from side to side, as it were, with a noise like the rustling of boughs. It must not be much of a noise, however, for my stringed instruments to the right have begun the very song of the morning. The bows tremble upon the strings, like
- ↑ This paper was written a year ago. Mr. Mattieu Williams, in his book Through Norway with a Knapsack, has since confirmed my fancy that every day dies a natural death. In Scandinavia, there is a midnight sun; and Mr. Williams says that although the altitude of the sun is the same ten minutes before twelve as ten minutes after, there is a perceptible difference in atmospheric tone and colour—"the usual difference between evening and morning, sunset and sunrise; the light having a warmer tint before than after midnight."
