SALUTATION TO SUNRISE

I have watied for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful, colorless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round the first uncertain promise of incresing light. For there is an hour before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul or around it, when even the starts fail. And this long and and dreaded expectation i had thought to be worst when one was alone at sea in a small boatwithout wind; drifting beyond one's harbor in the end of the outer channel tide, and sogging back to the first flow on the board, confused movement of the sea without any waves. in such lonely mornings i have watched the Owers light turning, and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that movements could be so strong streched out to the cluelessmind. I have prayed for the morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.

But now, on this ridge, draggingmyself on the main road, I found a deeper abyssof isolation and despairing fatigue than i have ever known, and I came near to turning eastwards and imploring the hastening of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can become in a due order. I still went forward a little beacuse when I sat down my lonliness oppressed me like a misfortune; a little balance and rhythm to the movement of my body.

I heard no sound of animals or birds.I pissed several fields, deserted in the half-darkness, and in some i felf the hay but always found it ringing west with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summit. For a litle spaceof time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road, that not compel me to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficient oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as athin, transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.

Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating gloom (which I think the cloud in purgatory must reflect) lifted the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colors came back to the things; the trees recovered their shape, live and trembling; here and there on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their movements took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle barrier was drawn which marks today from yesterday; all the night and its despondency became the past and entered my memory. The road before me the path on my left, the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing light., that is, into the familiar and invigorating present which I have always found capable of opening, the doors of the future with a gesture of victory.

My pain either left me, or I ceased to noticed it, and seeing a little way before me a bank above the road, and a fire grove of sparse and dominant chestnuts climbed up thither and turned, standing to the east.

There, without any warning of colors, or the heraldry that we have in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun. The air become warmer alomost suddenly. The splendour and health of the new day left me all in response, and persuaded of compelled me to immediate.

I found, therefore, in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath on of my tress, a place for lying down; I streched myself out upon it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vagueand tenous delight separated from complete forgetfullness. If the last confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of prayer and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of adoration - this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good proceeds, but partly to the Sun, which, of all the things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most complete and glorious.