The moon hung low over the quiet sea, sleeping now under the spell of the summer night, as if no storm had ever vexed it.
So silent, so hushed was it that but for the soft ripple on the sand we should have thought it calmed in eternal repose.

Far off along the horizon the stars hung motionless as the sea; overhead they shone out of the measureless depths of space with a soft and solemn splendour.
Not a branch moved on the great trees behind us, folded now in the universal mystery of the night.

The little stretch of beach, over whose yellow sands the song of the invisible Ariel once floated, lay in the soft light fit for the feet of fairies, or the gentle advance and retreat of the sea.

The very air, suffused through all that vast immensity with a mysterious light, seemed like a dream of peace.
In such a place, at such an hour, one shrinks from speech as from the word that breaks the spell.

When one is so much a part of the sublime order of things that the universal movement of force that streams through all things embraces and thrills him with the consciousness of common fellowship, how vain is all human utterance! The greatest of poems, the sublime harmony in which all things are folded, has never been spoken, and never will be.