Our heights in the sunrise show once again a world transfigured; a sparkling, coloured, other-worldly world.
“Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
The saffrons and yellows begin to gather over the moors, and the crests of the hills and the tree-tops are tipped with light. Each flower has its shimmering aureole; each has taken a hue never seen in the garish fulness of the sunshine, enamel, stained-glass-window hues, difficult to describe. There is a curious look of life about everything. It is the exquisite hour of the earth, untroubled by man; garden and woods, hill and valley, unfold their secrets to the sky and hold commune with the dawn-angels. There is a freshness, a vividness, almost a surprise about the world, as if all things were made new again. An immense difference in the scene compared to the night’s grave mysteries. The latter is a canto from the Divine Comedy as against Fra Angelico’s dance of Paradise. And to this innocent joy of the waking earth you have the songs of the birds. Some ecstatic thrush, or liquid slow-chanting blackbird, will have begun the hymns at the first glimmer of dawn, and hold the world spell-bound till the lesser chorus spreads a tangled web of sound from end to end of the valley and the garden heights, and the moor silence is reached.
Morning after morning of this glorious summer of the war, the pageant of sunrise marches, for those who have eyes to see, and night after night the mystery gathers in the moonlight. All England holds some such fair visions. Does it not seem a dream that it should be so? The horror, the devastation, the noise, the fire, the bloodshed, the agony, the struggle, only a couple of hundred miles away, are they the only realities in this red year? To us in England’s heart, still mercifully unwounded, these sometimes seem the dream, the dream of evil, and our peace the reality.
Dream, or reality, it is our peace we want to bring to you.