these are night moths (Arctica menthrasti, the ermine moth, answers the description), whilst those assembled sing old songs, which are heard as far as where the cows are lying under the branching trees.
So passed the evening until all have retired to rest, and the Poet is alone, when he takes out Hallam’s last-written letters—
“those fall’n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead.”[68]
He reads them afresh, to renew a sense of their bygone intimacy:
“So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine.”
The Poet’s mind struggles on “empyreal heights of thought” in incorporeal ecstasy—a sort of trance inexplicable—which lasts till dawn, when
“East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.”
XCVI.
He reproves the young lady, who, whilst tender over killing a fly, does not hesitate to call the harass of religious doubt “Devil-born.”
The Poet says, “one indeed I knew”—who, it may be presumed, was Hallam—and