Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glow’d the firmament
With living saphirs; Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.”
Were we inclined to do anything but enjoy this and be thankful—giving ourselves up to its gentleness, informing ourselves with its quietness and beauty,—we would note the simplicity, the neutral tints, the quietness of its language, the “sober livery” in which its thoughts are clad. In the first thirty-eight words, twenty-nine are monosyllables. Then there is the gradual way in which the crowning fantasy is introduced. It comes upon us at once, and yet not wholly unexpected; it “sweetly creeps” into our “study of imagination;” it lives and moves, but it is a moving that is “delicate;” it flows in upon us incredibili lenitate. “Evening” is a matter of fact, and its stillness too—a time of the day; and “twilight” is little more. We feel the first touch of spiritual life in “her sober livery,” and bolder and deeper in “all things clad.” Still we are not deep, the real is not yet transfigured and transformed, and we are brought back into it after being told that “Silence accompanied,” by the explanatory “for,” and the bit of sweet natural history of the beasts and birds. The mind dilates and is moved, its eye detained over the picture; and then comes that rich, “thick warbled note”—“all but the wakeful nightingale;” this fills and informs the ear, making it also “of apprehension more quick,” and we are prepared now for the great idea coming “into the eye and prospect of our soul”—SILENCE WAS PLEASED! There is nothing in all poetry above this. Still evening and twilight gray are now Beings, coming on, and walking over the earth like queens, “with Silence,”
“Admiration’s speaking’st tongue,”