Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
The sunset has a tranquil beauty but to me there is in it always a tinge of sadness, of the sadness of farewell, of the approach of darkness. This mood is expressed in the old hymn which in my childhood I used to hear so often in church:
Fading, still fading, the last beam is shining,
Father in heaven! the day is declining.
Safety and innocence fly with the light,
Temptation and danger walk forth with the night.
Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning, saith the Holy Book. The sunrise has not only inexpressible majesty and splendour, but it has the rapture of promise, the excitement of beginning again. Yesterday has gone forever, the night is over and we may start anew. To how many eyes, weary with wakefulness in the long watches of the night, or flushed with fever, is the first glimmer of the dawn welcome. The night makes every fear and worry worse than the reality, it magnifies every trivial distress. Mark Twain said the night brought madness—none of us is quite sane in the darkness. That particular regret for yesterday or apprehension for tomorrow that strikes you like a whiplash in the face at 2:45 A.M. dwindles into an absurdity in the healthy dawn.
Mark Twain, who had expressed the difference between the night and the morning tragically, also expressed it humorously. He said that when he was lying awake in the middle of the night he felt like an awful sinner, he hated himself with a horrible depression and made innumerable good resolutions; but when at 7:30 he was shaving himself he felt just as cheerful, healthy and unregenerate as ever.
I am a child of the morning. I love the dawn and the sunrise. When I was a child I saw the sunrise from the top of Whiteface and it seemed to me that I not only saw beauty but heard celestial music. Ever since reading in George Moore’s Evelyn Innes the nun’s description of her feelings while listening to Wagner’s Prologue to Lohengrin I myself never hear that lovely music rising to a tremendous climax without seeing in imagination what was revealed to the Sister of Mercy. I am on a mountain top before dawn; the darkness gives way; the greyness strengthens, and finally my whole mind and soul are filled with the increasing light.