Moonlight

Anne of Windy Poplars: Week 4

Roundhay Lake, John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1877

“Oh, Miss Shirley, I’m sure I don’t love him enough to marry him. I realize that now…now that it is too late. I was just moonlighted into thinking I loved him. If it hadn’t been for the moon I’m sure I would have asked for time to think it over. But I was swept off my feet…I can see that now. Oh, I’ll run away…I’ll do something desperate!”

~Hazel to Anne in Chapter 10 of The Second Year

“…the moon has a pure luminous mystery that makes everything beautiful, everything magic. The massed colors of early autumn glow in its light, all the little streams run silver, and silver rises the smoke from burning leaves.”

~Gladys Taber

“It’s moonlight tonight, beloved…moonlight on the poplars of the yard…moonlit dimples all over the harbor where a phantom ship is drifting outwards…moonlight on the old graveyard…on my own private valley…on the Storm King. And it will be moonlight in Lover’s Lane and on the Lake of Shining Waters and the old Haunted Wood and Violet Vale. There should be fairy dances on the hills tonight. But, Gilbert dear, moonlight with no one to share it is just…just moonshine.”

~Anne to Gilbert in Chapter 5 of The Third Year

Night in the Pastures
by Lucy Maud Montgomery

The night wind steals from the tranquil hills,
And its noiseless footsteps pass
O'er the dim hushed breadths of the pasture fields,
And the dew-wet trampled grass.
The stars are thick in the velvet sky,
Where a white young moon shines clear
Through the airy boughs of the poplars tall,
And the peace of the night is here.

The brook's soft gurgle is sweet and low,
And the sorrowful whip-poor-wills
Are grieving afar in the purple gloom
Of the dark encircling hills;
And the faint weird murmurs of elfin things
Through the shadowy pine-trees creep,
But the air is sweet with the hush of dreams,
And the fields have gone to sleep.

The placid cattle have laid them down
At the roots of the mystic firs,
And the sheep in the lowland are dimly white
Where the wind in the bracken stirs.
The hills are chanting a solemn hymn
At the altar of star and sky;
In a rapturous silence, a dim-lit calm,
The dewy pastures lie.

Here, in these meadows of starry rest,
In these mysteries of the night,
The manifold voices of Nature breathe
With a meaning of strange delight.
The passionless calm of the dreaming fields
Has the power of a holy prayer,
And the infinite love of the far dim hills
Shuts out every thought of care. 

I’m delighted you’re here, kindred spirit!

~Stephanie