pleasant if she should climb the hillside now and sit beside him, with her
shy dark eyes and floating hair. Her hair was long and fine, and the wind
would lift it; her face was fair, and another than the wind should kiss
it. The night would not then be so slow in going.

He turned upon his side, and looked along the grassy summit to the woods
upon the opposite slope and to the distant mountains. Dull silver,
immutable, perpetual, they reared themselves to meet the moonbeams.
Between him and those stern and changeless fronts, pallid as with snows,
stretched the gray woods. The moon shone very brightly, and there was no
wind. So unearthly was the quiet of the night, so solemn the light, so
high and still and calm the universe around him, that awe fell upon his
soul. It was well to lie upon the hilltop and guess at the riddle of the
world; now dimly to see the meaning, now to lose it quite, to wonder, to
think of death. The easy consciousness that for him death was scores of
years away, that he should not meet the spectre until the wine was all
drunken, the garlands withered, and he, the guest, ready to depart, made
these speculations not at all unpleasing. He looked at his hand, blanched
by the moonlight, lying beside him upon the grass, and thought how like a
dead hand it seemed, and what if he could not move it, nor his body, nor
could ever rise from the grass, but must lie there upon the lonely hilltop
in the untrodden wilderness, until that which had ridden and hunted and
passed so buoyantly through life should become but a few dry bones, a
handful of dust. He was of his time, and its laxness of principle and
conduct; if he held within himself the potential scholar, statesman, and
philosopher, there were also the skeptic, the egotist, and the libertine.
He followed the fashion and disbelieved much, but he knew that if he died
to-night his soul would not stay with his body upon the hilltop. He
wondered, somewhat grimly, what it would do when so much that had clothed
it round--pride of life, love of pleasure, desire, ambition--should be