such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,
its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding
hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true
tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be
perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds
and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure
sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens
precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in
the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each
advanced half-way.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and
listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but
it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the
crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one
last crisis--the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it
with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve
a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness,
emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The
qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far
more dignity than is found in the façade of a palace double its size
lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of
the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily