friend Mr. Matthew Herbert, and following them into the orchard,
wandered about among the trees, under the curdled moonlight of the
apple-blossoms, amid the challenges and responses of five or six
nightingales, that sang as if their bodies had dwindled under the
sublimating influences of music, until, with more than cherubic
denudation, their sum of being was reduced to a soul and a throat.

Moonlight, apple-blossoms, nightingales, with the souls of men and
women for mirrors and reflectors! The picture is for the musician
not the painter, either him of words or him of colours. It was like
a lovely show in the land of dreams, even to the living souls that
moved in and made part of it. The earth is older now, colder at the
heart, a little nearer to the fate of cold-hearted things, which is
to be slaves and serve without love; but she has still the same
moonlight, the same apple-blossoms, the same nightingales, and we
have the same hearts, and so can understand it. But, alas! how
differently should we come in amongst the accessories of such a
picture! For we men at least are all but given over to ugliness,
and, artistically considered, even vulgarity, in the matter of
dress, wherein they, of all generations of English men and women,
were too easily supreme both as to form and colour. Hence, while
they are an admiration to us, we shall be but a laughter to those
that come behind us, and that whether their fashions be better than
ours or no, for nothing is so ridiculous as ugliness out of date.
The glimmer of gold and silver, the glitter of polished steel, the
flashing of jewels, and the flowing of plumes, went well. But, so
canopied with loveliness, so besung with winged passion, so clothed
that even with the heavenly delicacies enrounding them they blended
harmoniously, their moonlit orchard was an island beat by the waves
of war, its air would quiver and throb by fits, shaken with the roar