The waning moon at length peered warily from behind a bank of cloud,
and her dim light melting through the darkness filled the night with
a dream of the day. Richard was no more of a poet or dreamer of
dreams than is any honest youth so long as love holds the bandage of
custom away from his eyes. The poets are they who all their life
long contrive to see over or through the bandage; but they would, I
doubt, have but few readers, had not nature decreed that all youths
and maidens shall, for a period, be it long or short, become aware
that they too are of the race of the singers--shall, in the journey
of their life, at least pass through the zone of song: some of them
recognise it as the region of truth, and continue to believe in it
still when it seems to have vanished from around them; others scoff
as it disappears, and curse themselves for dupes. Through this zone
Richard was now passing. Hence the moon wore to him a sorrowful
face, and he felt a vague sympathy in her regard, that of one who
was herself in trouble, half the light of her lord's countenance
withdrawn. For science had not for him interfered with the shows of
things by a partial revelation of their realities. He had not
learned that the face of the moon is the face of a corpse-world;
that the sadness upon it is the sadness of utter loss; that her
light has in it no dissolved smile, is but the reflex from a
lifeless mirror; that of all the orbs we know best she can have
least to do with lovers' longings and losses, she alone having no
love left in her--the cold cinder of a quenched world. Not an
out-burnt cinder, though! she needs but to be cast again into the
furnace of the sun.

As it was, Richard had gazed at her hardly for a minute when he
found the tears running down his face, and starting up, ashamed of