Chapter XXVIII

The still beauty of summer evenings on the
greenswards where they lie outspread holds out to
us, without empty gesture or words, a symbol of
rest in gladness.

Young morning and its tricks has gone away with
the breezes; noon itself and the velvet skirts
of its warm winds, of its heavy winds, no longer
sweeps the torrid plain; and this is the hour
when, without a branch's moving or a pond's
ruffling its waters, the evening slowly comes
from the tops of the mountains and takes its seat
in the garden.

O the infinite golden flatness of the waters, and
the trees and their shadows on the reeds, and
the calm and sumptuous silence in whose still
presence we so greatly delight that we desire to
live with it always or to die of it and revive
by it, like two imperishable hearts tirelessly
drunken with brightness.