Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 1900.

By George EdgarMontgomery

1269 At Night

THE SUN is sinking over hill and sea,

Its red light fires a spectral line of shore;

Night droops upon our half-world mistily

With sombre glory and ghost-haunted lore;

The stars show dim and pallid in the sky,

Vague, wraith-white glimmerings of volcanic spheres,

And a slim crescent of the moon appears

Like some young herald in the hours that die.

Soon we who watch the fading of a day,

Who feel the cool winds of the ocean blow

Upon our dusk fields in sweet, vagrant way,

Freshening earth’s arid spaces with their glow,

Stand forth amid the infinite peace of night,

An infinite peace for high and holy souls

That strive to find their far, mysterious goals

Beyond the horizon of their eager sight.

At this sequestered hour when tender sleep

Holds out to listless lives its precious boon,

When men grow weary of the fruits they reap,

Grow weary of recurrent dawn and noon,

Peace dwells upon them for a little while,

Like dew and shade upon the growing grass,

And, mindless of uncounted hours that pass,

They woo a deep oblivion and they smile.

Yet I, whose nights are full of waking dreams,

Sleep not—but watch the furtive moments drift

Like sluggish waves, and watch the fire-bright gleam

Of vibrant planets rolling straight and swift

Along their orbit pathways, even as life

Moves in its earthward orbit to the grave,

Till I, an atom, doomed to weep and slave,

Feel my fast kinship with celestial strife.

For now I see the universe outspread

Within my vision, as with close-shut lids

One may read clear the history of the dead

And stand with Pharaohs by the Pyramids,

Or sit within some rare Athenian home;

Yes, as the words and deeds of men are brought

Into the widening circle of my thought,

The stars grow real to me like deathless Rome.