Night – Darkling, I Listen

Night-Blowing Flowers by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

Children of night! unfolding meekly, slowly,

To the sweet breathings of the shadowy hours,

When dark-blue heavens look softest and most holy,

And glow-worm light is in the forest bowers;

To solemn things and deep,

To spirit-haunted sleep,

To thoughts, all purified

From earth, ye seem allied,

O dedicated flowers!
Ye, from the gaze of crowds your beauty veiling,

Keep in dim vestal urns the sweetness shrined;

Till the mild moon, on high serenely sailing,

Looks on you tenderly and sadly kind.

So doth love’s dreaming heart

Dwell from the throng apart,

And but to shades disclose

The inmost thought, which glows

With its pure life entwined.
Shut from the sounds wherein the day rejoices,

To no triumphant song your petals thrill,

But send forth odours with the faint, soft voices

Rising from hidden streams, when all is still.

So doth lone prayer arise

Mingling with secret sighs,

When grief unfolds, like you,

Her breast, for heavenly dew

In silent hours to fill.

Night by Ann Radcliffe (from Romance of the Forest)

Now Ev’ning fades! her pensive step retires,

And Night leads on the dews, and shadowy hours:

Her awful pomp of planetary fires,

And all her train of visionary powers.
These paint with fleeting shapes the dream of sleep,

These swell the waking soul with pleasing dread;

These through the glooms in forms terrific sweep,

And rouse the thrilling horrors of the dead!
Queen of the solemn thought—mysterious Night!

Whose step is darkness, and whose voice is fear!

Thy shades I welcome with severe delight,

And hail thy hollow gales, that sigh so drear!
When, wrapt in clouds, and riding in the blast,

Thou roll’st the storm along the sounding shore,

I love to watch the whelming billows, cast

On rocks below, and listen to the roar.
Thy milder terrors, Night, I frequent woo,

Thy silent lightnings, and thy meteor’s glare,

Thy northern fires, bright with ensanguine hue,

That light in heaven’s high vault the fervid air.
But chief I love thee, when thy lucid car

Sheds through the fleecy clouds a trembling gleam,

And shews the misty mountain from afar,

The nearer forest, and the valley’s stream:
And nameless objects in the vale below,

That floating dimly to the musing eye,

Assume, at Fancy’s touch, fantastic shew,

And raise her sweet romantic visions high.
Then let me stand amidst thy glooms profound

On some wild woody steep, and hear the breeze

That swells in mournful melody around,

And faintly dies upon the distant trees.
What melancholy charm steals o’er the mind!

What hallow’d tears the rising rapture greet!

While many a viewless spirit in the wind

Sighs to the lonely hour in accents sweet!
Ah! who the dear illusions pleas’d would yield,

Which Fancy wakes from silence and from shades,

For all the sober forms of Truth reveal’d,

For all the scenes that Day’s bright eye pervades!