The Hours of Afternoon, XXVIII: The still beauty of summer evenings

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.