For then across the
crowded roofs softly comes a strange sweetness, and deep down among the
gloomy wynds of deserted warehouses, still as temples, sudden fairies of
sunset dance and dazzle, and touch the grimy walls with soft hands. In
lonely back rooms, full of desks and dust, haunted lights of evening
stand like splendid apparitions; and sometimes, if you lingered at the
top of High Street, beneath the dark old church, and the moon was out
on the left of the steeple and the sunset dying on the right, dying
beyond the tangled masts and fading from the river, you would forget you
were a city clerk, and you would wonder why the world was so beautiful,
why the moon was made of pearl, and what it was that called to you out
of yonder golden sea; and your heart would fill with a strange gladness,
and you would call back to those unearthly voices, "I am yours, yours,
all yours!"
Thus would this town of bales and merchants, of office-desks and stools,
make poets at evening that she might stone them at noon. For, of course,
she would have forgotten it all in the morning; and it were well not to
remind her with your dreaming eyes of her last night's softness.
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