24th September

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

"First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline. Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgement was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear." Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1870 (Lancashire)

"Very bright and clear. All the landscape had a beautiful liquid cast of blue. Many-coloured smokes in the valley, grey from teh Denbigh limekiln, yellow and lurid from the two kilns perhaps on the shoulders of a hill, blue from a bonfire." Gerard Manly Hopkins, 1874 (Denbighshire)

"A day of exceeding and almost unmatched beauty... A warm delicious calm and sweet peace brooded breathless over the mellow sunny autumn afternoon and the happy stillness was broken only by the voices of children blackberry gathering in an adjoining meadow and the sweet solitary singing of a robin... Near the entrance to the village of Kington St Michael I fell in with a team of red oxen, harnessed coming home from plough with chains rattling and the old ploughman riding the fore ox...
When I returned home at night the good Vicar accompanied me as far as the Plough Inn. The moon was at the full. The night was sweet and quiet. Overhead was the vast fleecy sky in which the moon was riding silently and the stillness was broken only by the occasional pattering of an acorn or a chestnut through the leaves to the ground." Francis Kilvert, 1874 (Wiltshire)


Another glorious morning - and now the sun shines on autumn gold leaves! The fields I walk through to work are bare and strewn only with chaff now...


Walking home, the moon was rising over the same fields, and looking the other way the sky was ablaze with swirling sunset! Byslantedlight, 2009 (Cambs.)

Long post today - Northern Lights and gorgeous evenings and all - if it's too much for anyone do let me know and I'll put it under a cut...

Comments

[mav-fan.livejournal.com]

Lovely clouds. The fields are looking a bit sad this time of year, aren't they?

[caffyolay.livejournal.com]

You get some wonderful sunsets up there. I think it's because it's flatter than here and you can actually *see* what's going on! That last pic is gorgeous.