It is twilight always for the
dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. In
eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose
tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread
on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the
labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from
evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the
shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the
flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as
Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue
is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the
canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know
nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets
of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of
time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and
can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.
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