Hunters.

Innes, Sunset in the Woods, 1891

The woods are for the hunters of dreams.

Sam Walter Foss

Gloaming.

Innes, In The Gloaming, 1893

The French called this time of day‘l’heure bleue.’ To the English it was ‘the gloaming.’ The very word ‘gloaming’ reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

Joan Didion

Health.

Innes, Pool in the Woods, 1891

The BREATH of MORNING

How beautiful and fresh the pastoral smell

   Of tedded hay breathes in this early morn!

Health in these meadows must in summer dwell,

   And take her walks among these fields of corn.

I cannot see her, yet her voice is out

On every breeze that fans my hair about.

   Although the Sun is scarcely out of bed,

And leans on ground as half awake from sleep,

   The boy hath left his mossy-thatched shed,

And bawls right lustily to cows and sheep;                                 

   Or taken with the woodbines overspread,

Climbs up to pluck them from their thorny bowers,

   Half drowned by drops which patter on his head

            From leaves bemoistened by night’s secret showers.

John Clare