Mary C. M. Phillips

Moon-1885 by Ivan Aivazovsky

Charlotte Brontë ‘s description in Villette is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Here, Lucy Snowe is making her way through a park in which a concert (a “fête”) had been held.   The crowd is thinning and the festivities are over.  Only the majesty of the moon remains.

High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone.  The music and the mirth of the fête, the fire and bright hues of those lamps had out-done and out-shone her for an hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed.  The rival lamps were dying:  she held her course like a white fate.  Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangour and were forgotten:  with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven and on earth records for archives everlasting.  She and those stars seemed to me at once the types and witnesses of truth all regnant.  The night-sky lit her reign:  like its slow-wheeling progress, advanced her victory-that onward movement which has been, and is, and will be from eternity to eternity.