Can it be applied to eventide in the flat fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire? Does the gloaming ever fall on the manufacturing districts of Yorkshire—Leeds, Sheffield, Huddersfield? Twilight in the Potteries is surely twilight and no gloaming. May not, are not the limits within which the latter word may be used as aptly describing eventide, be the limits within which our old balladry sprung and flourished? May not, are not the limits within which the word is wholly inapplicable to describe the close of day, be the limits within which the love of song was not so strongly developed—where external nature did not, and does not suggest song, or poetry to the mind? Well, that definition is quite enough for the present day, in which “hard and fast lines” are at a discount! But there is still that awkward question, “What is the gloaming?” And what is there in the gloaming that distinguishes it from that which is twilight merely? To answer that with any hope of conveying any sense of the difference which undoubtedly does exist, is a matter which is beyond the capacity of any one not being a Ruskin. As to define the gloaming is beyond the powers of ordinary mortals, and as ostracism is threatened if I do not do something—as I am writing in terrorem, and to save my pen-and-pencil existence, which is hanging on this slender thread—I will, in default of being able to do better, give my own experiences of a real “GLOAMING.” GLOAMING Time of year—the end of August. Locality, not the Tottenham Court Road, but one of the northernmost p. 80points of the Northumberland border—a wild, rough, hard land—the fighting ground, for centuries upon centuries, first of the old Romans, and then of our own border laddies, who held it against the “rieving Scots”—a land over which the famous Sixth Legion has marched—a land which has seen Hotspur fight and Douglas fall—a land where almost every hillside and burn has its legend and ballad—a land on which one would reasonably expect to see the gloaming, as distinguished from twilight, fall! I had had ten days walking after wild grouse—tramping through the heather, generally dripping wet, for the Scotch mist did not observe or keep the border line, worse luck to it. At last a fine day, and a long tramp on the moors. At the close of it, having first walked enough over the soft moss and young heather to make me exult in the grand condition for exercise which ten days’ hill air will give, I separated from my party to try for a snipe down by a little tarn, lying in the midst of a “faded bent” in the moor, intending to tramp home afterwards in my own company—and in my own company it was that I had full opportunity of studying the effect
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