midnight
the Change had freed us from our baser passions indeed , from habitual and mechanical concupiscence and mean issues and coarse imaginings , but from the passions of love it had not freed us . It had but brought the lord of life , Eros , to his own . All through the long sorrow of that night I , who had rejected him , confessed his sway with tears and inappeasable regrets ... . I can not give the remotest guess of when I rose up , nor of my tortuous wanderings in the valleys between the midnight fires , nor how I evaded the laughing and rejoicing multitudes who went streaming home between three and four , to resume their lives , swept and garnished , stripped and clean . But at dawn , when the ashes of the world 's gladness were ceasing to glow -- it was a bleak dawn that made me shiver in my thin summer clothes -- I came across a field to a little copse full of dim blue hyacinths . A queer sense of familiarity arrested my steps , and I stood puzzled . Then I was moved to go a dozen paces from the path , and at once a singularly misshapen tree hitched itself into a notch in my memory .