He [Frederick Delius] brought me the promised book of songs. They were the Seven Songs published by Augener, and the Five Songs, also Augener's, which he brought me after I had sung the first ones to him. Later he bought the Seven Songs back from Augener who still has the book of Five Songs. Oh, what a glorious revelation these songs were to me! The harmonies, the 'Stimmung', were so delightful, more so than anything I had known before in music: the 'Cradle Song', 'Auf der Reise zur Heimat', 'Venevil', and 'Twilight Fancies'. The latter seemed to express my own feelings so wonderfully (...) Even now when this song is so popular and hackneyed, I cannot think of it without a pang of the old passionate longing. For it symbolized my fear that such a poet as Delius could not find anything in me: that his evident interest and friendship would soon be over and that the world would then be a blank - the sun gone down for ever. The young ladies and gentlemen who murder this song so often on the radio do not seem to be aware of its depth.