TIME PASSES
and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there
seemed to drop into this silence, this indifference,
this integrity, the thud of something falling.

[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men
were blown up in France, among them Andrew
Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instanta-
neous.]

At that season those who had gone down to pace
the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message
they reported or what vision they affirmed had to
consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon
rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children
making mud pies or pelting each other with hand-
fuls of grass, something out of harmony with this
jocundity and this serenity. There was the silent ap-
parition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance,
come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the
bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled
and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a
scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections
and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed
their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook
them; to abolish their significance in the landscape;
to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how
beauty outside mirrored beauty within.

Did Nature supplement what man advanced?
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