TIME PASSES 155they reported or what vision they affirmed had toconsider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moonrising, fishing-boats against the moon, and childrenpelting each other with handfuls of grass—somethingout of harmony with this jocundity, this serenity.There was the silent apparition of an ashen-colouredship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplishstain upon the bland surface of the sea as if some-thing had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. Thisintrusion into a scene calculated to stir the mostsublime reflections and lead to the most comfortableconclusions stayed their pacing. It was difficultblandly to overlook them, to abolish their signifi-cance in the landscape; to continue, as one walkedby the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirroredbeauty within.
Did Nature supplement what man advanced?Did she complete what he began? With equalcomplacence she saw his misery, condoned hismeanness, and acquiesced in his torture. Thatdream, then, of sharing, completing, finding in
solitude on the beach an answer, was but a re-flection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was butthe surface glassiness which forms in quiescencewhen the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient,despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures,has her consolations), to pace the beach was im-possible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirrorwas broken.[Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poemsthat spring, which had an unexpected success. Thewar, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.]
