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foamed and boiled and bled 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 signi-
ficance 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? did she complete
what he began? With equal benignancy she saw his misery, con-
doned his meanness, acquiesced in his torture. That dream - of
sharing, of finding outside the house completion - was then but
a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself but the surface
glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep
beneath?.  Impatient, despairing, yet loth to go (for beauty offers
her lures, has her consolations) to pace the beach was impossible:
contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.

VI

      Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms,
the arrowlike stillness of fine weather, held their court without
interference. Listening (had there been anyone to listen) from
the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked
with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the
winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of
leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and
mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the dark-
ness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shape-

 


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