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(24)

rising, quiet rose, the rooks settled the grass settled. Loosely
the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light
to it, save what came suffused through leaves or pale on flowers.

IX

     Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from
the sea to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull
it rather more deeply to rest and whatever the dreamers dreamt
wisely, dreamt holily, to confirm -- what else was it murmuring?
And behold, our message, our wisdom, it seemed to say, is clothed
in splendour. The wave sweeps dark up the beach. Our peace is
a brooding peace, our beauty a conscious beauty. We lie at your
door wishing you well.
     Who, waking in the depths of this dark, this holy, this
restful night whose darkness was a veil, whose murmur was of
secrets too deep to be fully uttered, could, even now, after the
damp and the spies, after the toad and the rat, resist the desire
to walk there on the beach on the pale sand, with the waves break-
ing, and only a light in the harbour a light on some mast head, a
light on the waves, and ask again, What and why?
     Yet seeing how often they had asked, how much had suffered,
how often been mocked, it were wiser perhaps to lie there in the
dark; to listen only; to let it say what it would -- to chant,
to croonm, that it was a marvellous night, and the moon burnt
through the blue like a rose. Through the open window the voice
of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly for them to

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