inite
horizon, free and lonely and innocent. The Dutch veldt may be a little
more desolate than Birmingham. But I am sure it is not so desolate as
that English hill was, almost within a cannon-shot of High Wycombe.

I looked across a vast and voiceless valley straight at the moon, as if
at a round mirror. It may have been the blue moon of the proverb; for on
that freezing night the very moon seemed blue with cold. A deathly frost
fastened every branch and blade to its place. The sinking and softening
forests, powdered with a gray frost, fell away underneath me into an
abyss which seemed unfathomable. One fancied the world was soundless
only because it was bottomless: it seemed as if all songs and cries
had been swallowed in some unresisting stillness under the roots of the
hills. I could fancy that if I shouted there would be no echo; that if
I hurled huge stones there would be no noise of reply. A dumb devil had
bewitched the landscape: but that again does not express the best or
worst of it. All those hoary and frosted forests expressed something so
inhuman that it has no human name. A horror of unconsciousness lay on
them; that is the nearest phrase I know. It was as if one were looking
at the back of the world; and the world did not know it. I had taken the
universe in the rear. I was behind the scenes. I was eavesdropping upon
an unconscious creation.

I shall not express what the place expressed. I am not even sure that it
is a thing that ought to be expressed. There was something heathen about
its union of beauty and death; sorrow seemed to glitter, as it does in
some of the great pagan poems. I understood one of the thousand poetical
phrases of the populace, "a God-forsaken place." Yet something was
present there; and I could not yet find the key to my fixed impression.
Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place. It
had been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales about
princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in a
land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moon
looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the
one white eye of the world.

There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with a
point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There
were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: for
they were acting their own life with just that rise