t degrees on the horizon. As
the day thus died, the frost made itself felt, touching the hedgerows
with rime, and crisping the damp road beneath my feet. The end drew on
with a mournful solemnity; but the death of the light seemed a
perfectly natural and beautiful thing, not an event to be grieved over
or regretted, but all part of a sweet and grave progress, in which
silence and darkness seemed, not an interruption to the eager life of
the world, but a happy suspension of activity and life. I was haunted,
as I often am at sunset, by a sense that the dying light was trying to
show me some august secret, some gracious mystery, which would silence
and sustain the soul could it but capture it. Some great and wonderful
presence seemed to hold up a hand, with a gesture half of invitation,
half of compassion for my blindness. Down there, beyond the lines of
motionless trees, where the water gleamed golden in the reaches of the
stream, the secret brooded, withdrawing itself resistlessly into the
glowing west. A wistful yearning filled my soul to enter into that
incommunicable peace. Yet if one could take the wings of the morning,
and follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could
pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of
the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving
seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of
the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can
tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering
aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient point,
conscious, in a sense, of it all, and conscious too that, long after I
sleep in the dust, the same strange and beautiful thing will be
displayed age after age. And yet it is all outside of me, all without.
I am a part of it, yet with no sense of my unity with it. That is the
marvellous and bewildering thing, that each tiny being like myself has
the same sense of isolation, of distinctness, of the perfectly rounded
life, complete faculties, independent existence. Another day is done,
and leaves me as bewildered, as ignorant as ever, as aware of my small
limitations, as lonely and uncomforted.

Who shall show me why I love, with this deep and thirsty intensity, the
array of gold and silver light, these mist-hung fields with their soft
tints, the glow that flies and fades, the cold veils of frosty vapour?
Thousands of