cold. The house is late and
silent. There is no sound but the ghostly creaking of a stair; our
thoughts are stealing away again. We creep out after them to the outer
gate. What are books and opinions? The creakings of an old house uneasy
with the heavy remembrances and the melancholy of antiquity, and with
some midnight presage of its finality.

The wind and rain have passed. There is now but the icy stillness and
quiet of outer space. The earth is Limbo, the penumbra of a dark and
partial recollection; the shadow, vague and dawnless, over a vast stage
from which the consequential pageant has gone, and is almost forgotten,
the memory of many events merged now into formless night itself, and
foundered profoundly beneath the glacial brilliance of a clear heaven
alive with stars. Only the stars live, and only the stars overlook the
place that was ours. The war--was there a war? It must have been long
ago. Perhaps the shades are troubled with vestiges of an old and
dreadful sin. If once there were men who heard certain words and became
spellbound, and in the impulse of that madness forgot that their earth
was good, but very brief, and turned from their children and women and
the cherished work of their hands to slay each other and destroy their
communities, it all happened just as the leaves of an autumn that is
gone once fell before the sudden mania of a wind, and are resolved.
What year was that? The leaves of an autumn that is long past are
beyond time. The night is their place, and only the unknowing stars
look down to the little blot of midnight which was us, and our pride,
and our wisdom, and our heroics.

_April 1918._

THE END

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