t, because now-a-days, for better or for worse,
poetry is no longer the irresponsible, uncontrolled, helter-skelter
performance of former times, but a very self-conscious, wide-awake,
deliberate matter, it can do both much more harm and much more good than
it could do before."

They were slowly driving along the beach, among the stunted pine shoots
and the rough grass and the yellow bindweed half buried in the sand,
and the heaps of sea-blackened branches, and bits of wood and uncouth
floating rubbish which the waves had deposited, with a sort of ironical
regularity, in a neat band upon the shore; down here on the coast the
storm had already broken, and the last thin rain was still falling,
dimpling the grey sand. The sun was just going to emerge from amidst
the thick blue-black storm-clouds and descend into a clear space, like
molten amber, above the black, white-crested, roaring sea; it descended
slowly, an immense pale luminous globe, gilding the borders of the
piled-up clouds above it, gilding the sheen of the waves and the wet
sand of the shore; and as it descended, the clouds gathered above it
into a vast canopy, a tawny orange diadem or reef of peaked vapours
encircling the liquid topaz in which the sun moved; tawnier became this
garland, larger the free sky, redder the black storm masses above; till
at last the reddening rays of the sun enlarged and divided into immense
beams of rosy light, cutting away the dark and leaving uncovered a rent
of purest blue. At last the yellow globe touched the black line of the
horizon, gilding the waters; then sank behind it and disappeared. The
wreath of vapours glowed golden, the pall of heaped-up storm-clouds
flushed purple, and bright yellow veinings, like filaments of gold,
streaked the pale amber where the sun had disappeared. The amber grew
orange, the tawny purple, the purple a lurid red, as of masses of
flame-lit smoke; all around, the sky blackened, until at last there
remained only one pile of livid purple clouds hanging over a streak of
yellow sky, and gradually dying away into black, with but here and there
a death-like rosy patch, mirrored deadlier red in the wet sand of the
beach. The two friends remained silent, like men listening to the last
bars, rolling out in broad succession of massy, gradually resolving
chords, of some great requiem mass--silent even for a while after all
was over. Then Cyril asked, pointing to a row of houses glimmering white
along the dar