Queen Elizabeth was well aware of all, but she never took my action amiss; she understood that I had to deliver the messages, but that it was not I who composed them.

Queen Elizabeth was a good, clever and touchingly simple woman, not a poet qui court apres l’esprit, but a woman who looked at the world through conciliatory and poetical glasses.  She was a good conversationalist, and there was always a poetic charm in all she did.  There hung on the staircase a most beautiful sea picture, which I greatly admired while the Queen talked to me about the sea, about her little villa at Constanza, which, built on the extreme end of the quay, seems almost to lie in the sea.  She spoke, too, of her travels and impressions when on the high seas, and as she spoke the great longing for all that is good and beautiful made itself felt, and this is what she said to me:  “The sea lives.  If there could be found any symbol of eternity it would be the sea, endless in greatness and everlasting in movement.  The day is dull and stormy.  One after another the glassy billows come rolling in and break with a roar on the rocky shore.  The small white crests of the waves look as if covered with snow.  And the sea breathes and draws its breath with the ebb and flow of the tide.  The tide is the driving power that forces the mighty waters from Equator to North Pole.  And thus it works, day and night, year by year, century by century.  It takes no heed of the perishable beings who call themselves lords of the world, who live only for a day, coming and going and vanishing almost as they come.  The sea remains to work.  It works for all, for men, for animals, for plants, for without the sea there could be no organic life in the world.  The sea is like a great filter, which alone can produce the change of matter that is necessary for life.  In the course of a century numberless rivers carry earth to the sea.  Each river carries without ceasing its burden of earth and sand to the ocean; and the sea receives the load which is carried by the current far out to sea, and slowly and by degrees in the course of time the sea dissolves or crushes all it has received.  No matter to the sea if the process lasts a thousand years or more—­it may even last for ages, who can tell?

“But one day, quite suddenly, the sea begins to wander.  Once there was sea everywhere, and all continents are born from the sea.  One day land arose out of the sea.  The birth was of a revolutionary nature, there were earthquakes, volcanic craters, falling cities and dying men—­but new land was there.  Or else it moves slowly, invisibly, a metre or two in a century, and returns to the land it used to possess.  Thus it restores the soil it stole from it, but cleaner, refined and full of vitality to live and to create.  Such is the sea and its work.”

These are the words of the old half-blind Queen, who can never look upon the beloved picture again, but she told me how she always idolised the sea, and how her grand nephews and nieces shared her feelings, and how she grew young again with them when she told them tales of olden times.