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 men and women have seen the sunset pass, loving it even as I love it.  They have gone into the silence as I too shall go, and no hint comes back as to whether they understand and are satisfied.

And now I turn in at the well-known gate, and see the dark gables of my house, with the high elms of the grove outlined against the pale sky.  The cheerful windows sparkle with warmth and light, welcoming me, fresh from the chilly air, out of the homeless fields.  With such array of cheerful usages I beguile my wondering heart, and chase away the wild insistent thoughts, the deep yearnings that thrill me.  Thus am I bidden to desire and to be unsatisfied, to rest and marvel not, to stay, on this unsubstantial show of peace and security, the aching and wondering will.