TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Did she complete what he began? With equal
complacence she saw his misery, condoned his
meanness, and acquiesced in his torture. That
dream, then, of sharing, completing, finding in
solitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflec-
tion in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but
the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence
when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient,
despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her
lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was
impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the
mirror was broken.

[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of
poems that spring, which had an unexpected
success. The war, people said, had revived their ~
interest in poetry,]

Night after night, summer and winter, the
torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine
weather, held their court without interference,
Listening (had there been any one to listen) from
the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic
chaos streaked with lightning could have been
heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and
waves disported themselves like the amorphous
bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by
no light of reason, and mounted one on top of
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