236 THE LAND'S END 



lying awake that night, I tried to recall the passages 

 I had read just to contrast the brighter picture with 

 that dark one in my mind, I could only remember 

 one, in a prose writer, and it was this : 



"Nature is now at her evening prayers, kneeling 

 before the red hills. On the steps of her great 

 altar she is praying for a fair night for mariners at 

 sea, for travellers in lonely deserts, for lambs on 

 moors and for unfledged little birds in their nests. 

 She appears to me as a Titanic woman, her robe 

 of blue air spread to the outskirts of the heath; a 

 veil white as an avalanche extends from her head to 

 her feet with arabesques of lightning flame on its 

 borders. Under her breasts is seen her purple zone, 

 and through its blush shines the evening star. Her 

 eyes are clear and deep as lakes, and are lifted and 

 full of worship and tremble with the softness of love 

 and the lustre of prayer." 



Very curiously in this the only poetic passage I 

 could recall the author's religion has mixed itself with 

 the sense of a living and intelligent principle in 

 nature that which at times makes nature seem a 

 person to us. The person may be interested in or 

 indifferent to us, but is all-knowing and all-powerful 

 and cannot be an intercessor. There is no doubt that 

 this sense or feeling in us, when strong, is disturbing 

 to the religious mind, producing as it does the notion 

 of a something unknown and uncanny (probably the 

 devil) in nature something which is ever trying in 

 all solitary places to seduce the soul from a jealous 

 and watchful God. It was, I think, a religious poet 



