INTRODUCTORY 13 



sometimes a wave that reaches boundless shores, or, 

 sinking Hke a burning ruby into depths we never 

 guessed were there, show us ourselves "as gods, 

 knowing good and evil"? How does it come that 

 the leaf of an autumn bramble expresses a hero's 

 soul better than epic verses ever can? And what 

 magic is there about sunset and the West that has 

 always drawn men's longing (so that, indeed, for 

 wistfulness one might fancifully say westfulness) ? 

 Is it that we feel the sun's daily going as so great a 

 loss that we must follow him with our pensive hopes? 

 Not so with us all, certainly. To me, for one, the 

 sun has always seemed an enemy, the ally of tedium, 

 a huge Evaporator sucking the spirit and leaving 

 naught but the plodding clay. "The gaudy, babbling, 

 and remorseless day" — well said, Shakespeare! 

 But this is verging on metaphysics: the point is, that 

 somehow there is not in desert sunset hues that 

 deepest, most sensitive note. They are fairyland, a 

 sheer marvel, the quintessence of beauty in color; 

 but they have not the ineffable quality that goes, 

 perhaps, with murkier, less all-revealing skies. It 

 may be that, being mysterious to ourselves, any- 

 thing less than mystery in Nature must fall short. 

 " Abyssus ahyssum invocat." 



As a fact, I have seen more of that moving glory 

 in sunset skies from the top of a London 'bus than 

 anywhere else, even Sierra crest or open vastness of 

 the Colorado. Perhaps it is the presence of six mil- 

 lion human souls (I do not mean bodies) that gives 

 the needed atmosphere, the spiritual haze. 



But the metaphysical must be reckoned with, 



