CHAPTER XLIV
THE MARSH
The sun has gone down. Except on one hand, the immense empty marshland expands to the sea, and where it mingles with the grey water would be uncertain, but for the clamour of the wading birds and the gleam, now and then, of a white wing. The low bent thorns, inland, now take on a strange humanity, as of men who have ventured out into the solitude and pitched their tents there and none has followed them; they are bent in alarmed and hurrying attitudes away from the sea, but cannot leave it. The sea rises steeply up like a vast ploughed field to an uncertain sky of the same hue. All that greyness takes hold upon the mind like autumn rain and lures it to we know not what desperate carelessness; and the siren, that sweet evil of the sea, chants such dissolving melodies as this:—
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head;
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
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