Edward Thomas
99
them profoundly and absorbed their energies, but whenever they had leisure to withdraw into themselves, for them, as for others of their temper, old sources of inspiration reopened, old habits of thought closed round them again, and in such hours of respite they returned to the familiar inner life from which they had been exiled, and the war dwindled to nothing but a weeping of rain on the window, a wind that wailed in the darkness and rattled at the door which shut it out.
