Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/21

Rh like, into her great throne-room of the heavens; the evening star calls up its slow and timid followers into the presence; the night-breeze begins to marshal her ermine-clad court of clouds; and then—why then the ineffable poetry of the hour and the scene is broken by the unspeakable prose of the dinner bell.

Life, as Carlyle observed at a moment when he was able to contemplate it undisturbed by dyspepsia, is a "conflux of two eternities." The sea and sky, when the last streak of land has disappeared, become a conflux of two virtual infinities. Life on the sea, therefore, being spent amid a combination of illimitables—at a representation of the Absolute, "supported," so to speak, "by the whole strength of the company"—one might well expect the spirit of man to be answerably affected by the solemnity of its surroundings. The correct thing for it to do, I believe, is "to beat against the bars of its fleshly prison," and to "long for absorption in the all-embracing Universe." Our muddy vesture of