Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/22

4 decay should grossly close us in no longer. A starry night on deck should speak to us more eloquently than it spoke to Lorenzo and Jessica on their moonlit bank, and the quiring of the spheres to the young-eyed cherubim should be audible above the wash of the flying waters, and perhaps even the throb of the engines.

As a matter of fact, however, there is no situation in which the spirit of man seems more eminently contented with its corporeal captivity than at this moment when it should be struggling for its freedom. The only result of these communings of his with the Infinite seems to be to magnify immensely his interest in the infinitesimal. Space, Time, Matter, and the Void, the One and the Many—all these vast and imposing abstractions appear to efface themselves in his imagination. As to Space, he is only conscious of it in its limitations while he is dressing. Time shrinks to an arbitrary though convenient method of computing the intervals between