I wonder, is the star come closer still? Sollers: O, close, I know, and viciously heading down. Vine: She was so silver! and the sun had left A kind of tawny red, a dust of fine Thin light upon the blue where she was lying,-- Just a curled paring of the moon, amid The faint grey cloud that set the gleaming wheel Around the tilted slip of shining silver. O it did seem to me so safe and homely, The moon quietly going about the earth; It's a rare place we have to live in, here; And life is such a comfortable thing-- And what's the sense of it all? Naught but to make Cruel as may be the slaughtering of it. [He breaks down again.] Sollers: It heats my mind! [He begins to walk up and down desperately.] Merrick: 'Twas bound to come sometime, Bound to come, I suppose. 'Tis a poor thing For us, to fall plumb in the chance of it; But, now or another time, 'twas bound to be.-- I have been thinking back. When I was a lad I was delighted with my life: there seemed Naught but things to enjoy. Say we were bathing: There'ld be the cool smell of the water, and cool The splashing under the trees: but I did loathe The sinking mud slithering round my feet, And I did love to loathe it so! And then We'ld troop to kill a wasp's nest; and for sure I would be stung; and if I liked the dusk And singing and the game of it all, I loved The smart of the stings, and fleeing the buzzing furies. And sometimes I'ld be looking at myself Making so much of everything; there'ld seem A part of me speaking about myself: 'You know, this is much more than being happy. 'Tis hunger of some power in you, that lives On your heart's welcome for all sorts of luck, But always looks beyond you for its meaning.' And that's the way the world's kept going on, I believe now. Misery and delight Have both had liking welcome from it, both Have made the world keen to be glad and sorry. For why? It felt the living power thrive The more it made everything, good and bad, Its own belonging, forged to its own affair,-- The living power that would do wonders some day. I don't know if you take me? Sollers: I do, fine; I've felt the very thought go through my mind When I was at my wains; though 'twas a thing Of such a flight I could not read its colour.-- Why was I like a man sworn to a thing Working to have my wains in every curve, Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be? Not for myself, not even for those wains: But to keep in me living at its best The skill that must go forward and shape the world, Helping it on to make some masterpiece. Merrick: