Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation succeeded the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful scene, like to the lunar landscape of the battle-field of Verdun, and I knew that my dwelling-place was a world of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the invading horror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling of suffocation clutched my throat, and a something burning wrapped my soul. Delight was dead. B.—(_Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto._) The master spoke again, in a voice of purling water over smooth stones and through soft grasses; the music of the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the beauty of the exterior world tried to communicate itself to me. But my eyes fell on a white-haired man seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a start and groan, and was doubtless thinking on combat and empty places and “heroes struggling with heroes and above them the wrathful gods.” And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and nameless sacrifices and children at evening and silent firesides, and broken loves and other visible and invisible things. C.—(_Joyeuse réunion de Paysans. Allégro._) Expressing the master’s deep belief in the goodness of humanity, its deathless adorations, its inextinguishable hopes. But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here in Savoy, and husbands and fathers and sons will cross their thresholds no more. “The ancients have ceased from the gates, the young men from the choir of the singers.” I sat by the stream among the peasants and remembered suddenly two combatants, an Austrian and a Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that first winter of the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the ground, and when he was brought in they were black and swollen, and as I saw him he was but a trunk of a man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with something wild and burning in his look, and restless hands, had fallen with his feet in a stream, and he, too, would walk no more; and so one thinks of brooks and sweet, moving waters these days. (_Orage—Tempête. Allégro._) The sudden D flat, the world in noise and horror and protesting hate, and hard, bright-eyed men meeting from East and West, the sons of the world falling for the sins of the world; and there is no way out, for all words save that of peace may be spoken. And I thought on the loneliness of the mind, and knew it for as great or greater than that of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these are of such abundance that there are always contacts. But the loneliness of the mind is a world where there is scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices call, and sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to _you_ to-night.