But we pass abruptly, in the second movement, to our own time and to the very heart of our own civilization. We are paying a call on a garrulous friend in the rue de la Paix. He is an American and therefore a philosopher; but as he descants on the 'nature of things,' doubtless in the beautiful English of the gentle American, we let our attention wander to things that touch us more sharply, to sights and sounds outside the window, each vividly perceived and clearly picked out, but all resolving themselves into a symbol, vaguely impressive, of the complicated whirl of life. And this passage again, with its satiric flavour and dexterity of execution, we are content to enjoy in its apparent detachment, until we glimpse the link which unites it to the larger interest of the whole. The link with that ancient queen is in a flash of contrast--a couple of Chinese chiropodists, grinning from their lofty window at a _mannequin_ on the opposite side of the street. And as the theme is developed, episodes which seem irrelevant at first, are soon found to have their relation with the thought--of death and tragic passion--on which the poet is brooding. At a chance word dropped by the American host the confused and perplexing sights and sounds of the outer world vanish; and the philosophical lecture, droning hitherto just on the edge of consciousness, fades even out of hearing-- ... I lost them At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them; A scene no more nor less than a vision, All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix. He is seven years back in time and many hundreds of miles away, pushing up a North American river in a screaming, smoky steamer, between high banks crowned with forests of fir: And suddenly we saw a beach-- A grey old beach and some old grey mounds That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds; So still and old and grey and ragged. For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows, The Indian graves.... So, rather obliquely perhaps as to method, but with certainty of effect, we are prepared for the culmination in the third movement. The poet has fled from civilization and 'Modern Movements' to the upland heather of a high old mound above the town of Trêves. And here, on a late autumn evening, he lingers to think. He remembers that it is the eve of All Souls' Day; and remembers too that the mound on which he is seated is an old burying-place of great antiquity. In the cold and dark of his eerie perch, certain impressions of the last few days return to him, just those which have been subtly galling a secret wound and impelling him to flee--the tragedy of the Chinese queen, the vision of the old tumuli at Sandusky Bay, the unheeded platitudes of his friend--