So they pass on. Let be!--But what is this-- A moan?--all frailly floating from the east To usward, even from the forenamed isle?... Would I had not broke nescience, to inspect A world so ill-contrived! SPIRIT OF THE YEARS But since thou hast We'll hasten to the isle; and thou'lt behold-- Such as it is--the scene its coasts enfold. SCENE VIII WALCHEREN [A marshy island at the mouth of the Scheldt, lit by the low sunshine of an evening in late summer. The horizontal rays from the west lie in yellow sheaves across the vapours that the day's heat has drawn from the sweating soil. Sour grasses grow in places, and strange fishy smells, now warm, now cold, pass along. Brass-hued and opalescent bubbles, compounded of many gases, rise where passing feet have trodden the damper spots. At night the place is the haunt of the Jack-lantern.] DUMB SHOW A vast army is encamped here, and in the open spaces are infantry on parade--skeletoned men, some flushed, some shivering, who are kept moving because it is dangerous to stay still. Every now and then one falls down, and is carried away to a hospital with no roof, where he is laid, bedless, on the ground. In the distance soldiers are digging graves for the funerals which are to take place after dark, delayed till then that the sight of so many may not drive the living melancholy-mad. Faint noises are heard in the air. SHADE OF THE EARTH What storm is this of souls dissolved in sighs, And what the dingy doom it signifies? SPIRIT OF THE PITIES We catch a lamentation shaped thuswise: CHORUS OF THE PITIES [aerial music] “We who withstood the blasting blaze of war When marshalled by the gallant Moore awhile, Beheld the grazing death-bolt with a smile, Closed combat edge to edge and bore to bore, Now rot upon this Isle! “The ever wan morass, the dune, the blear Sandweed, and tepid pool, and putrid smell, Emaciate purpose to a fractious fear, Beckon the body to its last low cell-- A chink no chart will tell. “O ancient Delta, where the fen-lights flit! Ignoble sediment of loftier lands, Thy humour clings about our hearts and hands And solves us to its softness, till we sit As we were part of it. “Such force as fever leaves maddened now, With tidings trickling in from day to day Of others' differing fortunes, wording how They yield their lives to baulk a tyrant's sway-- Yield them not vainly, they! “In champaigns green and purple, far and near, In town and thorpe where quiet spire-cocks turn, Through vales, by rocks, beside the brooding burn Echoes the aggressor's arrogant career; And we pent pithless here!