Richard went to the window. Before him spread an extensive but somewhat bare park, for the trees in it were rather few. Some of them, however, were grand ones: many had been cut down, but a few of the finest left. A sea of grass lay in every direction, with islands of clumps and thickets, and vague shores of hedge and wood and ploughed field. On the grass were cattle and sheep and fallow deer. On this side, nothing came between the park and the house. The day was late in the spring; summer was close at hand. There had been rain all the morning and afternoon, but the clouds were clearing away as now the sun went down. Everything was wet, but the undried tears of the day flashed in the sunset. Nature looked a child whose gladness had come, but who could not stop crying: so heartily had she gone in for sorrow, that her mind was shaped to weeping. Most of the clouds, late so dark and sullen, were putting on garments of light, as if resolved to forgive and forget, and leave no doubt of it. But the sun did not look satisfied with his day's work. Slant across the world to Richard's window came the last of his vanishing rays, blinding him as he brooded, and obliterating all between them in a throbbing splendour; yet somehow the sun seemed sad, as if atonement had come too late. The edge extreme of the glory vanished; a moment's cloud followed; and then, when the radiance of him who was gone grew rosy and golden above his grave, Richard began to see much that his presence had been hiding. But the revelation did not linger long. The clouds closed on the twilight, the world grew almost dismal, and the sadness crept into Richard; or was it not rather that his own hidden sadness rose up to meet the sadness of the world? Yet, even as he became aware of it, something in him recognised it as a thing foreign to the human heart: “We were not made for this!” he said. “--We are not here, I mean,” he corrected himself, “--we have not sprung into being in order to be sad! There is no reason in sadness! There is cause enough, man at least knows, but essential reason at the heart of its existence there is none!--Whence, then, comes this mistake, this sadness?” he went on with himself. “Why should there be so much of it in the world? Is it that, as for all other good things, a man must put forth his will for joy? It is plain a man must assert what is highest in him, else he cannot lay hold of the best: must a man will to be glad, else deserve to be sorrowful?” He began to whistle. “I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain!--Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness?--After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end?--I don't see what there is to make me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad!”