For in these years, when heavy weather obscures the fixed lights, and we are not certain about our bearings, it is useless to pretend that the darkness which once made us content with a book is now a worse kind of darkness only because intensified by a private shadow. The shadow of a personal grief does not wholly explain its sinister intensity. The night itself is different. It hides a world unknown. If a sun is to rise on that world, then not even a false dawn yet shows. When we stand peering into our night, where the sound of rain and wind is like nothing the memory knows, and may be even the dark tumult portending a day of wrath, we may turn again in solitude to what is left to us, to our books; but not with quiet content. To-morrow we may pull ourselves together. Curiosity about our new world may awaken. We may become adventurous, and make an effort towards greeting the unknown with a cheer, to show it there is no settled ill-feeling. But it has been my experience that when leaving port in dark weather, though the voyage to come was to be novel and interesting, one heard very little cheering from the glum figures working about the deck. The ship is sea-worthy, but she is bleak and foreign. In a week all will be well. We shall have cleared these icy latitudes. The sky will be fairer. We shall have more sun. We shall have become accustomed to our shipmates' unfamiliar faces and ways. It is only the start that is sullen and unpropitious. And here is Peace coming, and a new world, and there are my books; yet though this pipe after midnight is nearly done, and the fire too, I have not been able to settle on a book. The books are like the ashes on the hearth. And listen to the wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide and empty desert places! What does any of these old books know about me, in the midst of those portents of a new age? We are all outward bound, and this is the first night of a long voyage, its port unknown.