To be in some such place ... say, again, where the Breton tide races against the flank of Normandy and in a few minutes isolates Mont St. Michel from the mainland; or where the Northumbrian flood pours across the narrow sands of Lindisfarne; or, more than everywhere else I think, where the fierce Atlantic tides leap with bewildering surge and clamour across the vast sea-gates of Uist and rush like a cataract into the Hebrid Sea ... to be in some such place and at the first mysterious signals of the oncoming flood, by night, is to meet the unforgettable, and, as Blake says, to be at one with the eternal mystery. Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is that ancient inexplicable mystery, the everlasting and unchanging rhythm which holds star to star in infinite procession, which lifts and lowers the poles of our sun-wheeling world, which compels the great oceans to arise and follow the mysterious bidding of the moon. It is wonderful that the moon travels along the equator at the rate of a thousand miles an hour: but more wonderful that these loose, formless, blind and insensate waters should awake at the touch of that pale hand, should move to it and follow it as the flocks of the hills to the voice of the shepherd. Flow and ebb, ebb and flow ... it is the utterance of the divine law, the eternal word of Order. It is life itself. What life is there, from the phosphorescent atom in the running wave to the enfranchised soul stepping westward beyond the twilights of time, that is not subject to this ineffable rhythmic law. The tides of the world, the tides of life: the grey sap, the red blood, the secret dews, the tameless seas, birth and death, the noons and midnights of the mind of man, the evening dusk and the morning glory of the soul ... one and all move inevitably, and in one way: in one way come, and go, and come again. “_Mar a bha, Mar a tha, Mar a bhitheas Gu brath_ * * * * * _Ri tràgadh, ’S ri lionadh._” “_As it was, As it is, As it shall be Evermore_ * * * * * _With the ebb, With the flow._” THE HILL-TARN