On the broad rim of the basin they sat down. Cosmo turned towards
the naiad, such thoughts as I have written throbbing in his brain
like the electric light in an exhausted receiver, Joan with her
back to the figure, and her eyes on the ground, thinking Cosmo
brooded vexed on his newly discovered position. It was a sad
picture. The two were as the type of Nature and Art, the married
pair, here at strife--still together, but only the more
apart--Oberon and Titania, with ruin all about them. Through the
straggling branches appeared the tottering dial of Time where not a
sun-ray could reach it; for Time himself may well go to sleep where
progress is but disintegration. Time himself is nothing, does
nothing; he is but the medium in which the forces work. Time no
more cures our ills, than space unites our souls, because they
cross it to mingle.
Had Cosmo suspected Joan's thought, he would have spoken; but the
urn of the naiad had brought back to him his young thoughts and
imaginations concerning the hidden source of the torrent that
rushed for ever along the base of Castle Warlock: the dry urn was
to him the end of all life that knows not its source--therefore,
when the water of its consciousness fails, cannot go back to the
changeless, ever renewing life, and unite itself afresh with the
self-existent, parent spring. A moment more and he began to tell
Joan what he was thinking--gave her the whole metaphysical history
of the development in him of the idea of life in connection with
the torrent and its origin ever receding, like a decoy-hope that
entices us to the truth, until at length he saw in God the one only
origin, the fountain of fountains, the Father of all lights--that
is, of all things, and all true thoughts.
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