Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrowlike
stillness of fine (had there been any one to listen) from the upper
rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning
could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves
disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose
brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another,
and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night
and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until
it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion
and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants,
were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the
brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night,
with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before
them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.
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