or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
of grave things?

I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
or around it, when even the stars fail.

And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.

But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a
deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever
known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening
of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can
but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I
sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my
feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm
to the movement of my mind.

I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields,
deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always
found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter
from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a
little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road,
that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me
to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent
oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin,
transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.

Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating
gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from
the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good
influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to
things; the trees recovered