proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time’s dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come.
They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And for ever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.
And there are ships there! Have we not heard the ships there? (Have we not heard the great ships going down the river? Have we not heard the great ships putting out to sea?)
Great whistles blow there. Have we not heard the whistles blow there? Have we not heard the whistles blowing in the river? (A harness of bright ships is on the water. A thunder of faint hooves is on the land.)
And there is time there. (Have we not heard strange time, dark time, strange tragic time there? Have we not heard dark time, strange time, the dark, the moving tide of time as it flows down the river?)
And in the night-time, in the dark there, in all the sleeping silence of the earth have we not heard the river, the rich immortal river, full of its strange dark time?
Full with the pulse of time it flows there, full with the pulse of all men living, sleeping, dying, waking, it will flow there, full with the billion dark and secret moments of our lives it flows there. Filled with all the hope, the madness and the passion of our youth it flows there, in the daytime, in the dark, drinking with ceaseless glut the land, mining into its tides the earth as it mines the hours and moments of our life into its tides, moving against the sides of ships, foaming about piled crustings of old wharves, sliding like time and silence by the vast cliff of the city, girdling the stony isle of life with moving waters—thick with the wastes of earth, dark with our stains, and heavied with our dumpings, rich, rank, beautiful, and unending as all life, all living, as it flows by us, by us, by us, to the sea!
LIX
Full night had come when he got off the train at the town where Joel was to meet him. After the heavy rains of the afternoon, and the stormy sunset, the sky had cleared completely: a great moon blazed in the cloudless bowl of a depthless sky; after the rain, and the sultry swelter of the city
